Science News
Congress Probes Possible Bias against Women in U.S. Science Funding
But half of the biggest research agencies do not collect gender data about grant winners
By Fiona Case and ChemistryWorld
At the request of three Congresswomen the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has launched an investigation into whether gender bias is influencing the awarding of research grants, which would be illegal under US law.
There is evidence of gender disparity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) research at US universities and 4 year colleges—women hold only 35% of all tenured and tenure-track positions and 17% of full professor positions in Stem fields. This discrepancy has motivated numerous studies to discover factors that could be holding women back.
Funding bias could certainly be one of those factors, but the GAO investigation has quickly hit a road block. Three of the six largest funding agencies—the Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Defense (DOD), and NASA—have not been collecting demographic information on grant applicants. ‘It is surprising to me that after decades of efforts to understand gender inequality and to recruit and retain women in Stem, the agencies are not collecting the data,’ says Heather Metcalf, director of research and analysis at the Association for Women in Science (AWIS). ‘The federal government cannot know if a problem persists or if interventions are effectively removing barriers to participation without meaningful data collection and analysis.’
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U.S. Maps Pinpoint Earthquakes Linked to Quest for Oil and Gas
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PE&Htilde;A
The United States Geological Survey on Thursday released its first comprehensive assessment of the link between thousands of earthquakes and oil and gas operations, identifying and mapping 17 regions where quakes have occurred.
The report was the agency’s broadest statement yet on a danger that has grown along with the nation’s energy production.
By far the hardest-hit state, the report said, is Oklahoma, where earthquakes are hundreds of times more common than they were until a few years ago because of the disposal of wastewater left over from extracting fuels and from drilling wells by injecting water into the earth. But the report also mapped parts of eight other states, from Lake Erie to the Rocky Mountains, where that practice has caused quakes, and said most of them were at risk for more significant shaking in the future.
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Technology News
Program with Paper: A-Maze Your Friends with a Hand-Written Computer Program
Learn more about how computer programs work by writing one yourself—to solve a maze of your own creation!
By Science Buddies and Ben Finio
Introduction
You probably use computer programs every day. Every time you are on the Internet, play a video game or use a smartphone you rely on computer programs. Do you know you can learn a little bit about programming without needing to use a computer? In this fun activity you will write a "program"—a set directions for a volunteer to find the way through a maze. Can you help them find the way through without crashing?
Background
A computer program is a list of instructions or commands that tell a computer what to do. For example, when you are typing on a computer, there are commands that instruct it to display certain characters on the screen when you push a certain key on your keyboard. The program for a video game might have different instructions that tell the game to move the on-screen character when you push on a controller. A Web browser has instructions to tell it what to do when you mouse click on different buttons. There are many, many more examples of what computer programs can do. Can you think of more?
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Comcast to ditch $45.2B takeover of Time Warner Cable, report says
After meeting with regulators, Comcast looks to be giving up on its plan to acquire the cable giant, according to Bloomberg.
by Marguerite Reardon
Comcast may be giving up on its $45.2 billion bid to buy fellow cable provider Time Warner Cable after meetings with regulators indicated they may oppose the deal, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The news service said that the announcement could come as early as Friday.
Regulators have been concerned that the joining of the two largest cable operators in the US, creating a pay television behemoth with approximately 30 million subscribers, would influence the distribution of video content and could hinder competition from Internet companies like Netflix that stream video over broadband networks.
Comcast declined to comment on the report.
The news comes a day after Comcast officials met with regulators at the Department of Justice to begin the process of discussing potential concessions in the deal. On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission staff also met with the commissioners to brief them on their recommendation for the merger.
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Environmental News
Scientists Turn to Drones for Closer Look at Arctic Sea Ice
The new technologies allow new measurements of this changing environment
By Michael D. Lemonick and Climate Central
The sun has finally risen above the horizon in the Arctic after months of darkness. That means the floating ice that clogs the world’s northernmost seas every winter is beginning to loosen and it’s time for Christopher Zappa to head for the town of Ny-Ålesund, in the Svalbard Archipelago, a group of islands located about halfway between the northern tip of Norway and the North Pole.
Zappa, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, wants to understand the details of exactly how sea ice breaks up and melts, and he is going to call on a quintessentially 21st century technology to help him do it. Zappa is among a small group of scientists globally who are pioneering the use of “unmanned airborne systems”—or drones, to you and me—in a campaign to better understand Earth’s changing climate.
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Batteries and Renewable Energy Set to Grow Together
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
POMONA, Calif. — The future of American energy, according to one widely held view, will include solar panels and wind turbines continuing to proliferate, churning out ever more electricity and eventually eclipsing fossil fuels to help offset the forces of climate change.
With the cost of renewable technologies falling sharply, that vision is starting to take shape, especially in areas with abundant sunshine or steady wind. Here in California, the state is making such quick progress toward its goal of getting 33 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 that Gov. Jerry Brown raised the ante earlier this year, setting a target of 50 percent by 2030.
The shift sounds simple in theory — plug more solar and wind into the mix, and unplug more coal- or gas-burning power plants, sparing the world millions of tons of greenhouse gases.
But the reality is more complex. Because of the variable nature of these renewable sources — no electricity is generated when the sun goes down or the air is still — they add strains to the system of transmitting and distributing power.
