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<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><rss xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" version="2.0"> <channel> <title>News from Science</title> <link>https://www.science.org/news</link> <description>Trustworthy, high-impact stories about scientific research and the people who shape it.</description> <atom:link href="https://feeds.science.org/rss/news.xml" rel="self"/> <docs>http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification</docs> <generator>python-feedgen</generator> <image> <url>https://feeds.science.org/images/news-from-science-144w.jpg</url> <title>News from Science</title> <link>https://www.science.org/news</link> </image> <language>en</language> <lastBuildDate>Thu, 09 May 2024 04:51:24 +0000</lastBuildDate> <item> <title>New U.S. AI network aims to make supercomputers available to more researchers </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/new-u-s-ai-network-aims-make-supercomputers-available-more-researchers</link> <description>Pilot grants will help scientists train software to tackle societal problems</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> Mechanical engineer Baskar <span> Ganapathysubramanian </span> is developing an app that would use artificial intelligence (AI) to help farmers identify pests and advise on how to combat them. Computer scientist Anuj Karpatne sees AI as the key to forecasting how climate change, land use, and increased demand will affect water quality in U.S. lakes. Biochemist David Baker has enlisted AI to design novel molecules that could lead to new drugs. </p> <p> All three scientists already receive ample government funding to support their labs. But they lack access to the advanced computers they need to train their AI systems. </p> <p> Not anymore. </p> <p> On 6 May, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the trio were among the <a href="https://nairrpilot.org/awarded-projects"> 35 winners </a> of government-funded supercomputer time in a 2-year pilot project that aims to boost AI-driven research across many disciplines and improve the safety, reliability, and trustworthiness of AI systems. The awards are the first from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) program, which President Joe Biden asked NSF to lead as part of an <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/"> October 2023 executive order on AI </a> . </p> <p> “Computational biologists have never had a way to get access to [computing] at this level,” says Baker, who leads the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. “It’s hard for academics to keep up with industry.” </p> <p> NAIRR is designed to narrow that gap. “We want to broaden access to large-scale computing so that more people can tackle key societal challenges,” says Katie Antypas, who leads NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, which is managing the program. “We also want to give students hands-on access to these tools.” </p> <p> NAIRR’s road map comes from <a href="https://www.ai.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/NAIRR-TF-Final-Report-2023.pdf"> a 6-year, $2.6 billion plan </a> for growing the nation’s academic AI research capacity that a blue-ribbon panel proposed in January 2023. NSF expects to make several dozen more awards in the coming weeks from the initial pool of 150 proposals, she adds, and this week it announced <a href="https://nairrpilot.org/opportunities/allocations"> a second competition </a> , with awards made on a rolling basis. </p> <p> The NAIRR-funded scientists will have access to supercomputing facilities supported by NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE). Those machines are already in high demand, says Dan Stanzione, director of the NSF-funded Texas Advanced Computing Center, which hosts the Frontera and Lonestar machines. But he and other center directors have agreed to set aside time for the NAIRR projects. </p> <p> The supercomputer time “is coming out of my discretionary fund for advanced scientific computing because NAIRR is a priority,” Stanzione says. “But we also hope to add capacity.” NSF’s 2025 budget proposal includes a request for a $150 million down payment on a new half-billion-dollar machine at the Texas center. DOE’s recent decision to extend the life of the 6-year-old Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which has been eclipsed by an even more powerful machine, will also be a boon to NAIRR scientists. </p> <p> So far, NSF has reallocated internal resources to administer the program, with help from a dozen other federal agencies. NAIRR will get its own funding, however, if Congress approves NSF’s request for $30 million to continue the awards through 2025. In addition, some 26 companies, including such AI heavyweights as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and NVIDIA, have agreed to provide computing resources. “Whatever money we get from Congress will not be enough, so we will need partners,” NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan admitted during a White House AI event on Monday that featured several NAIRR awardees. </p> <p> Karpatne, a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, hopes the NAIRR grant will accelerate progress on a water quality model he has dubbed Lake-GPT. Unlike traditional models, which are based on detailed monitoring of one or two lakes and apply only to those settings, Lake-GPT aims to predict the fate of water quality in thousands of lakes across the country. The model is being trained on the vast amounts of environmental data collected by projects such as the NSF-funded National Ecological Observatory Network. </p> <p> That training will require lots of computing time, so Karpatne asked for 12 million GPU hours on any available machine. (Graphical processing units, or GPUs, are the computer chips favored in most AI work.) He wound up with less than 10% of that amount, some 750,000 GPU hours, on Summit. That’s enough to do forecasts of 20 lakes over the next 6 months, he says—and obtain results that he hopes will earn him additional computer time in subsequent rounds. </p> <p> In 2021, <span> Ganapathysubramanian </span> won a 5-year, $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to lead an AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture at Iowa State University. <span> He </span> says the USDA money goes to support personnel and research projects that don’t need “heavy-duty” scientific computing. </p> <p> But heavy-duty computing is what <span> he </span> needs to scale up InsectNet, a model that can identify pest species in mobile phone pictures. Its current version was trained on some 10 million images of insects, but <span> Ganapathysubramanian </span> hopes to improve its accuracy by expanding the training to 150 million images. He’s been given 920,000 GPU hours on Frontera to do that. He also wants to add a trustworthy chatbot that farmers can access on their phone to get advice on dealing with the pests. Eventually he’d like to use the farmers’ real-time requests, along with data from drones, to identify agricultural “hot spots”: infestations that may require immediate intervention. </p> <p> For Shu Hu, a computer scientist at Purdue University, the chance to train his students is just as important as the 4300 GPU hours he will get on the Lonestar machine to train his AI model to detect fake images. Two of his graduate students are hoping to learn how to stay one step ahead of the forgers by searching for common features in the growing universe of DeepFakes. At the same time, two undergraduates will gain access to DOE-funded course materials on AI. </p> <p> The first cohort of winners come from 17 states, Antypas notes, suggesting that NAIRR has already taken a small step toward making AI tools more accessible. She says federal officials are also discussing how NAIRR might provide researchers with not just computer time, but also access to vast training data sets, such as imaging data from federally funded clinical trials that have been curated by subject matter experts. “We want NAIRR to become a true national resource,” she says. </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/new-u-s-ai-network-aims-make-supercomputers-available-more-researchers</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/1cd3fff732.jpg" length="65013" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 18:15:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/1cd3fff732.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Es probable que una científica gane la presidencia de México. No todos los investigadores están alegres </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/es-probable-que-una-cientifica-gane-la-presidencia-de-mexico-no-todos-los</link> <description>Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo sería la primera investigadora en dirigir el país, pero sus críticos temen que sea tan hostil a la ciencia como su predecesor.</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="14"> <div> <span> This article is available <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-likely-win-mexicos-presidency-not-all-researchers-rejoicing"> in English </a> . </span> </div> <p> <span> Ciudad de México— </span> A principios de este año, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo se presentó ante miles de personas reunidas aquí en el Zócalo, una de las plazas más grandes del mundo, para arrancar su campaña para la presidencia de México. “Haremos de México una potencia científica y de la innovación”, prometió durante su discurso del 1 de marzo. “Para ello, apoyaremos a las ciencias básicas, naturales, sociales y a las humanidades, y los vincularemos con áreas y sectores prioritarios del país”. </p> <p> Sheinbaum Pardo, una ingeniera ambiental de 61 años que se ha desempeñado como jefa de gobierno de la Ciudad de México y como su secretaria de medio ambiente, disfruta de una importante ventaja en las encuestas sobre sus dos oponentes de cara a las elecciones del 2 de junio ( <a href="#sidebar"> ver recuadro </a> , abajo). Si gana, se convertirá en la primera mujer y la primera científica en liderar este país latinoamericano con 128 millones de habitantes. “Estoy muy entusiasmada”, le dijo recientemente a <em> Science </em> durante una extensa entrevista. </p> <p> Sin embargo, muchos de la comunidad científica de México no están seguros si Sheinbaum Pardo, que está respaldada por una coalición de partidos populistas de centro-izquierda, cumplirá lo que quieren. Es una protegida del actual presidente populista, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, quien ha aplicado <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063127221140020"> políticas profundamente impopulares entre muchos científicos </a> aquí, que incluyen recortes en el gasto en investigación, una controversial reestructuración de la principal agencia científica de México, y proyectos de desarrollo destructivos del medio ambiente. Y a pesar de los esfuerzos de Sheinbaum Pardo para asegurar a los investigadores de que les consultará para forjar la política científica, muchos temen que continúe el legado de su mentor en un intento por retener el apoyo de sus legiones de seguidores. </p> <div> <figure> <div> <img alt="Un mitin multitudinario en Ciudad de México, con una gran bandera mexicana ondeando sobre la multitud." src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.znrzpws/files/_20240503_nf_claudia_sheinbaum_rally_1600.jpg"/> </div> <figcaption> <span> En su mitin de inicio de campaña presidencial en el zócalo de la Ciudad de México, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo prometió hacer de México una potencia científica. <span> Marco Gonzalez/Eyepix Group/Future Publishing via Getty Images </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> </div> <p> “Obedece a un proyecto político”, afirma Antonio Lazcano Araujo, biólogo evolutivo de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). “Todo lo que Claudia Sheinbaum ha hecho hasta ahora sugiere una continuidad que no se atreve a romper, en lo que a política científica se refiere”. </p> <p> Sheinbaum Pardo rechazó tales puntos de vista durante su entrevista con <em> Science </em> . Si resulta elegida, declaró, “no solamente apoyaré la investigación científica, sino también su vínculo con los problemas nacionales y el desarrollo de la innovación”. Y lo que México necesita para lograr ese objetivo, afirma Sheinbaum Pardo, es una “presidenta científica”. </p> <p> <span> De niña </span> , Sheinbaum Pardo estaba inmersa en el mundo de la ciencia. Su madre, Annie Pardo Cemo, es bioquímica en la UNAM y sigue estudiando los mecanismos moleculares de la fibrosis, una forma de cicatrización de heridas. Su padre, Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, era ingeniero químico y empresario en el sector del curtido de cuero. (Falleció en 2013). Su hermano mayor, Julio Sheinbaum Pardo, es investigador de modelado oceánico en el Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada, en México. </p> <p> Fue Julio quien persuadió a su hermana para que estudiara física en lugar de ingeniería como estudiante en la UNAM. “Estudia física porque así te vas a formar bien como científica”, recuerda Claudia que Julio le dijo. “Y luego ya haces lo que quieras”. </p> <p> Para elaborar su tesis de licenciatura en 1988, Sheinbaum Pardo pasó un año <a href="https://www.revistacienciasunam.com/es/160-revistas/revista-ciencias-15/1406-cheranatzicurin-tecnologÌ"> estudiando estufas de leña </a> en la comunidad p'urhépecha de Cheranatzícurin, en el estado de Michoacán, desarrollando un modelo termodinámico de las estufas en un esfuerzo por mejorar su eficiencia. “Siempre tuve la intención de ayudar a las personas”, afirma. También comenzó a pulir sus habilidades políticas, uniéndose a un grupo de estudiantes que protestó con éxito un plan de la UNAM, tradicionalmente casi gratuita, para comenzar a cobrar la colegiatura. </p> <p> Sheinbaum Pardo se incorporó al personal docente del Instituto de Ingeniería de la UNAM en 1995, tras obtener un doctorado en ingeniería energética por un trabajo realizado parcialmente en el Laboratorio Nacional Lawrence Berkeley del Departamento de Energía de los Estados Unidos. Ayudó a crear un inventario nacional de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero de México, investigó la idea de <a href="https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/biblio/304532"> introducir automóviles eléctricos en la Ciudad de México </a> y asesoró a la empresa de electricidad nacional de México. También se mantuvo involucrada en política. Y, cuando López Obrador fue elegido para la jefatura de gobierno de la Ciudad de México en 2000, un amigo de la familia le presentó al nuevo jefe. Él pronto nombró a Sheinbaum Pardo secretaria de medio ambiente de la ciudad. </p> <figure> <div> <img alt="Una Claudia Sheinbaum más joven sentada en una oficina desordenada. Sobre la mesa hay una computadora de escritorio. Su silla está echada hacia atrás y se gira para mirar a la cámara." src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.znrzpws/files/_20240503_nf_claudia_sheinbaum_berkeley_1600.jpg"/> </div> <figcaption> <span> Como estudiante de posgrado, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, en esta foto de 1992, pasó algunos años en el Laboratorio Nacional Lawrence Berkeley en California. <span> Equipo de Comunicación de la Dra. Claudia Sheinbaum </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> Durante sus 6 años en el cargo, el transporte tuvo un enfoque importante. Abordó proyectos de transporte público y avenidas que, ella ha dicho, ayudaron a reducir en un 30% el número de días que la ciudad registró mala calidad del aire. Sheinbaum Pardo dijo a <em> Science </em> que fue difícil malabarear su trabajo gubernamental con su investigación académica, que incluyó la participación en dos informes de evaluación producidos por el Grupo Intergubernamental de Expertos sobre el Cambio Climático de las Naciones Unidas. Pero “me enamoré del servicio público”, dice. “Pones tu conocimiento al servicio de la política pública y cambias la vida de las personas”. </p> <p> Pero en 2006, López Obrador se postuló para presidente y perdió, y Sheinbaum Pardo regresó a la UNAM. Durante los siguientes 8 años, dedicó su tiempo a la academia. Su clase favorita para enseñar, dice, era la de desarrollo sustentable. “Es la esencia del desarrollo, que es disminuir desigualdades sociales”. </p> <p> <span> Mientras Sheinbaum Pardo </span> formaba a sus estudiantes, mantuvo lazos con López Obrador, quien ya había comenzado a construir un nuevo partido populista, el Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena). En 2015 fue la candidata de Morena para dirigir Tlalpan, una alcaldía de su ciudad natal, y ganó. Y tres años después, cuando López Obrador lanzó su tercera candidatura a la presidencia, Sheinbaum Pardo fue la candidata de Morena para un trabajo enorme: la jefatura de gobierno de la Ciudad de México, con sus más de 9 millones de habitantes. Ambos candidatos ganaron por amplios márgenes. </p> <p> La <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/podr-esta-ingeniera-ambiental-quien-es-posiblemente-la-pr-xima-alcaldesa-reparar-ciudad?adobe_mc=MCMID%3D25656030154739093214324112144512437555%7CMCORGID%3D242B6472541199F70A4C98A6%2540AdobeOrg%7CTS%3D1715104453"> nueva jefa de gobierno enfrentó desafíos muy notables </a> , entre ellos la escasez crónica de agua y la reparación de los daños causados por un potente terremoto que sucedió el año anterior. Pero la experiencia de Sheinbaum Pardo tanto en ciencia como en ingeniería le dio las herramientas para empezar a trabajar de inmediato, explica la bióloga evolutiva Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez, quien conoce a Sheinbaum Pardo desde que era muy joven, trabajó con ella cuando fue jefa de gobierno y ahora es asesora de su campaña presidencial. “No es una política típica”, sentencia Ruiz Gutiérrez. “Conoce el valor de [combinar] el conocimiento tanto humanístico, como científico y tecnológico”. </p> <p> En un esfuerzo por aliviar la crisis del agua, la ciudad lanzó su primer sistema automatizado para monitorear el uso del agua y las fugas, e implementó la recolección de agua de lluvia en los barrios más pobres. Para abordar los daños del terremoto, la jefa de gobierno solicitó a especialistas que evaluaran la geología local y determinaran cómo llevar adelante la reconstrucción de manera segura. Los expertos también estudiaron formas mejores de sellar las grietas en el este de Ciudad de México, donde la sobreexplotación de las aguas subterráneas había provocado el hundimiento del terreno. </p> <p> Para encontrar soluciones a otros problemas de la ciudad, estableció junto con Ruiz Gutiérrez la red de Educación, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Red ECOs), un organismo consultor que colabora con socios nacionales e internacionales. Red ECOs ayudó a establecer un instituto de investigación sobre el envejecimiento en la ciudad, así como un proyecto cuyo objetivo es combinar la producción agrícola y la energía solar. Sheinbaum Pardo también respaldó otras iniciativas ambientales, como la promoción de autobuses eléctricos y la instalación de 32.000 paneles solares en un importante mercado mayorista. Además, junto con Ruiz Gutiérrez buscó ampliar las oportunidades educativas creando dos nuevas universidades, una de ellas orientada a la medicina y la enfermería. </p> <p> La pandemia de COVID-19 puso la formación científica de Sheinbaum Pardo en el escenario principal. Cuando el alcance de la crisis se hizo evidente, trabajó con investigadores para desarrollar un modelo epidemiológico que ayudara a comprender cómo podría desplazarse el brote a través de la región. Se reunía por la mañana y por la noche con el equipo, recuerda, y desde su teléfono hacía un seguimiento del creciente número de infecciones. Junto con empresarios privados, la ciudad construyó un hospital temporal para COVID-19 que atendió a casi 10.000 pacientes. “Se esperaba que fuéramos a tener una crisis muy grave”, explica. “Y sí, hubo dificultad, pero siempre hubo coordinación para poder atender”. </p> <p> Sus políticas relacionadas con la pandemia en ocasiones <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/mexico-s-coronavirus-czar-faces-criticism-covid-19-surges"> entraron en conflicto con las del gobierno federal. </a> Por ejemplo, Sheinbaum Pardo comenzó a alentar fuertemente a las personas a usar mascarillas para reducir las infecciones después de leer <span> <a href="https://www.pnas.org/egi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2009637117"> un artículo sobre el tema </a> </span> del químico mexicano y premio nobel Mario Molina, incluso cuando la administración de López Obrador planteaba dudas sobre estas medidas. </p> <figure> <div> <img alt="El presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador pasa un bastón de mando, un palo de madera con listones multicolores, a Claudia Sheinbaum." src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.znrzpws/files/_20240503_nf_claudia_sheinbaum_obrador_1600.jpg"/> </div> <figcaption> <span> Muchos investigadores esperan que, de ser electa, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo revise las controversiales políticas científicas respaldadas por su mentor, el presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador (izquierda). <span> Henry Romero/Reuters </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> Cuando finalmente ya hubo vacunas disponibles, Sheinbaum Pardo y su equipo construyeron —en su computadora personal— un modelo para guiar la distribución. Utilizó diferentes variables para informar la planificación, como el número de dosis, refrigeradores y centros de vacunación disponibles. Ahora es coautora de tres artículos que detallan los <span> <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/11/2182"> modelos </a> </span> <span> <a href="https://jogh.org/2022/jogh-12-05038"> pandémicos </a> </span> y las <span> <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/2/665"> estrategias </a> </span> . La propia Sheinbaum Pardo analizó algunos de los datos de estas publicaciones, afirma Ruiz Gutiérrez, quien también es coautora. “Claudia siempre trabaja con datos”. </p> <p> Investigadores familiarizados con el enfoque de Ciudad de México elogian a Sheinbaum Pardo por supervisar la respuesta a la pandemia por parte de la ciudad, pero también afirman que cometió algunos errores. Por ejemplo, la ciudad compró y <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/09/mexico-city-covid-ivermectin/"> distribuyó el medicamento antiparasitario ivermectina, </a> a pesar de que no estar aprobado para tratar la COVID-19 en ese momento, y <span> <a href="https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-022-07890-6"> estudios posteriores han concluido que fue ineficaz </a> </span> . Un reciente informe, elaborado por un grupo independiente de investigadores que evaluó el manejo de la pandemia en México, también encontró que la Ciudad de México tuvo <a href="https://www.comisioncovid.mx/documents/Informe-Comision-Independiente.pdf"> uno de los números más elevados de muertes en exceso </a> durante la pandemia. </p> <p> <span> En junio de 2023 </span> , cuando López Obrador se acercaba al final del único mandato de 6 años permitido para el presidente de México, Sheinbaum Pardo presentó su renuncia como jefa de gobierno. En septiembre ganó candidatura de Morena para la presidencia y desde entonces promueve su plan de “transformación” de 381 páginas para gobernar. Enfatiza cuestiones como el refuerzo de los programas sociales para acabar con la desigualdad, la expansión de la educación superior y la lucha contra la delincuencia. Solo tres páginas del plan abordan cuestiones relacionadas con la ciencia. </p> <p> Para muchos investigadores, la gran pregunta es si, de ser electa, Sheinbaum Pardo continuará, revisará, o incluso revertirá las impopulares políticas relacionadas con la ciencia de su mentor. Un punto candente es el financiamiento. En aras de controlar la inflación y reducir el gasto, López Obrador adoptó repetidamente presupuestos austeros. La principal agencia de financiamiento de la ciencia de México, el Consejo Nacional de Humanidades, Ciencias y Tecnologías (Conahcyt) ahora gasta menos en términos reales que cuando él asumió el cargo, aunque recientemente propuso un aumento modesto ( <a href="#chart"> ver gráfica </a> , abajo). </p> <p> López Obrador también <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/brutal-blow-bill-threatens-dozens-trust-funds-support-mexican-science"> eliminó decenas de fondos </a> dedicados a la ciencia, <span> <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/money-running-out-astronomers-urge-mexico-save-its-giant-telescope"> amenazando el apoyo a proyectos como el Gran Telescopio Milimétrico Alfonso Serrano </a> </span> , la instalación astronómica insignia de México. Parte del <span> <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/diversion-research-money-buy-oil-refinery-enrages-mexican-scientists"> dinero desviado se destinó a la compra de una refinería de petróleo </a> </span> en Texas y a megaproyectos favorecidos, como el <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/controversial-train-heads-maya-rainforest"> controversial Tren Maya </a> , un ferrocarril de 1550 kilómetros diseñado para promover el turismo en la Península de Yucatán. </p> <p> La conclusión, dice Raúl Rojas González, matemático mexicano de la Universidad Libre de Berlín, es que el gasto público en ciencia “no ha sido una prioridad de este gobierno”. Tampoco ha logrado impulsar al sector comercial a invertir en investigación, asegura. La política, concluye, “ha sido demonizar todo lo que tiene que ver con […] la industria [privada]”. </p> <figure id="chart"> <figcaption> <h3> Una era austera </h3> <p> La principal agencia de financiamiento de la ciencia de México, Conahcyt, ha visto cómo se reduce su gasto bajo el actual presidente, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, pese a haber crecido bajo los dos presidentes anteriores. Sus presupuestos finales sugieren un modesto aumento, pero muchos investigadores mexicanos esperan que el próximo gobierno haga más. </p> </figcaption> <img alt="Gráfica que muestra el gasto en las cuatro administraciones anteriores. El gasto más bajo se registró con Vicente Fox Quesada de 2003 a 2006. Aumentó gradualmente con Felipe Calderón Hinojosa de 2006 a 2012. Siguió aumentando durante dos años bajo Enrique Peña Nieto, alcanzó su punto máximo en 2015 y disminuyó durante el resto de su mandato que terminó en 2018. Con Andrés Manuel López Obrador, ha disminuido ligeramente y luego ha aumentado un poco, pero se ha mantenido casi estable en el mismo nivel que el último año de la administración de Calderón Hinojosa." src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.znrzpws/files/sheinbaum_graph_spanish_version.svg"/> <figcaption> <span> <span> (Gráfica) M. Hersher/ <cite> Science </cite> ; (Datos) Paquete Económico y Presupuesto 2003–24; <cite> Reporte de Cuenta Pública de la Federación 2003–22 </cite> ; <cite> Reporte del Producto Interno Bruto Trimestral 2024 </cite> , Instituto Nacional de Estatística y Geografía, analizado por Andrés Agoitia Polo </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> También es causa de preocupación una controversial “ley de ciencia” de 2023 promovida por López Obrador que dio a Conahcyt <span> <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/frenzied-vote-mexico-s-lawmakers-pass-controversial-science-reform-bill"> nuevos y amplios controles sobre el financiamiento y las prioridades de la investigación </a> </span> . Los críticos de la ley aseguran que politiza la agencia y acusan a la controversial actual directora de Conahcyt, la genetista molecular María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces, de <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/science-bill-rankles-mexican-research-community"> no consultar a la comunidad de investigadores </a> en el desarrollo de la medida. (Álvarez-Buylla Roces ha dicho que Conahcyt consultó con “más de 70.000 personas, y también instituciones públicas y privadas”.) También causó furia al <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/myopic-funding-cuts-may-force-mexican-scientists-leave-major-international"> eliminar programas internacionales </a> , <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/lack-humanity-hundreds-early-career-researchers-forced-out-mexico-s-science-agency-2"> despedir a investigadores </a> y reducir sus salarios. </p> <p> En 2021, Conahcyt se enfrentó con investigadores después de que la fiscalía acusara a 31 científicos de lavado de dinero y otros delitos, y pidió que se enviara a los acusados a una prisión de alta seguridad. Desde entonces, un juez ha retirado los cargos contra al menos cinco de los investigadores, y Sheinbaum Pardo ha criticado los cargos como “excesivos”. La derogación de la ley de ciencia, explica Lazcano Araujo, sería un primer paso esencial para sanar las fracturas entre la comunidad científica y el gobierno. </p> <p> Los críticos de López Obrador también se han quejado de sus esfuerzos por <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp5399"> esencialmente eliminar </a> la Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO), que asesora al gobierno en conservación. “La CONABIO era una institución ejemplar y estamos viendo cómo se desmantela de una forma total”, dice Lazcano Araujo. </p> <p> Ese historial, en opinión de Rojas González, ha dejado a los investigadores preocupados por lo que podría suceder bajo la presidencia de Sheinbaum Pardo. “¿Va a seguir esta línea de ataques de López Obrador a la ciencia o […] va a cambiar radicalmente?”. </p> <p> <span> Sheinbaum Pardo le dijo a </span> <em> Science </em> que está al tanto del “cambio” en las políticas científicas de México impulsadas por su mentor. Y Ruiz Gutiérrez afirma que, de ser electa, Sheinbaum Pardo será receptiva a los aportes de los científicos en cuanto posibles revisiones. “Lo que se ha hecho bien, tiene que seguir”, explica la asesora de la candidata, mientras que se tiene que “corregir lo que haya que corregir”. Por ejemplo, Ruiz Gutiérrez afirma: “Algunas relaciones de nivel internacional, tenemos que recuperarlas […] Eso es fundamental”. </p> <p> Pero Sheinbaum Pardo ha mantenido una posición relativamente vaga sobre cómo abordaría problemas específicos. Por ejemplo, respecto al financiamiento, dice: “Yo creo que hay que apoyar la ciencia básica, pero sí hay que vincularla con el desarrollo de políticas y los grandes temas que hoy preocupan a nivel nacional”, como la disminución de la pobreza. Con este fin, ha dicho que pretende fortalecer las becas a estudiantes, ampliar las universidades que creó siendo jefa de gobierno y fomentar las colaboraciones con compañías extranjeras. </p> <p> En particular, Sheinbaum Pardo quiere trabajar con negocios extranjeros para impulsar la inversión privada en investigación, con el objetivo a largo plazo de remodelar la economía de México. “Mi idea es que México no solamente sea un exportador de productos” hechos por compañías extranjeras que construyen fábricas en el país, sino también un innovador tecnológico, afirma la candidata. Por ejemplo, su objetivo es alentar a las empresas estadounidenses que trabajan en México a financiar programas de investigación y desarrollo en el país. “Para mí, este vínculo de los grupos de investigación científica y tecnológica con el desarrollo nacional es indispensable”, explica. “Creo que en muy pocas veces en la historia de México se ha dado”. </p> <p> En lo que respecta a la ley de ciencia, su campaña ha enviado señales contradictorias. Su extenso documento de plataforma reconoce la ley como “un logro” del gobierno actual. Pero Ruiz Gutiérrez ha criticado la ley en el pasado. Y Sheinbaum Pardo sugirió a <em> Science </em> que está dispuesta a revisar la medida. “Hay que revisar [la ley] y hablar con la comunidad”, dice. </p> <p> También hay corrientes contradictorias en las promesas de Sheinbaum Pardo de impulsar la educación superior, dado que recientemente anunció que extendería las medidas de austeridad ya en curso para incluir a las universidades públicas, incluida su <em> alma mater </em> , la UNAM. </p> <p> En otras áreas, las políticas de Sheinbaum Pardo se apartarán claramente de las de la administración actual. Por ejemplo, mientras que López Obrador ha respaldado firmemente a la industria de combustibles fósiles de México y ha tomado pocas medidas para abordar agresivamente el cambio climático, la candidata planea fortalecer una transición a la energía renovable. En el estado norteño de Sonora, su intención es ampliar una planta fotovoltaica planificada para producir 1 gigavatio, para ahora producir 5 gigavatios, aproximadamente el equivalente a cinco plantas de combustibles fósiles. Y afirma que México debería invertir más en calentadores solares de agua para los hogares y reducir el consumo de gas natural del país. </p> <p> Además, la candidata explica que reunirá a científicos para desarrollar soluciones prácticas a otros problemas ambientales, como la actual crisis de suministro de agua en México. Es “importante” que los científicos publiquen artículos científicos, afirma, pero también “traducir” esos hallazgos “en el desarrollo de políticas públicas”. </p> <p> <span> No está claro </span> si esta visión persuadirá a los científicos escépticos hacia Sheinbaum Pardo a votar por ella el próximo mes. Carlos Bravo Regidor, analista político independiente, advierte que incluso si Sheinbaum Pardo gana, de acuerdo con las previsiones, “la política científica, en realidad no sería la prioridad para nada”, dada su apretada agenda política. </p> <p> Bravo Regidor también señala que, al lanzar ataques contra la comunidad de investigadores, Morena y López Obrador adoptaron una táctica utilizada por movimientos populistas en otros países — como Hungría, Brasil y Estados Unidos—probablemente porque los científicos pueden ser representados como un símbolo de una élite tecnocrática. Como resultado, Sheinbaum Pardo —como su sucesora— podría sentirse presionada por los partidarios de Morena para apoyar políticas populistas que podrían chocar con su identidad científica. </p> <p> Ruiz Gutiérrez, sin embargo, cree que Sheinbaum Pardo se mantendrá firme en los datos. “Habrá políticas basadas en evidencias”, asegura. “Algunos políticos del mundo niegan que hay un cambio climático, niegan la importancia de la ciencia... No, eso no va a pasar aquí”. </p> <p> La madre de Sheinbaum Pardo tiene pocas dudas de que la mentalidad científica de su hija la ayudará a convertirse en una presidenta decisiva y decidida. “Su forma de abordar las problemáticas es con esta visión”, dice Pardo Cemo. Y “una vez que se propone algo, le entra con mucha seriedad”. </p> <div id="sidebar"> <span> Historia relacionada </span> <h2> <span> Una colega ingeniera y rival presidencial </span> </h2> <span> By <a href="https://www.science.org/content/author/rodrigo-p-rez-ortega" title="Rodrigo Pérez Ortega"> Rodrigo Pérez Ortega </a> </span> <div> <figure> <div> <img alt="Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz sonriendo y saludando." src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.znrzpws/files/_20240503_nf_claudia_sheinbaum_sidebar_galvez_1216.jpg"/> </div> <figcaption> <span> Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz <span> Jeannette Flores/ObturadorMX/Getty Images </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> Es raro que un país tenga una sola candidata presidencial con antecedentes técnicos. México tiene dos. La rival más fuerte de Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz, también es ingeniera, aunque sus políticas son muy diferentes. La exsenadora está respaldada por tres partidos —situados en la extrema derecha, el centro y la izquierda— que en el pasado compitieron entre sí, pero ahora se unen contra el partido de Sheinbaum Pardo, Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena), que actualmente gobierna. </p> <p> Gálvez Ruiz, quien tiene raíces indígenas otomíes y tiene un título en ingeniería en computación por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), ha sido una crítica muy vocal hacia las políticas de Morena durante la actual presidencia de Andrés Manuel López Obrador. La administración “se ha caracterizado por su desprecio al medio ambiente y la ciencia”, afirma. De ser electa, añade, “la ciencia será el faro que nos guíe”. </p> <p> Gálvez Ruiz también ha criticado a Sheinbaum Pardo por no repudiar el fuerte apoyo de López Obrador a la industria petrolera de México. “O seguimos poniendo el dinero en la refinación [del petróleo], donde hemos perdido [dinero]... o lo ponemos en educación, ciencia, tecnología y cultura”, dice. “Yo opto por lo segundo”. </p> <p> Las encuestas muestran a Gálvez Ruiz por detrás de Sheinbaum Pardo. Pero si es electa, promete aumentar el gasto público y privado en investigación. También tiene como objetivo catalizar la innovación facilitando la capacidad de estudiantes e investigadores para moverse entre instituciones mexicanas e internacionales, así como de la academia a la industria. Actualmente, los investigadores suelen permanecer en una misma institución durante toda su carrera y los estudiantes que salen al extranjero para obtener un título de posgrado rara vez regresan a México, señala María Brenda Valderrama Blanco, especialista en políticas científicas de la UNAM y que asesora a Gálvez Ruiz. Al facilitar el movimiento, asegura, “ese conocimiento puede ser utilizado […] en cualquier rama y eso es lo que nos hace mucha falta”. </p> <p> Gálvez Ruiz no ha hecho públicos planes específicos para derogar o revisar la reciente controversial ley de ciencia de México, que otorga al Consejo Nacional de Humanidades, Ciencias y Tecnologías (Conahcyt), la principal agencia de financiamiento de la ciencia en la nación, un mayor poder sobre los presupuestos y las prioridades de investigación. Pero Valderrama Blanco asegura que Gálvez Ruiz descentralizará la política científica y dará más autoridad sobre el financiamiento de la ciencia a los gobiernos estatales de México, un enfoque desalentado por la ley actual. </p> <p> Gálvez Ruiz también ha afirmado que reconstruirá una comisión, desmantelada por López Obrador, que asesora al gobierno en materia de conservación de la biodiversidad. Y tiene intención de fomentar mayores oportunidades para las mujeres en la ciencia. </p> <figure> <div> <img alt="Jorge Álvarez Máynez sonriendo y levantando el puño en el aire." src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.znrzpws/files/_20240503_nf_claudia_sheinbaum_sidebar_maynez_1200sq.jpg"/> </div> <figcaption> <span> Jorge Álvarez Máynez <span> Fernando Llano/AP </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> Ese es un objetivo que el tercer candidato presidencial, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, del partido de centroizquierda Movimiento Ciudadano, parece compartir. No ha hablado de ciencia durante sus apariciones públicas. Pero como miembro del Congreso de México, Álvarez Máynez se opuso firmemente a la ley de ciencia y su plataforma promete transformar a Conahcyt en un organismo libre de interferencias políticas. </p> <p> El plan de Álvarez Máynez también contempla aumentar las becas para estudiantes de posgrado, crear nuevos centros de investigación en campos como la inteligencia artificial y crear un Observatorio Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación para “detectar las posibles áreas de oportunidad”. También quiere invertir al menos el 1% del producto interno bruto del país en ciencia. En el pasado, México ha codificado ese objetivo en la ley, pero ninguna administración ha podido lograrlo. </p> </div> </div> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/es-probable-que-una-cientifica-gane-la-presidencia-de-mexico-no-todos-los</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/01eea30abf.jpg" length="63551" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 17:00:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/01eea30abf.jpg" height="534" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Brazil’s plan to lure 1000 expat scientists back home faces criticism </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/brazil-s-plan-lure-1000-expat-scientists-back-home-faces-criticism</link> <description>Money for new repatriation program would be better spent supporting researchers who stayed in Brazil, critics say</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> Brazil’s government has launched a new program that aims to lure 1000 Brazilian researchers now working abroad back to their homeland. But many scientists are criticizing the repatriation initiative, arguing the money would be better spent on supporting beleaguered researchers who have stayed in Brazil. </p> <p> “It doesn’t make sense for the government to aim to attract established Brazilian researchers from abroad while we have thousands of unemployed [Ph.D.s] here, and those currently employed struggle with low salaries and dilapidated laboratories,” says Thaís Barreto Guedes, a biologist at the State University of Campinas. </p> <p> The repatriation program, called Conhecimento Brasil (Knowledge Brazil), was launched in April by the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It plans to spend 1 billion Brazilian reais ($200 million) over 5 years to provide Brazilian researchers with a master’s or doctoral degree who are working abroad in academia or industry with annual salaries of 120,000 to 156,000 reais, as well as 400,000 reais to establish laboratories. The government says the effort is needed to reverse Brazil’s brain drain. </p> <p> But critics note it isn’t even clear just how many Brazilian researchers have moved overseas in recent years; estimates range from 3000 to 35,000. And many researchers are skeptical the scheme will do much to strengthen Brazil’s scientific community, which has been struggling with funding woes. Last month, just days after the government launched the repatriation initiative, thousands of professors at 52 of Brazil’s 69 federal universities went on strike, demanding better salaries and research conditions. </p> <p> Over the past few decades, Brazil has increased the number of Ph.D.s it produces to more than 20,000 per year, Guedes says. But research budgets have stagnated or declined since 2015, she notes, leaving some 100,000 early-career scientists unemployed, “still seeking to consolidate themselves in the profession, or working in areas that do not explore their potential and high-level qualification.” </p> <p> “Unless that funding squeeze is eased, researchers who participate in the repatriation program could find themselves in a similarly tough spot after their funding runs out in 5 years,” says Hernani Oliveira, a biologist at the University of Brasília. </p> <p> Others doubt that the program’s promised levels of support, although high by Brazilian standards, will be high enough to persuade many researchers to give up better paid positions at foreign universities and companies. “More experienced researchers won’t want to return to earn less or the same they earn abroad while living with the uncertainty of not being able to find a job once the support is over,” says Alicia Kowaltowski, a biochemist at the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Chemistry. </p> <p> She also questions the government’s decision to extend the offer to researchers with a master’s degree. “I wonder if someone at this educational level has the experience needed to develop a robust research project and establish a laboratory,” she says. </p> <p> Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development—the federal funding agency running the program—did not respond to <em> Science </em> ’s request for comment. But one Brazilian researcher now working abroad says he shares many of the concerns. “The primary reason most researchers leave is the challenge of securing a permanent position in Brazil,” says ecologist Thiago Gonçalves Souza of the University of Michigan. The initiative “fails to address the root cause of the problem,” he adds. </p> <p> Souza says he left Brazil in 2022, after spending almost a decade at the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, because of a lack of investment in the university’s infrastructure and research. Until Brazil’s government addresses such problems, he says, “scientists—me included—are unlikely to consider returning to the country.” </p> <p> Preliminary results from a survey of 1200 Brazilian researchers working abroad by Ana Maria Carneiro, a sociologist at the State University of Campinas’s Center for Public Policy Research, suggest many agree. Most left Brazil after 2015, and up to 90% left with no expectation of returning, the preliminary data show. </p> <p> The repatriation program could produce some benefits for Brazil, says Renato Janine Ribeiro, president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science. But the best way for the nation to prevent brain drain, he says, “would be to tackle its root by improving working conditions and career prospects for researchers already in the country, preventing them from migrating abroad.” </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/brazil-s-plan-lure-1000-expat-scientists-back-home-faces-criticism</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/b1c62c5822.jpg" length="87677" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 15:50:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/b1c62c5822.