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Medical News
Chinese scientists genetically modify human embryos
Rumours of germline modification prove true — and look set to reignite an ethical debate.
David Cyranoski & Sara Reardon
In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published1 in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted — rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month2, 3 about the ethical implications of such work.
In the paper, researchers led by Junjiu Huang, a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, tried to head off such concerns by using 'non-viable' embryos, which cannot result in a live birth, that were obtained from local fertility clinics. The team attempted to modify the gene responsible for β-thalassaemia, a potentially fatal blood disorder, using a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9. The researchers say that their results reveal serious obstacles to using the method in medical applications.
"I believe this is the first report of CRISPR/Cas9 applied to human pre-implantation embryos and as such the study is a landmark, as well as a cautionary tale," says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. "Their study should be a stern warning to any practitioner who thinks the technology is ready for testing to eradicate disease genes."
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California Bill Would Ban Vaccination Opt Out Based on Personal Belief
Richard Pan, a pediatrician and state senator, discusses his bill pushing the elimination of parental belief exemptions from children’s school vaccination requirements
By Andrea Alfano
Disney likes to remind visitors that its theme parks are where “dreams come true.” But events there this past December sparked a serious wake-up call. Lurking among the fantastical floats and rides of Disneyland was the measles virus, which ultimately infected 111 visitors. To prevent such infections in the future, California State Sen. Richard Pan (D), a pediatrician, has proposed a bill that would eliminate vaccine exemptions based on personal beliefs.
The bill, SB 277, would bar children who are unvaccinated for nonmedical reasons from attending public or private schools. Currently, the personal belief exemption serves as a loophole that allows parents to choose not to vaccinate their children for essentially any reason, including ones founded on misinformation. Fewer than half of all states in the U.S. grant such exemptions, and several of those that do have recently engaged in efforts to tighten their opt-out requirements. These efforts have been met with formidable resistance, particularly from parents, as the failures of similar bills in Washington State and Oregon demonstrate. In California, however, the Disneyland measles event and other recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases may provide the edge needed to bring about change in the state.
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Space News
Celebrating 25 years of the Hubble Space Telescope
For more than two decades, telescope has brought the far reaches of the universe to Earth
By Christopher Crockett
On a chilly Saturday evening in March, unfazed by more than 6 inches of new snow, hundreds of people crowded into Shriver Hall at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to hear the East Coast premiere of “Cosmic Dust,” an orchestral piece set to images of deep space. A trumpet fanfare conveyed the immense power of an exploding star; a cascade from the violins accompanied the flights of comets. As the symphony played, images of galaxies and nebulae scrolled by on a big screen.
Not many telescopes get a concert in their honor. But the Hubble Space Telescope is not just any telescope.
“Hubble is stargazing on steroids,” says Russell Steinberg, the Los Angeles-based composer who wrote “Cosmic Dust.” From its vantage point high above the blurring effects of Earth’s atmosphere, Hubble is one of the sharpest eyes ever to peer out at the universe.
After 25 years in space, Hubble has seen it all. It witnessed fragments of a comet pummel Jupiter (SN: 7/23/94, p. 55). It spied planet nurseries silhouetted by the light of new stars in the Orion Nebula. It confirmed that in the center of every large galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole, an invisible behemoth weighing up to several billion suns. Hubble even monitored pulsating stars as far as 70 million light-years away. By doing so, it resolved a decades-long dispute about the expansion rate and age of the universe (SN: 4/5/14, p. 18).
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It’s Time to Go to Europa
A mission to Jupiter's icy moon is our best shot at finding extraterrestrial life in our solar system
By Van R. Kane
In the 4.6 billion years since our solar system formed, life could have emerged on several of its worlds. Aside from Earth, however, Jupiter's moon Europa seems to be the most likely to host it today. Early Venus and Mars probably had abundant liquid water, the essential elixir for life as we know it, but one became a hot hell and the other a frozen globe. Saturn's moon Enceladus also has a substantial reservoir of liquid water, but the U.S. scientific community, in its most recent decadal survey, prioritized studying Europa, which is nearer. Europa's ocean, with perhaps twice the water of Earth's oceans, is believed to have been liquid since the moon's formation. On Europa, life might have had time to evolve.
Scientists believe that Europa's ocean lies directly atop a sizable rocky world, putting water in contact with the other elements and minerals essential for life. As the moon orbits Jupiter, tidal flexing heats the world from within, keeping the vast ocean liquid and likely powering volcanic activity. Rich ecosystems exist on our own planet's seafloor, where volcanic rifts create hydrothermal vents. The same might be true on Europa.
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Odd News
Pop! Knuckle-Cracking Noise Finally Explained
by Stephanie Pappas
What do you get when you combine the "Wayne Gretzky of knuckle cracking" with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine? The answer to a very old question, it turns out.
By using MRI to video-record knuckle cracking in action, researchers have discovered that the unsettling "pop" made by cracking one's knuckles results from the rapid creation of a cavity in the fluid inside the joints.
"It's a little bit like forming a vacuum," study researcher Greg Kawchuk, a professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Alberta in Canada, said in a statement. "As the joint surfaces suddenly separate, there is no more fluid available to fill the increasing joint volume, so a cavity is created, and that event is what's associated with the sound."
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