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Global effort aims to protect health and safety of human ‘guinea pigs’ in drug trials </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/global-effort-aims-protect-health-and-safety-human-guinea-pigs-drug-trials</link> <description>Healthy volunteers—who usually join studies for money—deserve special attention, researchers say</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> <strong> PARIS— </strong> Twelve years ago, after J. Norward’s life hit a rough patch and she lost her job in human resources, a friend suggested an unusual way to earn some money: Become a paid volunteer in a drug safety study. Norward, who for privacy reasons asked <cite> Science </cite> not to use her first name, agreed, and before long, it had become a way to make a living. She would travel from her home in North Carolina to whichever clinic or hospital needed volunteers for a trial. “Baltimore, Chicago,” she says. “Connecticut. Wisconsin. Tennessee. Ohio. Everywhere.” </p> <p> Often she had to stay for a week or more, but the pay was pretty good, Norward says. Once she made about $9000 for a trial that lasted more than a month, including Christmas. She also met some great fellow volunteers, including a poet and a man who used his trial fees to start a trucking business. But it wasn’t an easy life. During one trial, her heart started pounding and she had terrible sweats—signs of a hypertensive crisis, she later learned. In another, she fell ill with flulike symptoms, but rather than being taken out of the trial, she was put in isolation so she could finish the study. Twice, “I was the only woman, and had to share a room with a bunch of men,” she recalls. “I was worried about my safety.” </p> <p> Over the past 2 years, an international group of ethicists, scientists, regulators, and other stakeholders has sought ways to better protect people like Norward, who join trials as paid, healthy volunteers rather than as patients hoping for an effective treatment. The existing edifice of research ethics—including the Declaration of Helsinki and guidelines from the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS)—offers few specific safeguards for such people, researchers say. At a meeting here on 18 and 19 April, some 90 people from two dozen countries—including Norward—discussed a draft Global Ethics Charter intended to fill the gap. </p> <p> The project is particularly concerned about phase 1 trials, studies in small numbers of people to establish the safety of a drug, find the right dose, or track how it is broken down in the body. Unlike patients who join later, phase 2 or 3 trials that test efficacy, the vast majority of people in phase 1 studies can’t expect any medical benefits—they’re in it for the money. They also have unique vulnerabilities. Many come from marginalized groups or are poor. Some are homeless or former prison inmates. </p> <p> Phase 1 studies are often “really burdensome,” says Jill Fisher, a social medicine professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who last year published a <a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479862160/adverse-events/"> book </a> titled <em> Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals </em> . Participants are typically confined for the duration of the study so they can be monitored closely and provide regular blood and urine samples. Most studies are sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry but run by so-called contract research organizations (CROs), whose study sites aren’t always up to standards. “Some volunteers have had absolutely terrible experiences with untrained staff and abysmal conditions,” Fisher says. </p> <p> Moreover, the risks of phase 1 studies are typically higher than in phase 2 or 3, especially when a drug has never been tried in humans before. (Phase 1 bioequivalence studies, which seek to establish that a generic drug has the same profile as the original one, are less risky.) “Healthy volunteers don’t think about the risk—they only think about the money,” says Roberto Abadie, a medical anthropologist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln who <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-professional-guinea-pig"> published a book </a> about a group of self-described “professional guinea pigs” in Philadelphia in 2003. (Some had taken part in more than 80 trials.) “There are a lot of things that are exploitative and troublesome from an ethical point of view,” Abadie says. </p> <p> Just how many trials use these volunteers every year is unclear. A rough inventory of a clinical trial database run by the U.S. government, carried out in 2022 by François Bompart of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, found at least 13,000 ongoing studies of drugs, biologics, or devices involving healthy volunteers. Half took place in the United States, 20% in Europe, and 15% in Asia. The real number is likely higher, Bompart says, because reporting phase 1 studies publicly is not mandatory. Most outcomes are not published, and research on the topic itself is scant. “It’s completely hidden from public view,” Fisher says. </p> <p> Professional trial participants tend not to talk much about their experience either. Norward, who says she averaged about six trials per year, told very few people what she was doing at the time. “I was ashamed,” she says. “Many healthy volunteers feel they are prostituting themselves,” says medical anthropologist Shadreck Mwale of the University of West London, who <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-59214-5"> studied them in the United Kingdom </a> . </p> <p> When phase 1 studies do draw the spotlight, it’s usually because something went terribly wrong. In 2006, six previously healthy people in London became critically ill shortly after receiving an experimental anti-body named TGN1412, developed to treat a range of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. One lost parts of his fingers and toes. In 2016, one man died and five others became seriously ill in Rennes, France, after receiving a candidate drug that acts on the body’s endocannabinoid system. </p> <p> The project to establish a set of global standards for healthy volunteers, <a href="https://www.inserm.fr/en/ethics/volrethics/"> dubbed VolREthics </a> , was launched in 2022 by members of the Ethics Committee at France’s national biomedical research agency, INSERM. They convened a series of meetings, and a coordinating committee that includes Fisher and Bompart published a <a href="https://www.inserm.fr/wp-content/uploads/inserm-volrethics-charter-february282024.pdf"> draft of the ethical charter </a> for public comment in February. A revised five-page version was discussed at the meeting. </p> <p> It would require mandatory inspections of trial sites and reviews of staff credentials; systems for posttrial follow-up to monitor for long-term adverse events; and adequate space, telephones, and Wi-Fi for volunteers. So-called completion bonuses, given at the end of a study to prevent dropouts, should be “modest,” the document says, because they are an incentive to conceal adverse events and other health problems. </p> <p> The draft also urges countries to implement a mandatory registration system to prevent people from joining too many trials. The system, already in place in France, Malaysia, and a few other countries, not only protects participants, but also makes for better studies, Bompart says. The data could be unreliable if volunteers join multiple trials at the same time or don’t observe the mandatory “washout” period for drugs to leave their body after a study. </p> <p> Industry is generally not opposed to the idea of a charter, says INSERM’s François Hirsch, perhaps because it could help improve the image of what is sometimes seen as a shady business. “They are not afraid of what we are proposing,” Hirsch says. Deepa Arora, CEO of an Indian CRO named Clinexel, who attended the meeting, says she welcomes clear guidelines. </p> <p> Elhassan Elkarimi of Morocco’s Anti-Poison & Pharmacovigilance Center also applauded the idea but would like the text to offer more specific guidance: for example, a ban on research on prisoners—which were widely used as subjects in the past—healthy children, and pregnant women. But Udo Schüklenk, a bioethicist at Queen’s University in Canada and editor-in-chief of <em> Bioethics </em> , was a dissenter, arguing that current guidelines already provide enough protection. Yet another ethical document will make life “miserable and difficult” for medical journal editors who need to verify whether manuscripts are compliant, Schüklenk says, especially when the charter diverges from national laws or regulations. </p> <p> The coordinating committee will soon finalize the charter and share it widely, Bompart says. He hopes it will inspire national regulators and trial sponsors to shore up protections, and “would love it” if elements of the text end up in the Declaration of Helsinki or the CIOMS guidelines. </p> <p> For her part, Norward calls the charter “a great blueprint.” After completing at least 20 trials, she stopped being a volunteer in 2016 and became a registered nurse. The experience shook her confidence in pharmaceutical research, she says, but it also kindled her interest in science. She’s planning to get a master’s degree in nursing and, eventually, a Ph.D. </p> <p> And she’s no longer ashamed. “I did an Ebola study, a malaria study. I’m proud to say I helped in some way,” Norward says. “I don’t regret anything, but I do worry about people still doing the studies.” </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/global-effort-aims-protect-health-and-safety-human-guinea-pigs-drug-trials</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/5cd6d7f763.jpg" length="72466" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 15:50:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/5cd6d7f763.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Meet the smallest animal known to spread seeds with its poop </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-smallest-animal-known-spread-seeds-its-poop</link> <description>The rough woodlouse is the smallest known animal to disperse seeds by eating and excreting them</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> At less than 11 millimeters long the rough woodlouse, a drab scaly invertebrate that feasts on decaying vegetation, might seem like an unlikely master gardener. Yet looks can be deceiving. According to <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10519"> a study out today in <cite> People, Plants, Planet </cite> </a> , the woodlouse is a champion of sorts: the smallest animal yet known to disperse seeds by eating them. It and other small invertebrates play underappreciated roles in spreading plant life far and wide, researchers behind the study note. </p> <p> The findings “open the list of potential seed dispersers” to include more minuscule invertebrates, says ecologist Claire Detrain of the National Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium, who wasn’t involved in the study. </p> <p> Researchers have long known that mammals and birds can play a key role in spreading seeds, often by eating fruit and then excreting the seeds. But there’s been less study of the role insects and other small invertebrates can play in this eat-and-excrete process, known as endozoochory. </p> <p> To help fill that gap, Kenji Suetsugu, a researcher at Kobe University, and colleagues decided to investigate how invertebrates interacted with the silver dragon plant ( <em> Monotropastrum humile </em> ), a common East Asian species that produces dustlike seeds. By positioning automated digital cameras near plants, the researchers collected more than 9000 photographs of insects and other invertebrates feeding on their fruits, mostly at night. Then, to see whether the seeds remained intact after being digested, the researchers fed silver dragon fruits to three kinds of invertebrates—camel crickets, rough woodlice, and earwigs—and examined their feces under a microscope. In a final step, the researchers used a chemical process to confirm whether the excreted seeds were capable of germinating. The whole process required “meticulous attention to detail and precision in handling very small materials,” Suetsugu says. </p> <p> The results confirmed earlier work showing camel crickets were efficient dispersers of viable seeds. They also showed that about 30% of the seeds excreted by woodlice and earwigs remained viable. And, for the moment, that finding makes the rough woodlouse ( <em> Porcellio scaber </em> ), which reaches just 5 to 11 millimeters long, the smallest known animal to practice endozoochory. </p> <p> “This discovery challenges conventional thinking about the size and types of animals that can participate in endozoochory,” Suetsugu says. </p> <p> It also suggests many other tiny invertebrates might also be involved in endozoochory, Detrain says, and that understanding their roles as seed dispersal agents could be important for conservation efforts. “From the point of view of the plants, it’s a good idea to have diversity of seed-dispersing agents,” she notes, the better to help the seeds take root in a wider variety of potential habitats. </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-smallest-animal-known-spread-seeds-its-poop</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/96815bd397.jpg" length="37451" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 12:25:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/96815bd397.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Powerful new AI software maps virtually any protein interaction in minutes </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/powerful-new-ai-software-maps-virtually-any-protein-interaction-minutes</link> <description>Predicting how proteins bind to other molecules could revolutionize biochemistry, drug discovery</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> An artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software program released today by Google DeepMind offers scientists a potent new tool to predict how proteins work. Whereas earlier versions of the company’s software could model how the strands of amino acids making up a protein fold into its final 3D shape, the new version reveals how folded proteins bind and interact with a host of other molecules, including DNA, RNA, and other proteins. That interplay determines a protein’s role in the cell. Understanding it will help scientists design drugs that can block or boost a protein’s function. </p> <p> The new AI, known as AlphaFold 3, <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl2528"> follows closely on the heels of RoseTTAFold All-Atom </a> , a related AI-guided software package for predicting interactions between proteins and other biomolecules developed by researchers led by David Baker at the University of Washington and described on 7 March in <cite> Science </cite> . Baker says <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07487-w"> DeepMind’s new software </a> , reported today in <cite> Nature </cite> , “is very impressive” and produces more accurate predictions than his team’s software. </p> <p> AlphaFold 3 (AF3) is the successor to AlphaFold 2, which was released in 2021 and learns to predict protein folding patterns by training on huge databases of known structures. According to DeepMind, in just 3 years, AF2 has been used by 1.8 million researchers to map out some 6 million different protein structures. But those maps are images of individual static proteins, ignoring the chemical communication going on inside cells. “Biology is a dynamic system,” says DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. “You have to understand how properties of biology emerge due to the interactions between different molecules in the cell.” </p> <p> RoseTTAFold All-Atom led the way in mapping those interactions by using an approach called diffusion, common in AI image generators such as DALL-E, which refines an AI’s output by adding and removing statistical noise. John Jumper, one of AF3’s chief architects, says DeepMind, too, adopted a diffusion approach, but also made additional core changes to its software, in part by deemphasizing code that predicts similar behavior when proteins have close evolutionary ties in favor of predictions based on the physical behavior of amino acid building blocks. The upshot, Jumper says, is that “we’ve seen enormous advances in accuracy over other tools, and even AlphaFold 2.” </p> <p> As Jumper and his colleagues report today, AF3 could correctly model known interactions between proteins and small, druglike molecules in 76% of the more than 400 cases tested, compared with roughly 40% for RoseTTAFold All-Atom. And for interactions between proteins and antibodies, AF3 was correct 62% of the time compared with 30% for AlphaFold Multimer, the company’s previous software package for modeling protein interactions with other biomolecules. </p> <p> Julien Bergeron, a biologist at King’s College London who was given early access to test the new AF3 software, calls it “transformative” in its ability to speed up research. Rather than spend years in the lab studying a protein, they can get a result in minutes. “We can start testing hypotheses in silico,” Bergeron says. “I’m pretty certain that every structural biology and protein biochemistry research group in the world will immediately adopt this system.” </p> <p> To encourage such widespread adoption, DeepMind researchers today also released AlphaFold Server, a free online platform that enables users to create AF3 models of proteins interacting with almost any other biomolecule. It’s a change from its approach with AF2, for which DeepMind researchers released a database containing some 200 million protein structures. But because the combinatorial associations between all these proteins and other biomolecules that bind to them is so vast, “it’s really not feasible to precompute everything and put it in a database,” says DeepMind’s Dhavanthi Hariharan. Instead, the server allows trained users to simply input the amino acid sequence of interest along with the nucleic acid sequence of a DNA or RNA strand or the formula of a small molecule drug. Within minutes, the software spits out images of how they likely interact, as well as confidence scores that rate the likelihood that the model is correct. </p> <p> The tool is also able to incorporate the effects of “posttranslational” modifications to finished proteins, as well as changes to DNA and RNA known as epigenetic markers. That should allow it to predict how these biochemical tweaks alter protein functions, in some cases causing disease. Those predictions could in turn help scientists develop medicines to prevent or reverse these changes. </p> <p> Max Jaderberg, chief AI officer of Isomorphic Labs, says of a DeepMind spinoff aiming to use modeling tools to discover drugs: “Understanding more about [protein interactions] will translate to much more effective drugs in the clinic and into the hands of patients.” </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/powerful-new-ai-software-maps-virtually-any-protein-interaction-minutes</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/68eca8137f.jpg" length="42386" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 12:00:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/68eca8137f.jpg" height="532" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>‘Unqualified failure’ in polio vaccine policy left thousands of kids paralyzed </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/unqualified-failure-polio-vaccine-policy-left-thousands-kids-paralyzed</link> <description>Well-intentioned decision to switch oral polio vaccines in 2016 backfired, new draft report says</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> Something momentous happened in the history of polio eradication in April 2016: Over a period of 2 weeks, 155 countries and territories started to use a new version of Albert Sabin’s classic oral polio vaccine (OPV) that no longer protected against one of the three types of poliovirus. Type 2 virus had been eradicated by then, and the only remaining type 2 polio cases were touched off by the live virus in the vaccine itself. Dropping the type 2 component from the vaccine would end those cases as well, the thinking went. </p> <p> But “the switch,” as this global move has become known, became “an unqualified failure,” according to an unusually blunt draft report commissioned by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) that is now open for public comments. Unexpectedly, vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 has continued to circulate after the switch, paralyzing more than 3300 children. And GPEI has spent more than $1.8 billion trying to quash these outbreaks, mostly in Africa. Those numbers are certain to increase until the polio program finds a way to deal with the problem it inadvertently—and with the best of intentions—created. </p> <p> “It is about time someone publicly declared the switch a failure, given the obvious management and leadership errors,” says Kimberly Thompson, who heads Kid Risk, Inc., a nonprofit that has long modeled the consequences of various polio vaccine options. </p> <p> The authors of the report wanted it to catch the program’s attention. “We need to recognize that these are paralyzed children in some of the hardest places in the world,” says Natalia Molodecky, a consultant for the Task Force for Global Health. “These are very real consequences of the program.” But, she adds, the switch was a very difficult operation to get right. “This is a real-life example that we can learn from to guide future action.” </p> <p> “We are trying to call a spade a spade,” says her co-author Roland Sutter, who, as the head of polio research at GPEI until 2020, was one of the architects of the switch. “I hope the report will be a wake-up call for the program,” Sutter says. “Polio eradication has been my life’s work and ambition, and I would really like to see it succeed.” He still thinks it’s doable. </p> <p> What the switch was intended to do, reduce vaccine-derived type 2 cases to zero, “clearly didn’t happen,” acknowledges Aidan O’Leary, director for polio eradication at the World Health Organization (WHO), one of six core partners in GPEI. “The [case numbers] speak for themselves. The key is what we do about it.” </p> <p> OPV, made of live, weakened polioviruses, is the most effective vaccine for eradicating polio because it induces strong immunity in the gut and spreads through the stool of immunized children, protecting even those who don’t get the vaccine drops. OPV has helped bring down polio cases by more than 99.9% since the eradication program began in 1988. The “wild” poliovirus is now cornered in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it has paralyzed four children so far this year. </p> <p> But in rare instances, the weakened OPV viruses can regain their ability to paralyze and start to circulate among susceptible children, sparking new polio outbreaks in areas where vaccination rates are low. That’s why the endgame of the eradication initiative calls for stopping all use of OPV once the wild virus is gone and introducing vaccine made of inactivated virus (IPV), which can’t revert, into routine immunization. </p> <p> Planned after wild type 2 poliovirus had been eradicated, the switch—which the report calls “the largest coordinated public health effort in history”—was like a trial run for that ultimate goal. GPEI created a stockpile of monovalent vaccine targeting only type 2 to respond to the inevitable but, GPEI thought, small, vaccine-derived type 2 outbreaks that would initially occur. After a few years, the reasoning was, the world could stop worrying about type 2. </p> <p> Some countries were indeed able to quash type 2 outbreaks with the monovalent vaccine. But in Africa, the “worst-case scenario” quickly materialized, the draft report says: Type 2 outbreaks began raging out of control as an increasing number of children who were no longer receiving the type 2 virus in routine immunization became susceptible to it. Between 3 and 4 years after the switch—“the point of no return,” the report says—cases jumped from 84 in seven countries to 548 in 21 countries. The number of cases has increased about 10-fold since 2015. </p> <figure> <figcaption> <h3> A fateful decision </h3> <p> Type 2 vaccine-derived polio cases soared, and many more countries saw outbreaks, after the 2016 decision to drop the type 2 component from oral polio vaccines. </p> </figcaption> <img alt="" src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.z7tk6u2/files/_0507_nid_polio.svg"/> <figcaption> <span> <span> D. An-Pham/ <cite> Science </cite> </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> </p> <p> How could that happen? The draft report says the monovalent vaccination campaigns GPEI launched in response to outbreaks were too limited geographically, came too late, and often didn’t reach enough children. Because these outbreaks occurred in places where routine immunization rates were low, there was no backdrop of protective immunity. </p> <p> Another factor, the authors say, is the “inability or unwillingness of GPEI leadership to recognize the seriousness of the evolving problem and take corrective action.” A strategy committee with representatives from GPEI’s core partners—WHO; UNICEF; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); Rotary International; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance—governs by consensus. A key example of its inaction, Molodecky says, is that the evaluation was commissioned only in August 2023, more than 7 years after the switch. “Having a formal review at year three … would have enabled the program to make course corrections,” she says. </p> <p> An underlying problem is that GPEI has long regarded vaccine-derived viruses as less dangerous or of secondary importance compared with wild virus, Sutter says, even though they’re the same biologically and epidemiologically: “There’s only poliovirus. It paralyzes kids.” When wild type 1 poliovirus jumped from Pakistan to Malawi and Mozambique in 2022, GPEI was on it immediately, quickly snuffing out the outbreak. If GPEI had applied the same urgency to vaccine-derived virus, “we would be in a different place,” Sutter says. </p> <p> Now the goal is to stop the ongoing outbreaks. Faster, broader responses will help, as will <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.370.6518.751"> a novel type 2 polio vaccine that is far less likely to spark outbreaks </a> , and new vaccines are in development. The report also calls for the broader use of IPV, which doesn’t stop transmission but prevents paralysis, in routine immunization and outbreak control. Boosting routine immunization in vulnerable populations is key. </p> <p> As for the future cessation of all OPV, the lessons from the switch are “unambiguous,” the authors write: It should not be tried until GPEI has not only eradicated the wild poliovirus, but also stopped the persistent transmission of vaccine-derived viruses. “It would be better to take the time, get it right, than to rush, and fail spectacularly,” the draft report says. </p> <p> The authors end with an unusual epilogue for a technical report, saying there’s a “moral imperative” for the partners in GPEI to provide more rehabilitation and education to the thousands of children who have been paralyzed by vaccine-derived polio-virus type 2. “I do feel we have a responsibility, myself as well, to take care of these children,” Sutter says. The authors also call on GPEI to “take a hard look” at how to lower the risk to polio workers and their guards, more than 100 of whom have been assassinated in the past dozen years—most of them in Pakistan—and whether their families receive enough monetary compensation. The longer eradication takes, the more such murders may occur, the authors say. </p> <p> O’Leary, who notes the draft is still not finalized, says GPEI will consult with its management and oversight groups, outside experts, and WHO member states on how to proceed with OPV cessation, making sure lessons from the switch are incorporated. Decisions need to be made by early 2025. </p> <p> The report is “a hard read,” says John Vertefeuille, director of CDC’s global immunization division and a member of the strategy committee that governs GPEI. But, he says, “I also think it will lead us to forging very effective paths to finish the job” of eradication. </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/unqualified-failure-polio-vaccine-policy-left-thousands-kids-paralyzed</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/5aba3b4f94.jpg" length="60251" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2024 17:45:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/5aba3b4f94.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Parasites in these 200 old cans of salmon may spell good news for marine food webs </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/parasites-these-200-old-cans-salmon-may-spell-good-news-marine-food-webs</link> <description>Researchers dissected a surprising data source and found a sign of ecosystem health</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> Parasites plague almost every creature on Earth, from ticks on dogs to lice on whales. But for marine ecologists, it’s hard to analyze the tiny creatures that lurk in big, elusive ones. Now, a new study uses a novel sample—commercially canned salmon—to do just that. The finding of more parasites in recent years may be good news for the health of salmon and other Pacific Ocean creatures, researchers say. </p> <p> Although people “often think of [parasites] as being indicative of sickness … from an ecosystem perspective, they’re a sign of health,” says Jeb Byers, an ecologist at the University of Georgia who was not a part of the study. By monitoring parasite populations, he notes, researchers sometimes can “quickly tell if the ecosystem is intact.” </p> <p> When it comes to marine ecosystems, however, such data on past parasites are sparse. “We don’t have baseline data,” says Natalie Mastick, a marine mammalogist and postdoc at Yale University’s Peabody Museum. </p> <p> So, Mastick was intrigued when she received a call from the Seafood Products Association in Seattle looking to offload 500 cans of salmon from the past 40 years. At the time, Mastick was a doctoral student at the University of Washington, studying endangered orcas, or killer whales. To understand orca parasites, she had been trying to study organisms that parasitize salmon, a favorite orca prey that might pass the parasites along to the whales. But, “There didn’t seem to be enough data,” she says, “until we got that call.” </p> <p> The cans, set aside to monitor packaging integrity over time, contained chum, coho, pink, and sockeye salmon caught in the Gulf of Alaska and Bristol Bay from 1979 to 2021. Mastick and her colleagues suspected they also contained common, centimeter-long parasitic roundworms called anisakids, also known as sushi worms. “You wouldn’t notice them,” Mastick says. “They look like muscle filament, and are the exact same color as the filet.” And they are safe for human consumption because the canning process kills the worms. </p> <p> The researchers “dissected” 178 cans. About half contained anisakids, and the researchers documented a total of 372 worms. The distribution of worms per gram of fish showed that, over the past 4 decades, anisakid levels had increased in chum and pink salmon but remained constant in coho and sockeye, the research team reported <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10994144/"> last month in <cite> Ecology and Evolution </cite> </a> . </p> <p> The rising numbers of worms in chum and pink salmon could reflect the fact that those species tend to live near shore as juveniles, closer to marine mammals that perpetuate the parasites’ life cycle. Alternatively, it could mean that parasites that infect chum and pink salmon are thriving, Mastick says. But although finding worms in a tin of fish might seem bad news to people, the boost in anisakids could be good news for the environment, the researchers wrote. The parasites rely on several other animals to complete their life cycle, such as krill and smaller fish eaten by salmon. Their expanded presence could indicate that, after decades of commercial whaling and fur trapping that upended many Alaskan ecosystems, these waters are recovering. </p> <p> The researchers speculate the parasite increase could be, in part, the result of policies like the Clean Water and Marine Mammal Protection acts that helped reduce pollution of Alaskan waters and protect wildlife. Still, the researchers cannot rule out the possibility that some parasites in canned fish may simply have degraded over time, creating an illusion that older salmon harbored fewer parasites. </p> <p> If the results do hold up, the good news might come with a catch. “Nowadays these mammals and salmon have more sublethal threats than they used to,” Mastick says, including warming seas, pollution, and shipping noise. “So the parasites may have a bigger impact than they would have historically because they’re working in tandem with other threats.” </p> <p> Just how big an impact? That’s a can of worms for future parasite research. </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/parasites-these-200-old-cans-salmon-may-spell-good-news-marine-food-webs</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/0654171bef.jpg" length="104931" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2024 17:20:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/0654171bef.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>White House overhauls rules for risky pathogen studies </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-overhauls-rules-risky-pathogen-studies</link> <description>New policies for gain-of-function and “dual-use” research will cover broader swath of experiments</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> The White House is tightening federal oversight of so-called gain-of-function (GOF) studies that could enhance risky viruses in ways that increase their ability to cause a pandemic. It is also overhauling rules for a broader category of federally funded research on dangerous pathogens that is considered “dual use,” because the results could be used as bioweapons. </p> <p> The new rules, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about U.S.-funded studies in Wuhan, China, that manipulated bat viruses distantly related to SARS-CoV-2, will expand the number of studies that must undergo special reviews. But the rules, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2024/05/06/united-states-government-policy-for-oversight-of-dual-use-research-of-concern-and-pathogens-with-enhanced-pandemic-potential/"> released yesterday </a> by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), are narrower than a proposal floated last year that many scientists feared would complicate studies on low-risk pathogens such as cold viruses and herpesviruses. </p> <p> Many researchers involved in <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-weighs-crackdown-experiments-could-make-viruses-more-dangerous"> the intense debate over how to regulate GOF studies </a> funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) appear to be generally satisfied by the new policy. It is “a very big step forward,” says biosecurity expert Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who has called for tighter GOF rules. “Based on an early read, we think this strikes a good balance,” says Allen Segal, chief strategy and public affairs officer for the American Society for Microbiology, which had concerns about regulatory overreach. </p> <p> In a statement, NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli praised OSTP for its “unified and strengthened policy” that shows “responsible science and vigorous oversight can evolve in tandem.” </p> <p> The new policy, which will take effect in May 2025, replaces decade-old rules governing “dual-use research of concern” (DURC) crafted in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks. The DURC rules require additional oversight of seven types of experiments that involve 15 high-risk human and animal viruses and bacteria from a longer U.S. government list of dangerous human, animal, and plant pathogens and toxins known as select agents. If an academic researcher proposes an experiment that would make a bacterium resistant to drugs, for example, the university’s biosafety committee must report the work to the funding agency and submit a risk mitigation plan. </p> <p> Under the new policy, the rules for DURC—now dubbed Category 1 research—will expand to all 68 select agents, as well as about two dozen additional high-risk pathogens, such as West Nile virus, usually studied in laboratories with the highest biocontainment measures. And it expands the list of regulated experiments from seven to nine. </p> <p> OSTP is also replacing a 7-year-old policy for GOF studies that modify dangerous agents such as H5N1 avian influenza in ways that could make them more risky to people. That policy required such studies of “potential pandemic pathogens” (PPPs) to undergo a high-level federal review, although only three proposals have been subjected to that scrutiny so far. </p> <p> Under the new rules for GOF studies, now called Category 2 research, even certain experiments with less lethal agents such as seasonal flu could fall under the policy. That’s because it includes any pathogen that, when manipulated in the lab, could become what the policy calls a "pathogen with enhanced pandemic potential" that severely threatens public health or national security. And it extends oversight to experiments involving “extinct” viruses, such as 1918 influenza, that are no longer in circulation but could be resurrected by scientists. As with the previous policy, proposed Category 2 studies would undergo a department-level review of the risks and benefits by a panel of federal experts. </p> <p> Many pathogen researchers are relieved that OSTP pared back last year’s advice from the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity to <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-scientists-brace-tighter-scrutiny-potentially-risky-research"> require that even studies of low-risk pathogens undergo DURC screening </a> , and that the PPP definition potentially include viruses that are relatively harmless but spread easily. “I think they really tried to minimize the chilling effect on virology research,” says Johns Hopkins biosecurity expert Gigi Kwik Gronvall. </p> <p> Also welcome is the policy’s detailed guidance on how to conduct reviews. For example, researchers and institutions—and not federal agencies—will initially determine whether a study falls into Category 1 or Category 2. “Now it’s clear what everybody’s roles are,” Inglesby says. He and others are pleased that a type of GOF research aimed at developing countermeasures, for example altering a virus to create vaccine strains or a mouse version that can be used to test antiviral drugs, generally won’t be considered Category 2 research. The government can also waive the rules in the event of a public health or agricultural emergency. </p> <p> Some critics of GOF research still have concerns. For example, Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch and others say NIH should regularly release details on the risky studies it reviewed but deemed not GOF. The policy instead requires only annual public reporting on funded Category 2 projects. Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright is also troubled that under the new rules Ebola virus, SARS-CoV-2, and monkeypox are apparently not considered PPPs. The policy is “complex and convoluted, essentially guaranteeing failure” because it is open to interpretation, he <a href="https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1787614190456148379"> wrote </a> on X (formerly Twitter). </p> <p> Even supporters of the new policy agree that it is complicated and might not work exactly as planned. Time will tell, Gronvall says. “We’ll have to see real case examples of how well this works.” </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-overhauls-rules-risky-pathogen-studies</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/6865089207.jpg" length="65529" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2024 17:12:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/6865089207.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Could a newly discovered sperm whale ‘alphabet’ be deciphered by humans? </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/could-newly-discovered-sperm-whale-alphabet-be-deciphered-humans</link> <description>Discovery of potentially complex communication could reveal way to interpret what these marine mammals are saying—but not everyone is convinced</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> When two sperm whales from the same family meet in the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, they make clicking sounds, like telegraph operators tapping out Morse code. </p> <p> For years, scientists have classified these noises into roughly two dozen distinct phrases, or codas, making the communications seem about as complicated as two novice trumpeters trading notes. </p> <p> But the interactions might be better compared to a duet between veteran jazz musicians, researchers report today in <cite> Nature Communications </cite> . Various features of the clicks, including subtle alterations in pacing and rhythm, suggest <a href="https://nlcontent.springernature.com/d-redirect/TIDP2889042X65B201A68FEC48A1BE75F54120A2602BYI4/?url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.nature.com%2farticles%2fs41467-024-47221-8&linksource=https%3a%2f%2fnemo-mail-monkey-live.springernature.app%2f15589138%2fpressReleases%2f%5bdossier-id%5d%3feditorialDomain%3dhttps%253A%252F%252Fpress.springernature.com%26publicationDomain%3dhttps%253A%252F%252Fdx.doi.org"> sperm whales have the capacity to convey a much richer amount of information than previously known </a> . The work also hints at the tantalizing—and controversial—idea that humans might one day understand these interactions well enough to decipher or even take part in them. </p> <p> “This is the tip of the iceberg,” says David Gruber, a biologist at City University of New York and an author on the new paper. </p> <p> The research is the latest from <a href="https://www.projectceti.org/"> Project CETI </a> , an initiative founded by Gruber that has brought together high-profile marine biologists, computer scientists, and linguists to see whether advances in artificial intelligence and animal monitoring tools can open the door to cross-species communication. The group’s title is an homage to the quest to detect advanced extraterrestrial life, <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.369.6509.1288"> known as SETI </a> (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). </p> <p> Fueled by a $33 million grant from the Audacious Project philanthropy, the scientists are focused on several sperm whale clans swimming in the Caribbean, among the most closely studied sperm whales in the world. The whales there use a distinct “dialect” of 21 of the approximately 150 sperm whale codas found around the world, each a series of three to 40 clicks. </p> <p> But 21 pieces of information is a relatively small amount. Think of each as equivalent to a hieroglyphic image. Computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who are part of CETI went looking for more complex patterns in recordings of 8719 codas from at least 60 whales belonging to a 400-whale group known as the Eastern Caribbean 1 clan. </p> <p> At first glance, “you feel like [the whale] is producing kind of the same call over and over again,” says Pratyusha Sharma, a Ph.D. student who did much of the analysis. “But one of the things that really stood out is how there’s this fine-grained variation.” </p> <p> Scientists had already classified whale codas by tempo—ones that lasted a long time versus a short time; and by rhythm—ones with similar time gaps between clicks. Sharma and her collaborators grouped codas based on distinct clusters of tempos and rhythms, and found new, distinctive features. </p> <p> For example, a coda was adorned with an extra click 4% of the time. The researchers concluded it was a modified version of a short coda—rather than simply a different, longer phrase—because the rhythm had more in common with adjacent shorter codas. </p> <figure> <div> <div> <div> </div> </div> </div> <figcaption> <span> Coda exchange between multiple sperm whales in Dominica recorded near the surface <span> Project CETI </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> The scientists dubbed this extra click “ornamentation.” Rather than occurring at random, it tended to happen at specific moments in a whale-whale encounter: at the beginning and end of a string of calls, when a following whale started to click along with a leading whale, when it paused, or when it went silent for the rest of an exchange. </p> <p> The team’s analysis also revealed that whales would gradually slow or accelerate the tempo of a series of codas. Imagine a waltz that speeds up or slows down while always maintaining the same relationship between individual beats. An analysis showed codas delivered close in time shared similar shifts in tempo, supporting the idea that it was a gradual fluctuation, rather than chance. The team dubbed this phenomenon “rubato”—a musical term denoting a subtle change in tempo. </p> <p> Here, too, the recordings showed this phenomenon was linked to interactions between whales. When one altered the tempo of clicks, a second whale mirrored that shift, even if it was singing different codas. By adding up the combinations of these different features and seeing whether they occurred in the recordings, the number of discrete units of communication among these eastern Caribbean whales rose from 21 to approximately 300. </p> <p> The description of what the researchers termed a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” opens the possibility of conveying a much larger variety of information. “We don’t know what they are talking about,” Sharma says. “But the fact that they have this combinatorial basis is already very interesting.” This combinatorial power is a key building block of human speech, which mixes a finite number of sounds into a vast array of words to convey information. </p> <p> The research reveals intriguing new features in sperm whale communication, particularly the matching of tempo between whales, says Luke Rendell, a marine mammal scientist at the University of St Andrews whose work helped identify sperm whale dialects around the world. </p> <p> But Rendell, who was not involved with the current work, worries the impulse to liken sperm whale communication with human language risks mistaking what’s distinctive about whales. For instance, he said, a more elaborate combination of coda features doesn’t necessarily mean they carry lots of extra information in the same way human language does. </p> <p> Given the importance of social bonding within a clan of sperm whales, it’s possible the experience of matching coda tempos strengthens a sense of a mutual connection, rather than conveying a specific bit of data, Rendell says. “My hunch is that the synchrony is kind of the point,” he says. “It speaks to me more about music and the role that plays in musical performance.” </p> <p> Gruber agrees that whales might not be using a language in the same way humans do. But he says the new research reveals more about the structure of a species’ communication system, much as scientists deciphered how the waggles of honey bees <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/dancing-hive"> tell other bees </a> where flowers are located. </p> <p> Plus, Gruber says, it’s not unlike what we would do if the other SETI ever strikes gold. “Imagine if you did come across a nonhuman, non-DNA–based life form that was using a vastly different communication system than yours. How would you try to communicate?” he says. “That’s essentially what we’re up against with a whale.” </p> <p> Count Rendell as a skeptic. “I think we’re going to collect a lot of data and I think it’s going to be new and exciting,” he says. “I just don’t think we’re going to end up having a conversation with whales.” </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/could-newly-discovered-sperm-whale-alphabet-be-deciphered-humans</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/79507c003d.jpg" length="24671" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2024 12:15:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/79507c003d.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>To combat cow flu outbreak, scientists plan to infect cattle with influenza in high-security labs </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/combat-cow-flu-outbreak-scientists-plan-infect-cattle-influenza-high-security-labs</link> <description>Novel effort comes as study finds key receptor for avian flu virus in udders</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> The avian influenza virus that has been infecting dairy cows and spreading alarm in the United States was expected to reach Germany this week. But that’s actually good news. A shipment of samples of the H5N1 virus from Cornell University virologist Diego Diel is destined for the Federal Research Institute for Animal Health in Riems, which has one of the rare high-security labs worldwide that are equipped to handle such dangerous pathogens in cattle and other large animals. There, veterinarian Martin Beer will use the samples to infect dairy cows, in search of a fuller picture of the threat the virus poses, to both cattle and people, than researchers have been able to glean from spotty data collected in the field. </p> <p> Six weeks into the outbreak that has spread to farms in nine U.S. states, the flow of data from those locations remains limited as public health officials sort out authorities and some farms resist oversight. “It’s incredibly difficult to get the right sample sets off the infected farms,” says Richard Webby, an avian influenza researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “It’s clearly a barrier to understanding what’s going on. … That’s why these experimental infections of cows are really going to be super informative.” </p> <p> Beer and other scientists at biosafety level-3 (BSL-3) labs that handle large animals hope to glean clues about how to head off a dire scenario in which the virus establishes itself in cows across the United States, or eventually worldwide. That could harm the beef and dairy industries and increase the risk of a human pandemic. “Nobody wants this dangerous virus to become entrenched in a new species that we use to produce food and that has so much close contact to humans,” Beer says. </p> <p> As he and other groups set up their controlled infection experiments in cattle, a preprint posted last week gives a possible explanation for why the virus seems to thrive in the cow udder—and therefore ends up in milk. Influenza viruses bind well to certain cell surface carbohydrates called sialic acids, which vary by species. Avian viruses latch onto duck and chicken sialic acids, whereas human influenza viruses latch onto certain mammalian sialic acids. In the <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.01.591751v1"> preprint, posted on bioRxiv </a> , researchers from Denmark found duck-type as well as human-type receptors in the mammary gland of a dairy cow, which could make it a natural target for the bird virus. </p> <p> The results are potentially important but also preliminary, Beer cautions, noting that distinguishing between some types of sialic acids can be difficult. But Webby, one of the preprint’s authors, says it’s obvious the udders are especially hospitable to the virus. “We clearly know the receptors are in there for the avian virus because it's growing like a weed.” The authors also expressed concern that cows, like pigs, could become influenza “mixing vessels” that create dangerous new human strains when avian and mammalian flu viruses that simultaneously infect an animal exchange genes. Beer says he’s more worried, however, about an avian virus slowly adapting. </p> <p> So far, the threat to people has been limited. The only confirmed case to date, a Texas dairy worker who reported close contact with milked cows on an affected farm, developed conjunctivitis, but his symptoms resolved after he was given the antiflu drug oseltamivir. An eye swab yielded virus of the same H5N1 genotype, called B3.13, that has been infecting cows, researchers <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2405371"> reported last week in <cite> The New England Journal of Medicine </cite> </a> . </p> <p> Human eyes may be uniquely vulnerable to the strain because they contain the same H5N1 receptor found in ducks and cow udders. But the rapid viral growth in cow udders raises concerns that the avian virus could learn to latch on to the mammal-specific virus receptor also in the udder, says Tom Peacock, an influenza virologist at the Pirbright Institute. “It seems a good reason to get this eradicated from cattle as soon as possible.” </p> <p> One goal of the lab work is to investigate how the virus is spreading from cow to cow. The working theory is that lactating cows with infected udders are spreading the virus to other dairy cows during the milking process, but that’s based on circumstantial evidence such as the presence of H5N1 in environmental samples from milk parlors. “The big question right now is whether the virus is mechanically transmitted or can be transmitted from cow to cow via aerosol as well,” says Jürgen Richt, a virologist at Kansas State University. </p> <p> The best way to test this is in well-designed animal experiments in highly secure labs, he says. “There are only a few facilities that can do this kind of work, so we have been coordinating with each other who is doing what.” </p> <figure> <div> <img alt="a researcher wearing PPE holds a syringe near a cow's neck inside a laboratory" src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.zuult2k/files/_20240510_on_cowtest.jpg"/> </div> <figcaption> <span> Workers in protective gear at Kansas State University's large animal biosafety level-3 facility demonstrate how to take a blood sample from a cow. <span> ABSA International </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> Richt, who runs one such facility, plans to inoculate the nose and mouth of male and female cattle with the same strain Diel sent Beer. “Then we will look at what’s happening within the animals,” he says. “We will kill some of them after 4 or 5 days and look where the virus is in the body.” Others will be watched for weeks to see whether they develop antibodies to H5N1 and how long they shed the virus in various ways. And 2 days after some of these initial infections, new cows, called sentinels, will be added to the mix to see whether they can catch the virus. </p> <p> While Richt is doing these experiments with nonlactating cows, Beer will work with lactating cows, depositing the virus straight inside all four of the animals’ teats. And Volker Gerdts, director of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Saskatchewan in Canada, is planning similar experiments with calves in the organization’s BSL-3 facility. </p> <p> Using lactating animals adds a whole layer of complexity, because dairy cows are very sensitive to changes in their conditions and because they need to be regularly milked, Beer says. “We just bought three new milking machines to take into the BSL-3.” But these kinds of experiments are “absolutely crucial,” says evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona. “It’s still possible that this will become an H5N1 pandemic. And those experiments will help understand if that’s likely or less likely.” (Beer <a href="https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/14/7/07-1468_article.htm"> previously infected cattle </a> in 2007 with a different form of H5N1.) </p> <p> Other researchers are studying the cow flu strain in cell culture. Diel, for instance, is examining how well the virus replicates in different cell types. He also wants to see whether the affinity of the bovine H5N1’s hemagglutinin, the surface protein the virus uses to bind to cells, has changed to one better suited for the sialic acids on cells in the human respiratory tract, a sign that the virus is adapting to transmission in mammals. </p> <p> Some scientists are anxiously looking for signs of the bird flu becoming human-adapted by tracking the mutations seen in the viral sequences from infected cows. A few, such as one called 631L, have already been found and appear to make H5N1’s polymerase, the enzyme the virus makes to copy its genome, work better in mammals. But similar mutations have been seen in H5N1 cases in other animals, and there has been little other evidence of mammalian adaption so far, Peacock says. </p> <p> As new mutations are found, scientists are planning to genetically alter the cow flu viruses they are already using in experiments to mirror these changes. “That’s just faster than waiting for a new isolate to be sent again, which takes weeks,” Beer says. Once he has tested the current U.S. virus from cows, Beer wants to do a similar experiment with a European lineage of H5N1 to see whether the ability to infect cow’s udders is specific to the current strain or is more universal. </p> <p> The flurry of activity on the research side is in marked contrast to what scientists say is still a slow official response to the outbreak itself: Researchers still have no idea how many lactating and nonlactating cow in affected herds have antibodies or whether any workers on these farms have antibodies, a sign of infection, Worobey says. “I would love to have some serological information.” </p> <p> “The reason why this is not a big human health problem is because the virus is not that transmissible. It’s not because of our actions in response to this new situation,” says virologist Marion Koopmans of the Erasmus Medical Center. </p> <p> Worobey agrees: “If we’re going to be serious in the U.S. and as a global community about trying to prevent pandemics that we can prevent, then this is not the way to do that.” </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/combat-cow-flu-outbreak-scientists-plan-infect-cattle-influenza-high-security-labs</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/b188784638.jpg" length="60372" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2024 11:00:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/b188784638.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Australia bets big on dark horse quantum computing technology </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/australia-bets-big-on-dark-horse-quantum-computing-technology</link> <description>In AU$940 million deal, PsiQuantum will build “utility scale” facility to harness photons</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> In the global race to build a fully functional quantum computer, Australia has wagered heavily on a company developing a dark-horse technology. The Australian national government and the state of Queensland will invest AU$940 million (about $620 million) in PsiQuantum, a 9-year-old Silicon Valley startup, <a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240429080449/en/PsiQuantum-to-Build-World%E2%80%99s-First-Utility-Scale-Fault-Tolerant-Quantum-Computer-in-Australia"> the company announced </a> last week. PsiQuantum will build a facility in Brisbane to house a computer that uses photons as the quantum bits or qubits that encode information, instead of the atoms, ions, or tiny circuits of superconducting metal on which higher profile approaches to quantum computing rely. </p> <p> “It’s a gamble,” says Raymond Laflamme, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo. However, Australia’s chief scientist, Cathy Foley, says it’s one worth taking. The project will ensure “we are at the front of the pack in the global race to build the first useful quantum computer,” she said <a href="https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/100208"> in a statement </a> . “We need to do this now; otherwise we will be left behind.” </p> <p> Australia is playing to its strengths in quantum theory and photonics, notes Irfan Siddiqi, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Two of PsiQuantum’s four founders are Australian. Australian officials, Siddiqi suggests, are “saying, ‘Probably a lot of these things in quantum are going to work, so we might as well try one where we have a unique advantage.’” </p> <p> A fully functional quantum computer could solve problems that would overwhelm any conventional supercomputer. Whereas the bits in a conventional computer must be set to either 0 or 1, a quantum computer’s qubits can be 0 and 1 at the same time, although when measured that state collapses to 0 or 1. Multiple qubits can be “entangled” so that even while the state of each remains completely uncertain, the states of all the qubits are perfectly correlated. Then, for example, if one is measured and collapses to 0, the others will collapse the same way, too. For certain types of problems, potential solutions can be thought of as quantum waves sloshing among the qubits. The waves interfere so wrong solutions cancel one another out and only the correct one remains. </p> <p> A qubit can be anything that has two quantum states to denote 0 and 1 and can interact with its siblings in a controlled way. For a photon, those states can be its polarization—horizontal or vertical—or even which of two paths in an optical circuit it takes. The circuits for a photonic quantum computer can be etched onto microchips and connected with optical fibers, says Terry Rudolph, chief architect at PsiQuantum and a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London. Because it exploits that familiar technology, he says, “the final machine is copying and pasting of a bunch of stuff.” </p> <p> Less helpfully, photons barely interact with one another. They can be made to do so with a beam splitter, a half-silvered mirror set at an angle that will, with equal probability, transmit a photon or deflect it by 90°. When two photons traveling in perpendicular directions strike the mirror from opposite sides, one might expect that half the time the photons will emerge still traveling in perpendicular directions, because both were transmitted or both reflected. However, quantum mechanics dictates that each photon will be both transmitted and reflected. Those two-way states interfere so that both photons exit in the same direction, in an entangled state. </p> <p> Physicists knew that this effect could be used to perform a single logical operation, or gate, on photons shot through a small maze of mirrors, beam splitters, and other optical elements. However, the process would yield the right output in only a fraction of trials. For a complex computation involving many gates, the number of trials would explode exponentially. </p> <p> In 2001 Laflamme; Emanuel Knill, now at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology; and Gerard Milburn of the University of Queensland found a way around the problem. “The funny thing is when [Knill] and I started on this, we wanted to show that it would never work,” Laflamme says. Instead, the three theorists found that a technique called quantum teleportation, which transfers the state of one qubit to another, could in some cases create an initial state of the qubits on which the gates were sure to work. Preparing this state would still succeed only sometimes, Laflamme says, but the computation as a whole would require far fewer trials. </p> <p> Inspired by that work, the PsiQuantum team later found a different way to make the computations even more efficient, ironically by leveraging the mass of extra circuitry inevitably needed to <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/biggest-flipping-challenge-quantum-computing"> correct errors among the qubits </a> . “We go directly for the error correcting codes and we skip all the kind of intermediate things that Knill, Laflamme, and Milburn, and many other people did in academia,” Rudolph says. “That’s really what’s given us a big leap.” </p> <p> Rudolph wouldn’t say how PsiQuantum’s progress compares with <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.365.6460.1364"> efforts based on other technologies </a> , which have manipulated hundreds of qubits. Nevertheless, by 2027, PsiQuantum plans to build a quantum version of a supercomputing facility, with racks and racks of processors. It will also include a plant to liquify helium to cool the chips so the photon-counting detectors on them work. </p> <p> Some experts question whether PsiQuantum’s technology is ready to scale up. Still, even if the company’s effort does not advance as planned, Australia’s investment in “the ecosystem of people making the wires and the lasers and the fab and all of that” will pay off, Siddiqi predicts. “It doesn’t matter what you produce in the end because [the] government has trained people in a good industry that’s moving forward.” </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/australia-bets-big-on-dark-horse-quantum-computing-technology</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/2476b440e5.jpg" length="74007" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2024 18:35:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/2476b440e5.jpg" height="530" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Deadly Pacific ‘blobs’ tied to emission cuts in China </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/deadly-pacific-blobs-tied-emission-cuts-china</link> <description>Warming due to cleaner air rippled across the ocean, modeling suggests</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> Starting in late 2013, the first in a handful of <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/ocean-heat-waves-pacific-s-deadly-blob-could-become-new-normal"> record-shattering heat waves </a> struck the north Pacific Ocean near Alaska. Temperatures in these warm “blobs,” which have occurred four times in the past decade, sometimes reach more than 2°C above normal. They have sparked coastwide blooms of toxic algae, left thousands of humpback whales missing and presumed dead, emptied the nets of Alaska cod fishers, and littered North American beaches with the corpses of starved seabirds. </p> <p> Research has implicated climate change, which can supercharge natural fluctuations in ocean heat. But now, scientists are pointing to another surprising contributor: China’s success in stemming air pollution. A steep decline in aerosols—tiny airborne particles such as sulfates—emitted by Chinese factories and power plants in the 2010s appears to have amplified a string of extreme heat waves on the other side of the Pacific, <a href="https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2313797121"> driving up to 30% of the temperature increase during these heat waves </a> , scientists report today in the <cite> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences </cite> . </p> <p> “We have been aware of the important role of aerosol forcing in modulating climate change,” says Hai Wang, a climate modeling expert at the Ocean University of China and an author on the paper. “But we didn’t expect that the warming would increase by that much.” </p> <p> The new work ties together two phenomena that hadn’t previously been linked, says Dillon Amaya, a climate modeling expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who studies climate impacts in U.S. waters. “There has not been a satisfying explanation” for the spate of heat waves, he says. “This offers a really compelling argument.” </p> <p> Aerosols can act like tiny mirrors, reflecting sunlight back into space and reducing the amount that reaches Earth’s surface. Eliminate them and the world warms. Scientists <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/clearer-skies-may-be-accelerating-global-warming"> last month reported </a> that cleaner air might be responsible for 40% of the increase in heat driving global warming between 2001 and 2019. </p> <p> Wang and his collaborators wondered whether a drop in aerosol pollution might explain a more geographically specific warming effect. The Pacific heat waves occurred in a part of the ocean that previously seemed unresponsive to rising global temperatures, and they coincided with a pollution crackdown in China that <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab9e21"> between 2006 and 2017 </a> pushed down emissions by as much as 70% for sulfur dioxide, which reacts in the atmosphere to form sulfate particles. </p> <p> To see whether the two developments might be linked, the researchers turned to a dozen computer models that have been used to simulate how the atmosphere and ocean interact to shape global climate, in a coordinated exercise known as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). </p> <p> The researchers partly relied on a quirk in different iterations of the project. The models participating in CMIP5 assumed that aerosol pollution over East Asia would flatten, but not drop. The CMIP6 models, however, more closely mimic the actual decline in aerosol pollution. When the researchers ran the models to re-create the climate up to the year 2020, both generations moved in tandem until 2007. Then they diverged. The CMIP6 models showed strong warming in the northeast Pacific, the epicenter of the heat waves. </p> <p> By peering more deeply into one model, the researchers uncovered a possible explanation. Much as a dropped rock can send waves across a pond, temperature changes in a limited region can ripple across the atmosphere, Wang says. The computer simulations showed a chain reaction in which falling air pollution in China increased warming near the coast of Asia, which amplified a high-pressure system along the Pacific’s western edge. That intensified a neighboring low-pressure system in the middle of the Pacific. A huge low-pressure patch known as the Aleutian Low, off the coast of Alaska, responded by strengthening and expanding southward, which weakened westerly winds that cool the sea surface and set the stage for a heat wave. </p> <p> These patterns didn’t cause the heat waves, Wang says. Natural fluctuations in the weather did that. But they likely amplified the heat waves’ intensity, as did climate change, by creating conditions “that make these extreme events easier to happen,” he says. </p> <p> The study covers a relatively short time span and a small number of heat waves in a complex, dynamic ocean, cautions Maria Rugenstein, a Colorado State University scientist who studies interactions between the atmosphere and the tropical Pacific. “It’s kind of statistically not very substantial,” she says of the number of events. “But their physical argument is very solid.” </p> <p> If the findings hold up, Rugenstein says, they also offer a lesson about the potential consequences of intentionally injecting aerosols high into the atmosphere, a geoengineering strategy some have proposed as a way to cool the planet. The study shows the climate can respond quickly, with unexpected repercussions an ocean away. “I would take this as a cautionary tale,” she says. </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/deadly-pacific-blobs-tied-emission-cuts-china</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/d6bce17941.jpg" length="42488" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2024 16:30:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/d6bce17941.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>New animal dads often kill their stepchildren. These parrots adopt them instead </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/new-animal-dads-often-kill-their-stepchildren-these-parrots-adopt-them-instead</link> <description>Green-rumped parrotlet stepfathers still get their DNA into the gene pool when they spare their adoptive chicks’ lives</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> Kill them or keep them. That’s the dilemma males of a small species of South American parrot face when a widowed female with chicks chooses him as her new mate. Many male animals—including lions and gorillas—slay such younglings to ensure all future offspring are theirs. But these diminutive parrots sometimes take a different tack. </p> <p> According to a study published today in the <cite> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences </cite> , green-rumped parrotlet <a href="https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2317305121"> stepdads are as likely to adopt the mother’s chicks as to kill them </a> . Surprisingly, these adoptive fathers wind up having as many offspring of their own over their lifetimes as do infanticidal males. The work is the first to show that adoption, like infanticide, can lead to long-term reproductive success. </p> <p> “It’s an extraordinary study,” says Sievert Rohwer, an emeritus curator of birds at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum who was not involved in the research. In 1986, he predicted certain avian species, such as raptors, would opt to adopt rather than kill, but evidence remained primarily anecdotal until now. </p> <p> A year after Rohwer made this prediction, Steve Beissinger, now an emeritus ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.333.6041.398"> began to erect nesting boxes for green-rumped parrotlets ( <em> Forpus </em> <em> passerinus </em> ) on a cattle ranch in Venezuela </a> . The parakeet-size birds, which mate for life, immediately moved into the PVC-pipe homes. </p> <p> Detailed observations over the next 3 decades by Beissinger and his students revealed that males outnumber females by almost two to one. The tightly bonded pairs need a cavity or nesting box to raise their young; the limited number of these homes leads to fights and evictions. The birds rarely divorce, and if one mate dies (particularly, the male), the other is besieged by suitors. </p> <p> “Within an hour of losing her mate, a female at a nesting box will be surrounded by males,” says Karl Berg, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and co-author of the new study. </p> <p> Beissinger thought these newly minted stepfathers would kill any of their new mate’s chicks—an idea reinforced when a male with a bloody beak was seen exiting a widow’s nesting box. But Berg also witnessed a stepdad feeding a widow’s nestling. “It was more complicated than we first thought,” he says. </p> <p> So, the researchers continued their observations, monitoring more than 2700 nests over the study period. At more than 250 of these, nestlings were attacked and killed, and eggs were destroyed. Parrotlet pairs without homes were the killers in 69% of these cases. These killers drove away the nesting pairs and grabbed the houses for themselves. Stepdads (and in a few cases, stepmoms) were responsible for the other 31%. </p> <p> Amid this bloodshed, however, researchers noticed a more peaceful resolution to familial upheaval: Adoptions of unrelated chicks by stepparents were just as common as infanticide. </p> <p> In more than half of the nests, infanticide didn’t occur when a female took a new mate. Sometimes this was because widows prevented stepdads from entering. But in other cases, the new parents did enter the nests and began treating the offspring as their own, even regurgitating seeds to them and defending them against other aggressive birds. Most surprisingly, adoptive males subsequently mated with widows, nesting at a younger age than their competitors. Indeed, stepdads went on to have as many chicks as did the killers over the birds’ lifetimes—upending the established idea that adoption is maladaptive and hinders a stepparent’s reproductive success. </p> <p> Adopting likely strengthened the bond between a stepdad and widow, Berg says, leading to earlier and more mating opportunities. “It turns out that [this] can also be an effective strategy” for getting one’s genes into the next generation, he says. </p> <p> Adopting unrelated offspring as a strategy for securing one’s reproductive success “is almost unknown” in the animal kingdom, says Christina Riehl, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University who wasn’t involved with the work. “This study carefully teases apart” how and where it occurs, she says, and reveals that the tactic can have positive reproductive consequences. </p> <p> The bold decision can work out well for adopters, Beissinger adds, as the new dads—adopters and killers alike—“get both the love and the real estate.” </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/new-animal-dads-often-kill-their-stepchildren-these-parrots-adopt-them-instead</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/bbedf10614.jpg" length="33531" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2024 16:00:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/bbedf10614.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Hellish Venus may have lost its water quickly </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/hellish-venus-may-have-lost-its-water-quickly</link> <description>Newly identified water-loss mechanism means planet may have had an ocean more recently</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> With surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead, Venus today is a veritable hellhole, despite being similar in size to Earth and orbiting in the habitable zone of the Sun. Yet studies suggest the planet may have once hosted oceans and even conditions suitable for life. Explaining how all that water disappeared has been a problem. </p> <p> A study <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07261-y"> published today </a> in <cite> Nature </cite> offers a solution, identifying a new water-loss mechanism operating high in Venus’s atmosphere that could have doubled the rate of water loss. Speedier drying could have allowed oceans to exist until later in Venus’s history—implying the planet might have been habitable for longer. “It fits in with Venus being a more active and maybe water-rich world,” says Sue Smrekar, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved in the study. </p> <p> Today, Venus puts Earth’s greenhouse effect to shame. At 96% carbon dioxide, its atmosphere traps so much heat that surface temperatures reach more than 450°C. Yet spacecraft and telescopes have seen faint hints of water vapor in the atmosphere, and in the late 1970s, NASA’s Pioneer Venus orbiter detected a sign of long-vanished oceans: an enrichment of heavy hydrogen, deuterium. </p> <p> Subsequent modeling studies <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/was-venus-once-good-home-life-nasa-missions-aim-find-out"> have suggested </a> the planet had enough moisture billions of years ago to cover the surface in 3 kilometers of water. But as volcanoes spewed carbon dioxide, a runaway greenhouse effect would have raised temperatures and boiled off most of the water. High in the atmosphere, the Sun’s ultraviolet light would have split the water vapor molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. In a process called hydrodynamic loss, the featherweight hydrogen got hot and energetic enough to escape the planet’s gravity, leaving the telltale deuterium enrichment. </p> <p> But crucially, this process cannot account for the last 100 meters of water loss because hydrogen is also a greenhouse gas. Once enough hydrogen escaped, temperatures could no longer rise, and the water loss would have slowed. “You can’t lose all the water to match the present-day observations,” says Michael Way, who has modeled Venus’s climate at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “You’re left in this conundrum.” </p> <p> The authors of the new study say they have identified new water-loss chemistry that can resolve the problem. For the highest gas molecules, some 150 kilometers above the surface, sunlight would not only split water vapor but also carbon dioxide, creating hydrogen and carbon monoxide that would combine into an unstable ion called HCO <sup> + </sup> . Almost immediately, the HCO <sup> + </sup> ions would break apart to shed excess energy. “Because hydrogen is so much lighter than carbon monoxide, it gets most of the energy from this process and zips away superfast,” says Michael Chaffin, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder and a co-lead author on the new study. “The hydrogen uses the carbon monoxide molecule as a launchpad to escape to space,” explaining how the last “dregs” of venusian water could have been lost even after hydrodynamic loss ceased. </p> <p> Together the new HCO <sup> + </sup> mechanism and the previously modeled water-loss processes could have enabled Venus to lose its water in half the time, a relatively brisk 600 million years, the researchers say. If so, Venus may have held onto its oceans until much more recently, perhaps 2 billion to 3 billion years ago. “If Venus did have this early habitable phase, understanding how it went from habitable to completely uninhabitable is extremely important,” Way says. </p> <p> Co-author Bethan Gregory, a planetary scientist at CU Boulder, led a <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2022JE007576"> previous study </a> last year that showed how the same HCO <sup> + </sup> process could also explain how Mars lost its water, after NASA’s MAVEN orbiter detected energetic hydrogen escaping Mars in a way that corresponds to the breakup of HCO <sup> + </sup> . “The Mars and Venus atmospheres are both [carbon dioxide] dominated, so there are a lot of similarities there,” she says. Relatively low carbon dioxide levels on Earth mean there’s no threat that the same process could desiccate our atmosphere. </p> <p> No upcoming mission will be able to definitively test whether the HCO <sup> + </sup> mechanism was at work on Venus. Neither NASA’s VERITAS mission, which Smrekar leads, nor Europe’s EnVision mission, both to launch in 2031, have instruments to measure hydrogen loss from the upper atmosphere. NASA’s DAVINCI probe, also set to launch in 2031, will sample the atmosphere, but only below 70 kilometers. “There’s just nothing on the books to study the upper atmosphere,” Way says, but “people will propose [an instrument] I’m sure.” </p> <p> Chaffin says finding out is critical, not just to better understand how Earth’s near-twin went down its darkling path, but also to apply the knowledge to rocky planets being discovered beyond the Solar System. “Venus and Earth may have formed from identical material, and yet they ended up very different,” he says. “Understanding how these processes work, and how they might limit the existence of habitable environments everywhere in the universe, is really important.” </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/hellish-venus-may-have-lost-its-water-quickly</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/b3373dd442.jpg" length="17697" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2024 12:05:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/b3373dd442.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>The U.S. has a new way to mask census data in the name of privacy. How does it affect accuracy? </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-has-new-way-mask-census-data-name-privacy-how-does-it-affect-accuracy</link> <description>First-ever analysis finds a method called differential privacy degrades data at smallest units and could jeopardize voting rights</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> U.S. residents who fill out the census questionnaire every 10 years are told their answers will remain confidential. But that promise from the U.S. Census Bureau comes with a statistical caveat: The stronger the privacy shield, the less accurate the data. </p> <p> That trade-off, long familiar to researchers, became a hot-button issue after the government adopted a new approach to protecting privacy for the 2020 census. Many demographers worried the new method would degrade the quality of census data, which are used not just for academic studies, but also for drawing congressional districts and allocating federal funds. But neither the agency nor its critics knew by how much, kicking off a fierce debate over how the new approach compared with the previous method. </p> <p> Now, <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl2524"> a study appearing this week in <cite> Science </cite> Advances </a> provides the first-ever, independent hard numbers to answer that question. Experts say the findings could help the Census Bureau do a better job on the next census in 2030. They could also influence high-stakes legal battles over voting rights. </p> <p> Here’s a guide to understanding this highly technical analysis and why it matters. </p> <h2> Why are census data important? </h2> <p> Researchers use census data to paint a picture of the country’s changing demographics. Government officials at all levels use the information to determine the population eligible for federal programs ranging from health, nutrition, and housing benefits to highway construction. </p> <p> But the key reason the federal government has conducted a census every 10 years since 1790 is to meet a requirement in the U.S. Constitution that seats in the now 435-member U.S. House of Representatives be allocated according to the population of each state. To draw districts of roughly equal size, election officials need to know exactly where people live, down to the smallest voting unit. Census data are also used to ensure compliance with federal statutes such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which requires that election maps don’t discriminate against certain minority groups or unfairly dilute their ballot clout. </p> <h2> What prompted this study? </h2> <p> Demographers have always known about the trade-off between accuracy and privacy. But they learned to work around the distortions introduced by the privacy method the Census Bureau used in the 1990, 2000, and 2010 censuses. </p> <p> That approach is called swapping. It selects responses to questions about age, race, ethnicity, and household characteristics from a resident in one block and exchanges it for a similar response by someone in another block. (The bureau divides the country into some 11 million geographic units, called census blocks, which have a median size of 23 people, and then aggregates blocks to tally up larger areas.) Researchers assumed that swapping was used on people with unusual demographic characteristics that make them more vulnerable to being identified. But Census officials never revealed how often they applied the tool. </p> <p> In preparing for the 2020 census, however, agency officials decided that swapping wasn’t good enough to preserve the promise of absolute confidentiality. They said their research had shown that a determined data hacker might be able to figure out an individual’s identity by combining census data with information from other publicly available databases. </p> <p> So, Census officials replaced swapping with another statistical tool, called differential privacy. It adds varying amounts of statistical “noise” to every piece of data based on its perceived vulnerability, with more vulnerable data getting more noise. </p> <h2> How was the study done? </h2> <p> In a bid to better understand how the switch to differential privacy might affect data quality, a group of researchers asked the bureau in 2021 to release its so-called noisy measurement file (NMF) from the 2020 census. The NMF contains tweaks made to the raw data by applying differential privacy, but before the bureau cleaned up the data and released a “postprocessed” file. In July 2022, a Columbia University political scientist filed a formal request for the file and in October sued the bureau seeking its release. </p> <p> The lawsuit was dismissed in April 2023. However, the judge ordered the bureau to release files that would satisfy the request. (Census officials had told the court they were planning such a release before the suit was filed.) The agency then released files from the 2010 census in which swapping had been applied, as well as files from a series of experiments they did to learn what happens to census data when differential privacy is used. (The tests were run on files from 2010, because the 2020 census hadn’t been carried out.) </p> <p> Analyzing those files allowed a team of scholars from Harvard, New York, and Yale universities to measure the impacts of each method on the accuracy of the census data as well as to compare the two methods. The study represents “the first comprehensive, public analysis of the impact of both approaches to disclosure avoidance on the quality of the data,” says Harvard political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere, who was not involved in the work. </p> <h2> What did they find? </h2> <p> The study concludes that differential privacy and swapping were equally effective when it came to preserving the accuracy of data on larger population groups—such as at the state level. But at the smallest geographic unit, the census block, differential privacy resulted in larger errors and greater variation. The impact was most severe among Hispanic residents and multiracial populations, with the magnitude of the error occasionally exceeding the total number of minorities in those units. For example, a block with three Hispanic residents might appear to have zero or six Hispanic people after statisticians applied differential privacy. </p> <p> “What they have shown is that the true cost of what the Census Bureau is doing now compared to [using] swapping comes at the block level,” Ansolabehere explains. </p> <p> The greater distortion of the smallest groups from differential privacy stems from the different ways in which the two methods are applied. Census officials decided to retain the overall and voting age populations of the affected geographic unit when swapping responses, providing certainty for both demographers and election officials redrawing voting districts. That is, a block with 23 people still has 23 people after swapping. </p> <p> But they didn’t impose that requirement for differential privacy. That meant the noise added could affect the total population of the block. It can also produce such illogical results as a negative number of residents, groups of children living without an adult, or occupants on a block with no recorded housing units. </p> <p> To prevent a public backlash to such oddities, Census officials eliminate those nonsensical outliers, such as by changing negative numbers to zero, before releasing a revised file to the public. But the study shows such adjustments actually magnify the distortion. </p> <p> One advantage of differential privacy over swapping is that the random noise it injects “has very well-known statistical properties,” explains California Institute of Technology social scientist Jonathan Katz. “That was supposed to be better than swapping, where the distortions are harder to correct. And Census officials would have been right if they hadn’t truncated values that were negative.” </p> <p> “The paper describes how bad things can get” when those values are truncated, he adds. “And the answer is, pretty bad.” </p> <p> The study did show that the impacts of differential privacy were no worse than errors produced by other factors, such as chronic undercounting of hard-to-reach groups, ambiguous answers, or mistakes in entering data. (The 2010 census missed an estimated 16 million people, for example, some 5% of the total U.S. population, and 10 million people were double counted.) </p> <p> But that finding is hardly reassuring, says study co-author and statistician Cory McCartan, who will move to Pennsylvania State University next month. “It’s fair to say [that] at … the national, state, and county level the undercount errors are much bigger than anything introduced by differential privacy,” he says. “But at the block level, certainly the privacy errors are now as big or bigger than these other sources. And Census introduced” those errors, he adds. </p> <h2> What impact might those errors have? </h2> <p> Ansolabehere, who studies election systems, worries inaccuracies at the smallest geographic units could affect how courts decide whether voting rights laws that require equal protection for minority groups have been met when policymakers draw election boundaries at all levels. “If I go into court and the opposing side says the data at the precinct level are messy and can’t be trusted, that could undermine my case,” he says. </p> <p> One surefire way to improve accuracy is for the Census Bureau to release less data from the decennial census. That would reduce the amount of noise that must be injected into every response to prevent reidentification. But it would also restrict the ability of researchers to understand demographic changes by sifting through the trillions of data points now available. </p> <p> Releasing less data would also be a blow to anyone doing surveys drawn from a representative sample of U.S. residents, Ansolabehere says. “The entire survey research industry depends on census data to define what its samples should look like,” he explains. “If too few numbers are released, I have to fill in the gaps. And I may not get it right.” </p> <h2> Is the study likely to settle the debate over the two methods? </h2> <p> Probably not, because supporters of each method claim it backs their positions. </p> <p> John Abowd, a former chief scientist of the Census Bureau who spearheaded the agency’s adoption of differential privacy, says, “We never expected [differential privacy] to be better in the sense of both more accurate and more protective of confidentiality, because that’s impossible” from a statistical perspective. But what the agency did expect, he says, is that the data “would be fit for [its congressionally mandated] purpose: giving accurate estimates of the overall population and the percentage of that population from large minority groups” that can be used to reapportion House seats every decade. </p> <p> But one leading critic of differential privacy, University of Minnesota demographer Steven Ruggles, says the study supports his view that the agency should return to swapping. “It does minimal damage to accuracy, preserves accurate counts of the number of people and the number of adults at every level of geography, and can be effectively targeted to focus on people at high risk of disclosure,” he explains in a recent paper. </p> <h2> What might the study mean for the 2030 census? </h2> <p> The Census Bureau has until 2028 to decide what type of privacy system it will use in the 2030 census. And it’s not assuming the status quo is fine. Although Census Bureau officials declined to comment on the study itself, a spokesperson says the agency is conducting research aimed at both “improving the existing disclosure avoidance system … and evaluating alternative approaches that might outperform” what was used in 2020. </p> <p> Harvard statistician Kosuke Imai, a co-author of the new study, would like to see the Census Bureau release the NMF “in a more usable format” than what his team had to work with. More hands would generate more information for the bureau to incorporate into its decision-making, he says. </p> <p> Abowd, who retired from federal service last year and is an emeritus professor at Cornell University, agrees that “there are things that can be done to make those data easier to use,” he says. “But given its limited resources, the Census Bureau doesn’t have any obligation to fund those improvements.” </p> <p> Overall, the new study highlights how much is at stake, says Katz, who studies redistricting. “Unless you’re a nerd like me who uses the Census data all the time, most Americans don’t even know this fight has been going on,” he says. “But the outcome could have a major impact on their lives.” </p> <div> <span> <strong> Clarification, 8 May, 4:45 p.m.: </strong> This story has been updated to clarify the sequence of events relating to the suit filed seeking release of Census Bureau files. </span> </div> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-has-new-way-mask-census-data-name-privacy-how-does-it-affect-accuracy</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/971e2912ba.jpg" length="92164" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2024 18:15:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/971e2912ba.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>What a Philippine court ruling means for transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a dietary breakthrough </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/what-philippine-court-ruling-means-transgenic-golden-rice-once-hailed-dietary</link> <description>Plant engineered to counter a debilitating vitamin A deficiency in developing countries has faced fierce opposition</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> Golden Rice seemed to be on the cusp of fulfilling its promise. Decades ago, researchers created the genetically modified (GM) rice variety to combat vitamin A deficiency, a scourge of the developing world that can cause blindness and even lead to death. But for more than 20 years activists opposed to GM crops kept Golden Rice confined to laboratories and test plots. </p> <p> But in 2021, the government of the Philippines granted a permit allowing the commercial planting of Malusog Rice, a Golden Rice variety tailored for local conditions and tastes. Farmers began to grow limited amounts of the grain in 2022. Officials hoped to have the variety comprise 10% of the nation’s rice harvest within 8 years, enough to meet the needs of all vitamin A deficient households. </p> <p> On 17 April, however, a Philippine Court of Appeals revoked the permit, bringing that plan to a halt. Ruling on a lawsuit brought by Greenpeace and other groups, the court concluded that in the absence of a scientific consensus on the safety of Golden Rice it should not be commercially cultivated. The nation’s constitution, the judges found, required the government to follow the so-called precautionary principle of waiting to approve new crops and activities until scientists reach a consensus that they are safe for humans and the environment. </p> <p> The court also found that the government has not established mechanisms to monitor the safety of growing and consuming Golden Rice. So, the decision also blocks new field testing in greenhouses or open fields, crimping research until an approved monitoring scheme is in place. </p> <p> “The court decision is a catastrophe for Golden Rice in the Philippines and elsewhere,” says <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.320.5875.468?adobe_mc=MCMID%3D58000637841860946489208149054056839995%7CMCORGID%3D242B6472541199F70A4C98A6%2540AdobeOrg%7CTS%3D1712793600"> Ingo Potrykus, a plant biotechnologist who co-led the development of the amber colored rice </a> while at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. </p> <p> For those on the other side of the dispute, the decision “is a monumental win for Filipino farmers and Filipino people,” Greenpeace Southeast Asia campaigner Wilhelmina Pelegrina said in a statement. Greenpeace joined MASIPAG, a farmers’ association, and other organizations and individuals in challenging the planting permit. “GM crops have never been proven safe,” Pelegrina asserted. </p> <p> The current Golden Rice variety has two added genes, one from maize and another from a bacterium, that enable the plant to produce a compound that the human body converts into vitamin A after the rice is consumed. The International Rice Research Institute and the Philippines Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), which collaborated in developing Malusog Rice, say it helps fight vitamin A deficiency by complementing the use of supplements and eating leafy green vegetables, fish, and dairy products. In particular, Golden Rice is seen as helping poor families that cannot afford to get vitamin A from other foods. An estimated 15% of Filipino infants and children have vitamin A deficiency. </p> <p> The lawsuit, filed in 2022, hinges on a Philippine legal remedy called the Writ of Kalikasan. It protects the constitutional right to “a balanced and healthy ecology” and prioritizes that right over human activities that may have an environmental impact, according to the court decision. </p> <p> Antonio Contreras, a political scientist at the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB), believes the court ruling rests on “a misreading of the precautionary principle.” For those opposing GM crops, he says, “just the existence of a plausible risk (to the environment), even if it is not certain, can stop any measure” to address social problems. In his view, the precautionary principle calls for having compelling evidence that a solution to a problem is cost effective and not environmentally harmful—a standard he thinks Malusog Rice meets. </p> <p> But the court disagreed, finding unpersuasive the evidence of Golden Rice’s safety presented by government attorneys defending the permit. It ruled there was no scientific consensus “simply because both camps presented opposing evidence,” says Aldrich Fitz Dy, a Philippine consulting attorney who has handled similar cases but is not involved in the current dispute. The court should have weighed the validity of the competing claims, Dy says. </p> <p> The government is expected to file an appeal within days. It could ask the Court of Appeals to wholly or partially reconsider its decision. Dy, however, is not optimistic that the court will accept a motion to reconsider. </p> <p> The other option for the government is to appeal to the Supreme Court. This would give the court an opportunity to “provide more guidance on the standard of evidence that a party needs to present in order to show that a crop or an act is harmful or safe for the environment,” Dy says. If the government goes that route, he thinks the Supreme Court could overturn the decision. But the process could take at least 2 years, he says. </p> <p> In the meantime, PhilRice may have no choice but to comply with the current decision, as rulings on environmental cases are not normally stayed on appeal, Dy says. </p> <p> Greenpeace contends currently planted Malusog Rice will have to be destroyed, but Dy says there is nothing in the decision to support that claim. </p> <p> The decision could also affect PhilRice’s ongoing work to develop varieties of transgenic rice fortified with zinc and iron and even combine them with Golden Rice. And it blocks planting of a GM pest-resistant eggplant developed by UPLB. </p> <p> Advocates worry—and opponents boast—the decision will reverberate beyond the Philippines. “There is a strong grassroots movement against [GM organisms] in Asia and indeed [activists] are inspired by this win by Filipino farmers,” Pelegrina wrote in a text message to <cite> Science </cite> Insider. </p> <p> Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States have all approved Golden Rice for consumption although there is little if any cultivation of the crop. </p> <p> Aside from the Philippines, only Bangladesh is close to growing Golden Rice for consumption. But the request to start planting has been under review since 2017. “Commercial competition and probably corruption are involved in blocking a Golden Rice regulatory decision there,” says Adrian Dubock, executive secretary of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, which holds the rights to Golden Rice for humanitarian use of the grain. </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/what-philippine-court-ruling-means-transgenic-golden-rice-once-hailed-dietary</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/d6c86efe8b.jpg" length="48771" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2024 14:45:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/d6c86efe8b.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>Questionable firms tempt young doctors with ‘easy’ publications </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/questionable-firms-tempt-young-doctors-with-easy-publications</link> <description>Foreign trainees seeking U.S. medical residencies pay hefty sums to build research resumes</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> Last year, physician Rupak Desai co-authored <a href="https://www.ahajournals.org/action/doSearch?field1=AllField&text1=%22rupak+desai%22&field2=AllField&text2=&ConceptID=&ConceptID=&publication%5B%5D=circ&publication=&Ppub=&AfterMonth=1&AfterYear=2023&BeforeMonth=12&BeforeYear=2023"> more than three dozen conference abstracts </a> in <cite> Circulation </cite> , the American Heart Association’s (AHA’s) flagship journal. The works marked a modest fraction of <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=osLi_fUAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&authuser=1&sortby=pubdate"> his publications in 2023 </a> , which totaled 162. But Desai, scholarly productivity notwithstanding, is not employed by a hospital, university, nor any other type of scientific institution. </p> <p> Based in Atlanta, Desai runs a business that offers junior doctors from around the world a chance to beef up their CVs before applying for coveted residency or fellowship positions at hospitals or physician offices in the United States. For about $1000 and a commitment to work 10 to 15 hours remotely over a few weeks, last year’s participants in Desai’s Express Research Workshop could get a byline on three abstracts submitted to AHA’s biggest annual conference, the Scientific Sessions meeting, according to an <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240319100800/https:/docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjSDBg1n3OA8YUkBzIh9lHBbbPP6c8Td3IZ383Bc3S57j6aQ/viewform"> online ad </a> that was removed after <cite> Science </cite> contacted Desai for this story. </p> <p> “With our guidance, you could be published in the prestigious Cardiology journal [ <cite> Circulation </cite> ] before or during your next application season,” the ad promised. A “combo” deal for an additional $600 also offered abstracts slated for another conference, as well as “continued work” on “at least 2 full papers for PubMed indexation” over the following 6 months. (Although they’re not peer reviewed, published conference abstracts are cited in the same category as peer-reviewed papers on the standard residency application form.) </p> <p> The Express Research Workshop belongs to a growing cottage industry of businesses, consultants, and nonprofits dangling seemingly easy publications for the <a href="https://www.ecfmg.org/news/2023/03/17/match-shows-strong-gains-for-international-medical-graduates-imgs/"> more than 12,000 </a> international medical graduates who apply for U.S. residency positions every year. A joint investigation by Retraction Watch and <cite> Science </cite> identified 24 such organizations across the U.S. and abroad. The programs likely have spawned thousands of publications—most of them full-length, peer-reviewed papers. These include database studies, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses—all through work that can be done entirely online. </p> <p> Ads for specific projects posted to WhatsApp groups or on LinkedIn typically mention the type of study, its title, how many “seats” or “positions” are available, and the price to participate. One “surgery research opportunity” advertised two paid author slots on a paper that would be submitted “next week.” </p> <p> At one Arizona-based firm, clients who paid $275 could be part of a web-based cross-sectional study that could be completed in just <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240322104734/https:/www.usmlesarthi.com/rapid-affordable-research.html"> 2 to 3 weeks </a> and submitted for publication. In Texas, a $4500 online course spanning 6 to 12 months promised <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240315085703/https:/researchupdate.org/clinical-research-training-programs/"> four abstracts and four full-length papers </a> . And in California, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240329143952/https:/www.cibnp.com/"> a program </a> highlighted a recent graduate who landed a residency after adding a whopping 34 publications to his name, according to a post on the messaging platform WhatsApp. Of hundreds of publications reviewed by <cite> Science </cite> , none mentions how it came about, nor the companies involved. </p> <p> Although some of these groups may provide bona fide research training—through recorded lectures and Zoom sessions, for instance—all occupy at best an ethical gray area in scholarly publishing. Many of the programs, critics contend, are little more than dressed-up paper mills pumping out quick and dirty studies that degrade the medical literature. </p> <p> Selling a place in an investigation or study, even if it entails a bit of work and a chance to learn something, “that’s misconduct, in my view,” says Ana Marušić, a professor and research integrity adviser at the University of Split School of Medicine and a council member at the nonprofit Committee on Publication Ethics. “It’s the same as paper mills that sell authorship.” </p> <p> <span> THE PROGRAMS SPEAK </span> to a real need. Research output <a href="https://www.yousmle.com/how-many-publications-for-residency/"> is an increasingly important element </a> in medical residency applications, and even more so for international medical graduates (IMGs) without U.S. citizenship, who face especially long odds of “matching” into a residency program. </p> <p> For a competitive residency such as plastic surgery, for example, matched non-U.S. IMGs had an average of 54 abstracts, presentations, and papers in 2022. Their unmatched peers had just five, according to <a href="https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Charting-Outcomes-IMG-2022_Final.pdf"> a report from the National Resident Matching Program </a> , a private nonprofit group. For orthopedic surgery, the numbers were 98 and 25, respectively. After part of the United States Medical Licensing Examination <a href="https://www.usmle.org/usmle-step-1-transition-passfail-only-score-reporting"> switched </a> from a numeric score to pass/fail in 2022, the perceived importance of publications has grown even more. </p> <p> Yet, at many medical schools around the world, research plays little to no role in a student’s education. For new graduates, racking up publications to help a residency application is daunting, which makes companies offering quick training and guaranteed output an appealing proposition. </p> <p> “That’s why you see a rise in all of these groups,” says Siddhesh Zadey, a Ph.D. student at Columbia University who co-founded the India-based think tank <a href="https://www.asarforindia.org/"> the Association for Socially Applicable Research </a> . “Everyone is just trying to buy a publication.” </p> <p> Many groups advertising research experience specifically mention IMGs on their websites or social media profiles, and several are run by them. But many physicians who have taken part are unhappy customers. “They say they are going to offer you mentorship and they are going to teach you, but that is not their primary goal,” says Digbijay Kunwar, a young doctor in Nepal who participated in an online program offered by the Pakistan-based company <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240322103016/https:/pk.linkedin.com/company/lightsofcareersandresearch"> Lights of Careers & Research </a> . “Their product is just authorship.” </p> <p> Kunwar, who earns about $300 a month working at a government hospital and hopes to land a residency in the U.S., said he quit the workshop out of frustration with the lack of effective mentorship and training. Lights of Careers & Research, which promises “guaranteed publication” on its LinkedIn page, did not respond to phone calls or emails seeking comment. </p> <p> Others share Kunwar’s assessment. When a self-described Indian IMG with no research experience inquired about two U.S.-based companies in a 2022 post on Reddit, the responses included stark warnings from apparent previous clients: “I feel like I was being tricked,” one wrote, adding, “I won’t mention it on my CV for sure. … I am not sure if the whole thing is even legal.” </p> <p> In another Reddit post, a commenter said about one of the two firms: “[T]hey won’t share the data base with you and you don’t get to do the statistics part. You basically get to contribute to the introduction and pitch them your ideas.” </p> <p> Desai’s workshops appear more popular. “You’ll get a chance to contribute to every stage of research, from topic selection to submitting the paper and everything in between. And by the end of it, you’ll be confident to at least talk about research in your interviews efficiently,” one commenter <a href="https://archive.fo/4Np3Q"> wrote </a> on Reddit. But the comments also make it clear that authorship did not necessarily require work. </p> <p> Desai, who holds a medical degree from India and says in one ad he has “mentored over 300 students, trainees and physicians” since 2020, told <cite> Science </cite> in an email that his program and others like it serve an unmet need. “Many IMGs have expressed frustration on social media about the lack of available opportunities as beginners,” he says. </p> <p> Desai denies that medical residency seekers or others can buy authorship on papers coming out of his workshops; any author, he says, must contribute to the research: “[A]ll group members and submitters have been instructed to determine authorships solely based on contributions in brainstorming, data extraction for systematic reviews, abstract writing, or support for data visualization graphics/tables.” </p> <p> According to Desai, doing quality research in a matter of weeks is possible “only with significant support from mentors, who have worked on numerous projects with the same data sets, and importantly, with the help of an experienced team of researchers and residents.” </p> <p> Still, AHA, whose journal and meeting abstracts were advertised as publication opportunities to IMGs, expressed misgivings about Desai’s program when <cite> Science </cite> provided details on the ad and his workshop. Foreign doctors with limited resources, it said in a statement, “may unwittingly be deceived into participating in and paying for courses that may not provide the value the descriptions suggest.” </p> <p> <cite> Science </cite> contacted the Association of American Medical Colleges, which operates the electronic residency-application system and whose members accept IMGs into their residencies, and the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, a body that certifies IMGs as ready for residency and offers them guidance on training. Both declined to comment for this story. </p> <div> <div> <img alt="quotation mark" src="https://www.science.org/pb-assets/images/styleguide/quotation-mark-1672180580783.svg"/> <div> They say they are going to offer you mentorship and they are going to teach you, but that is not their primary goal. </div> <ul> <li> <strong> Digbijay Kunwar </strong> </li> <li> a young doctor in Nepal </li> </ul> </div> </div> <p> Some of the outfits offering research opportunities, including the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240408073354/https:/www.cureus.com/channels/researchupdate"> Research Update Organization </a> and the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240408073407/https:/www.cureus.com/channels/cibnp"> California Institute of Behavioral Neurosciences & Psychology </a> , have a mechanism to ease publication: their own “channel” at <cite> Cureus </cite> , a Springer Nature medical journal known for its fast publication turnaround. According to the journal’s website, this allows the groups to appoint “ <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240425085255/https:/www.cureus.com/channels"> hand-picked editors </a> [who] manage all content from submission to publication.” </p> <p> In a statement, Graham Parker-Finger, director of publishing at <cite> Cureus </cite> , said the journal assesses “all organizations that have a <cite> Cureus </cite> channel carefully before approval, considering their history and ethical standards.” He added that, although channel owners can appoint their own editors, <cite> Cureus </cite> still maintains editorial oversight of channel content. </p> <p> <span> SEVERAL RESEARCHERS </span> contacted by <cite> Science </cite> challenged the quality of the papers produced by these groups and expressed concern about their potential real-world consequences. A case in point is <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2035-8377/14/2/37"> a vaping study </a> organized by the Houston-based <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231103034641/https:/researchupdate.org/clinical-research-education/"> Research Update <u> Organization </u> </a> . The resulting paper, which appeared in 2022 in the open-access journal <cite> Neurology International </cite> by the publisher MDPI, concluded that electronic cigarette users had higher risk and earlier onset of stroke than tobacco smokers. The findings quickly <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10177441/E-cigarette-users-15-likely-suffer-stroke-middle-age-regular-smokers.html"> made headlines </a> and became a central part of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240318124219/https:/www.undo.org/exposed/big-tobacco-fantasyland"> a campaign by the California Department of Public Health </a> against vaping, with claims like “vaping is anti-aging because you’re more likely to die younger from a stroke” appearing <a href="https://musebycl.io/health/big-tobaccos-fantasyland-debunked-california-tobacco-prevention-program"> on national TV and billboards </a> . </p> <p> That’s how the research came to the attention of Gal Cohen and Floe Foxon, two scientists who work at contract research organizations and have ties to e-cigarette maker Juul Labs. The more they looked at the article, the more problems they saw. The work was based on data from an <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/index.htm"> annual survey on health and nutrition </a> by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but the reported number of survey respondents was inexplicably off by an order of magnitude—the survey is completed by about 5000 people a year, but the paper cited 266,058 respondents from 2015 to 2018. The authors also failed to report whether the difference in age of stroke onset between vapers and traditional smokers could simply be due to vapers being younger overall. And those were just a few of the obvious issues, according to Cohen and Foxon, who alerted both the authors and the journal to their concerns. </p> <p> Others agree the work is fatally flawed. “The paper seems like a joke,” said biostatistician and epidemiologist Miguel Hernán of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “No self-respecting journal should have published this.” The results have since appeared as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240328072303/https:/www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/str.54.suppl_1.WP185"> a conference meeting abstract </a> in the journal <cite> Stroke </cite> . </p> <p> The <cite> Neurology International </cite> article’s corresponding author, and the one noted as responsible for the statistical analysis, is Urvish Patel— <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240328141542/https:/researchupdate.org/team/urvish-patel/"> founder and director </a> of the Research Update Organization. On the paper, however, Patel lists his only affiliation as the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai has no records of an employee called Urvish Patel, a spokesperson for the institution told <cite> Science </cite> in an email. But the spokesperson did say “someone by the name of Urvish Patel” had “received an MPH [Master of Public Health] degree from the school in 2015.” </p> <p> Although several of Patel’s 13 co-authors on the vaping paper listed well-known U.S. universities as their affiliations, none was a faculty member at those institutions. Nearly all were IMGs and at least some attended Patel’s programs, according to interviews and <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/Research+Update+Organization/@29.8461193,-95.4120534,9z/data=!4m8!3m7!1s0x89c257304451da59:0x3b78b0394ff300d9!8m2!3d29.7099063!4d-95.396515!9m1!1b1!16s%2Fg%2F11lgzll0fw?entry=ttu"> Google reviews </a> . </p> <p> “You have to admire the business model,” said epidemiologist John Britton, who recently retired from the University of Nottingham and is a proponent of using vaping to help smokers quit. “Get people to pay for ‘training,’ give them a Mickey Mouse project to comment on, gift them authorship, and publish the paper in a journal that doesn’t care. Nice one.” </p> <p> Emails seeking comment from MDPI and the editor-in-chief of <cite> Neurology International </cite> , on whose <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240405190654/https:/www.mdpi.com/journal/neurolint/topical_advisory_panel"> advisory panel </a> Patel sits, went unanswered. But in an interview, Patel rejected the criticism and said his paper had “clearly described very well [the] methodology, data, every single thing.” All the same, Patel has published other studies using the same CDC survey data in ways that appear incorrect or misleading, several researchers tell <cite> Science </cite> . </p> <p> Patel acknowledged that several of his co-authors were IMGs who had paid his organization for training—but “for publication, no.” He continues to use the Mount Sinai affiliation in his publications, as well as in his <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240408075931/https:/scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=Zo3D8N8AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate"> Google Scholar </a> , <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240319071706/https:/orcid.org/0000-0002-6702-298X"> Orcid </a> <u> , </u> and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240408074051/https:/www.cureus.com/users/103838-urvish-k-patel"> <cite> Cureus </cite> profiles </a> , explaining that “because you’re a graduate and alumni [sic] from Mount Sinai, it’s [a] privilege for them if you are publishing the paper.” </p> <p> Zadey and Reese Richardson, a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University whose team has also investigated the programs advertising research opportunities, flagged several other questionable papers, including a systematic review and meta-analysis from the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240322220105/https:/grrsp.com/about-us"> Global Remote Research Scholars Program </a> exploring the effect of breathing exercises on blood pressure and heart rate. Zadey points out <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277248752300065X"> the study </a> , published in the <cite> International Journal of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Risk and Prevention </cite> , an Elsevier title, failed to describe the design of each included study, a standard practice for systematic reviews. And this, he says, was just one of a long list of “bizarre” shortcomings that even included not comparing the intervention with the control condition. </p> <p> Rahul Kashyap, the paper’s corresponding author and CEO of the Global Remote Research Scholars Program, said his team avoided a direct comparison for several reasons, including challenges related to assessing variability and combining data across different types of studies. “Variability (variation) between the intervention and control groups was not our main research question,” he wrote in an email to <cite> Science </cite> . </p> <p> Josée Dupuis, chair of the department of epidemiology, biostatistics, and occupational health at McGill University, also sees serious problems with the statistical methods used by Kashyap and colleagues. In her view, the many subpar publications coming out of these programs are a sign of a “failing” peer-review system. “There’s just not enough high-quality reviewers to weed out these poor-quality papers,” she says. Another factor, Dupuis suggests, is misguided priorities: “Maybe the emphasis on publications for these residency programs, maybe that’s what needs to be looked at.” </p> <p> <span> Jigisha </span> Patel, a physician and independent research-integrity specialist in the United Kingdom, agrees. “The current research culture, which rewards publication quantity over quality, sets up a demand for publications that is so easy to exploit,” she says. </p> <div> <span> This story was produced in collaboration with <a href="https://retractionwatch.com/"> Retraction Watch </a> and supported by the <a href="https://www.science.org/content/page/science-fund-investigative-reporting"> <cite> Science </cite> Fund for Investigative Reporting </a> . </span> </div> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/questionable-firms-tempt-young-doctors-with-easy-publications</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/3be3c17a74.jpg" length="37008" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2024 12:25:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/3be3c17a74.jpg" height="500" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>In medieval England, leprosy bounced between humans and squirrels </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/medieval-england-leprosy-bounced-between-humans-and-squirrels</link> <description>First reconstruction of leprotic bacterial genome from ancient animal remains sheds new light on its ecology</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div data-interstitial="3"> <p> Leprosy, a disease that can cause nerve damage, lesions, and the loss of smell and eyesight, has afflicted people for millennia—and we’re not alone. It’s also plagued squirrels since at least the Middle Ages, according to a new study. After analyzing squirrel bones dating to medieval England, researchers found that the furry critters carried a strain of a leprosy-causing bacterium strikingly similar to the one many Brits harbored centuries ago. The finding suggests the disease once bounced back and forth between humans and squirrels, which could help scientists understand how leprosy persists today. </p> <p> “It’s one of the first times we can actually identify pathogens in ancient animal remains to a conclusive level,” says Maria Spyrou, a genomicist at the University of Tübingen who was not involved in the study, published today in <em> Current Biology </em> . Such archaeological evidence could help scientists understand “why diseases emerge in some populations, why they decline, and perhaps ways to eradicate them,” she adds. </p> <p> Leprosy, which can be caused by two bacterial species— <em> Mycobacterium leprae </em> and <em> M. lepromatosis </em> —is on the decline but still afflicts more than 200,000 people each year, mostly in Asia, Africa, and South America. It is spread mostly through prolonged contact with an infected person. The disease was long believed to occur only in humans, but since the 1970s, researchers have discovered <em> M. leprae </em> in nine-banded armadillos in North and South America—which <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/yes-you-can-get-leprosy-armadillo"> occasionally pass it on to people </a> —and in a few nonhuman primate species. </p> <p> In 2016, scientists also discovered that red squirrels ( <em> Sciurus vulgaris </em> ) in England <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aah3783?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed"> carry a strain of <em> M. leprae </em> </a> that’s closely related to the one that circulated among medieval English humans. But how the disease might have jumped between the two species through history remained uncertain. “It’s in humans, and then it’s in squirrels much later on, but we don’t know anything about what’s happening in between,” says Sarah Inskip, an osteoarchaeologist at the University of Leicester and an author of the new study. </p> <p> Medieval squirrels, the team reasoned, might have answers. Middle Ages England was squirrel crazy: People kept the arboreal rodents as pets and used their furs to line and trim clothing. Inskip and her colleagues zeroed in on the medieval city of Winchester, which had not only skinners, tailors, and furriers, but also a hospital for leprosy patients. “It was a really smart way of [looking for] more cases,” Spyrou says. </p> <p> After sorting through remains previous archaeologists had gathered from a pit in Winchester, the team identified 12 red squirrel bones from between the 10th and 13th centuries that appeared swollen, rough, or damaged from infection or inflammation, the markers of leprosy. By crushing these bones and plucking fragments of DNA from the resulting powder, they managed to isolate and reconstruct a genome of an <em> M. leprae </em> strain—the first ever recovered from archaeological remains of a nonhuman animal. </p> <p> “I was amazed we actually got it,” Inskip says. Archaeology tends to prioritize human remains, so the tiny bones the team had to work with were not all well-preserved or well-labeled—nor was isolating pathogen DNA within them an easy task. “It was a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack.” </p> <figure> <div> <img alt="lady with a squirrel" src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.za3c4ys/files/_20240503_on_squirrels_leprosy_secondary.jpg"/> </div> <figcaption> <span> In medieval England, people sometimes kept squirrels as pets. <span> Bridgeman Images </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> To the team’s surprise, the medieval squirrel strain <a href="https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)00446-9"> bore an even closer relation to medieval human strains gathered </a> from the site of the leprosy hospital than to those taken from modern red squirrels. This indicates leprosy circulated between squirrels and humans in England during the Middle Ages, possibly “ping-ponging” between the two, Inskip says—though how frequently remains uncertain. It’s also unclear where and how the squirrels first picked up the disease. </p> <p> The study shows why it’s important to consider the history and ecology of diseases, not just how they infect people today, says Elizabeth Uhl, a veterinary pathologist at the University of Georgia who was not part of the study. “If you want the whole story, you have to get the pieces from all the different disciplines,” she says. </p> <p> Although there’s no evidence of red squirrels infecting people in modern times, defining the contexts in which leprosy bounced between species in the past, Uhl explains, can help us anticipate future risks—both with squirrels and other nonhuman carriers. Targeting only human infections might miss our relationships with these animals, she says, allowing the disease to persist. </p> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/medieval-england-leprosy-bounced-between-humans-and-squirrels</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/2bf91969cc.jpg" length="42225" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2024 12:00:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/2bf91969cc.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> <item> <title>News at a glance: Infrared telescope debuts, GM rice stumbles, and maternal mortality drops </title> <link>https://www.science.org/content/article/news-glance-infrared-telescope-debuts-gm-rice-stumbles-maternal-mortality-drops</link> <description>The latest in science and policy</description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<article> <div> </div> <div data-interstitial=""> <div> <span> ASTRONOMY </span> <h2> <span> Highest scope opens its infrared eyes </span> </h2> <p> After 26 years of planning and construction, the world’s highest telescope began operating in Chile this week, offering a rare opportunity to make ground-based observations far into the infrared part of the spectrum. The University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory’s (TAO’s) 6.5-meter telescope is not especially large but benefits from its lofty position 5560 meters high on Cerro Chajnantor, a peak in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Moisture in the atmosphere blocks much of the infrared spectrum, and telescopes equipped to record it—such as NASA’s JWST—are often launched into space. But at TAO, the air is bone dry, with little atmosphere to peer through. That will allow astronomers to conduct long, detailed observations of phenomena such as planets coalescing around newborn stars and black holes forming at the center of galaxies. The heavily subscribed JWST is not accommodating such lengthy studies. </p> </div> <div> <span> RESEARCH INTEGRITY </span> <h2> <span> No charges against image sleuth </span> </h2> <p> A prosecutor in France has declined to pursue criminal allegations of threats and blackmail brought against scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik by microbiologist Didier Raoult after Bik publicly critiqued about 60 of his papers. The prosecutor said in a letter to Bik that a probe had found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing. Raoult, whose work at the Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection is itself under criminal investigation in France for suspected violations of biomedical ethics laws, filed his complaint against Bik in 2021. He asserted that he was harassed by the avalanche of automatic emails he received when Bik and others commented on his articles on PubPeer, an online forum for feedback on scientific papers. Bik, who lives in California, says she is relieved at the outcome, and had not been intimidated by the legal threat: “It didn’t silence me.” </p> </div> <div> <span> BIOTECHNOLOGY </span> <h2> <span> Philippine court blocks GM rice </span> </h2> <p> In a setback for genetically modified (GM) crops, a Philippine court of appeals has revoked a permit allowing farmers to grow rice for consumption that had been genetically modified to produce vitamin A. The fortified Golden Rice targets vitamin A deficiency, which is common in developing countries and can cause blindness and impair disease resistance. In 2021, the Philippines became the first country to allow commercial cultivation of the GM crop, capping a decadeslong quest by its developers. But responding to a petition brought by a farmers’ group, Greenpeace Philippines, and others, the court found no consensus on its safety for human health and the environment. Its decision last month also blocks the commercialization of GM eggplant that resists insects. The government can ask the court to reconsider—although a reversal is considered unlikely—and can also appeal to the nation’s Supreme Court. </p> </div> <div> <div> <img alt="quotation mark" src="https://www.science.org/pb-assets/images/styleguide/quotation-mark-1672180580783.svg"/> <div> We are witnessing the plunder of Ukraine’s paleontological heritage. </div> <ul> <li> <strong> Legal scholar Paul Stewens, </strong> </li> <li> in <a href="https://undark.org/2024/04/25/opinion-academic-publishers-ukrainian-fossils-theft/"> <cite> Undark Magazine </cite> </a> , on research published by Russian scientists in Western journals about fossils they excavated from Taurida Cave in Crimea after Russia annexed it. </li> </ul> </div> </div> <div> <span> PUBLIC HEALTH </span> <h2> <span> Maternal mortality rate dives </span> </h2> <p> After reaching a historic high in 2021, the U.S. maternal mortality rate fell by 32% the following year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said this week. The rate, defined as the number of pregnancy-related deaths during gestation or in the 6 weeks after birth, was 22.3 for every 100,000 live births in 2022, down from 32.9 in 2021. Decreases occurred across all age, ethnic, and racial groups, although the drop for Asian women was not statistically significant. For Black women, who suffer the highest rates, it dropped from 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021 to 49.5 in 2022. Specialists say the declines are almost certainly related to a drop in COVID-19–related deaths in 2022; the disease puts pregnant people at greater risk for death. The overall rate for 2022 was still above that of 2019 and more than double the level 2 decades ago. Some researchers recently attributed that rise largely to a CDC-led addition of a “pregnancy checkbox” on death certificates that they say artificially inflates the number of deaths recorded as related to pregnancy. The agency has defended the change as a remedy for previous undercounting and said the switch cannot explain all the increase. </p> </div> <div> <span> INFECTIOUS DISEASES </span> <h2> <span> Antibiotics overused in pandemic </span> </h2> <p> A whopping 75% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 received antibiotics even though only 8% had bacterial coinfections that warrant their use, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO). Doctors often give antibiotics to err on the side of caution, but that’s not recommended unless there’s evidence of a bacterial infection; overuse of the drugs can exacerbate the development of antibiotic resistance. The findings, presented on 27 April at a meeting in Spain, come from WHO’s Global Clinical Platform for COVID-19, which contains data about 450,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in 65 countries between January 2020 and March 2023. WHO says the numbers provide a new reminder of the need for more rational use of antibiotics, which will be discussed at a September meeting convened by the United Nations. </p> </div> <div> <span> NATURAL HISTORY </span> <h2> <span> Australia museum staff get a reprieve </span> </h2> <figure> <div> <img alt="People rally outside of South Australian Museum" src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.zif3k23/files/_20240503_nib_australia_museum.jpg"/> </div> <figcaption> <span> Supporters of the South Australian Museum rally outside Adelaide’s Parliament House against cuts. <span> JENNY SCOTT </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> After vociferous protests from scientists, Indigenous leaders, and the public, officials have paused a controversial plan to shrink research programs at one of Australia’s major natural history museums. In February, the 168-year-old South Australian Museum announced it would eliminate 12 of 22 science and curatorial positions to address budget woes and “reimagine” the institution’s work. Researchers and others called on the state government of South Australia, a major museum funder, to halt and review the scaleback. They argued the cuts would cripple studies of museum collections holding some 5 million items, including a renowned trove of Precambrian fossils. On 26 April, Peter Malinauskas, South Australia’s premier, announced that a three-member panel, including the state government’s chief scientist, would review the plan and issue recommendations later this year. </p> </div> <div> <span> MATERIALS SCIENCE </span> <h2> <span> Bacteria could tame plastic waste </span> </h2> <p> Researchers have developed a manufacturing method that <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47132-8"> seeds newly made plastic with bacteria that can digest and degrade the product </a> after it is used and landfilled, potentially reducing the hundreds of millions of tons of waste plastic that foul Earth’s environment annually. A team at the University of California San Diego exposed batches of spores from a strain of <em> Bacillus subtilis </em> bacterium to rounds of successively higher temperatures. The survivors evolved to withstand temperatures up to 135°C, the level at which many plastic materials are shaped during manufacturing. The scientists mixed dormant spores with pellets of a thermoplastic polyurethane—which is used to make products as varied as shoes and automotive parts—then melted the pellets to create strips and placed them in soil, as would be found in a landfill. The spores awakened and degraded 90% of the plastic within 5 months, the researchers report this week in <cite> Nature Communications </cite> . Although they haven’t yet studied what chemicals and microplastic might get left behind, they note that any lingering spores are likely harmless, as <em> B. subtilis </em> is commonly used in probiotics and considered safe to humans, animals, and plants. </p> </div> <div> <span> DRUG DEVELOPMENT </span> <h2> <span> Rare report of clinical trial cost </span> </h2> <p> A large clinical trial that ushered in a new global regimen for treating drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) cost only €34 million to conduct, an order of magnitude less than published estimates of other trials’ costs based on pharmaceutical industry data, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF). The group last week made the rare disclosure of an individual clinical trial’s price tag at a World Health Organization conference on pharmaceutical pricing. Previous studies have reported average overall trial costs across groups of trials and used proprietary industry data that cannot be scrutinized. MSF says its disclosure, to be published in greater detail in a journal, should spur trial sponsors to routinely reveal their costs, which are often cited to justify high drug prices. The group also launched an online toolkit for sponsors to calculate these costs. MSF’s clinical trial of the anti-TB drug bedaquiline in combination with other drugs, described in a 2022 paper, was stopped early because its efficacy and safety strikingly surpassed standard-of-care treatment. </p> </div> <div> <span> CONSERVATION </span> <h2> <span> Indigenous-led sanctuary honored </span> </h2> <p> A marine sanctuary off British Columbia established and maintained by an Indigenous group has won recognition for its science-based management. The nonprofit Marine Conservation Institute last month named Gitdisdzu Lugyeks, a 33-square-kilometer preserve created in 2022 by the Kitasoo Xai’xais First Nation, as one of its Blue Parks, a network now comprising 30 marine sanctuaries in 23 countries; the British Columbia reserve is the only Indigenous-led one. Also known as Kitasu Bay, it contains a herring spawning ground, whales, seabirds, and other wildlife. The Blue Parks network promotes biodiversity and sustainable management in marine protected areas, and Kitasoo Xai’xais leaders have vowed to pursue those aims using traditional knowledge and the latest marine science. They utilized their tribal authority to declare and manage the sanctuary after failing to secure the designation from Canada’s government. </p> </div> <div> <span> BIOMEDICINE </span> <h2> <span> FDA to regulate lab tests </span> </h2> <p> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced this week it will implement a controversial plan it proposed last year to tighten regulation of a large class of lab tests. Under the newly finalized rule, tests that are designed and used for patient care within a single lab, such as some prenatal screening tests and gene sequencing of tumors, will be subject to FDA’s scrutiny. In practice, such tests are often marketed nationwide, and regulators say many aren’t well validated and can put patients at risk. Under the new rule, to be phased in over the next 4 years, <a href="https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2024-08935.pdf"> FDA will regulate the tests as medical devices, allowing stricter oversight of their safety and efficacy </a> . Last year, some researchers welcomed the initial proposal, but others worried it may limit public access to needed tests. Based on the more than 6000 comments FDA received, it opted to exempt some kinds of tests, including some that a health care system limits to its own patients. In general, the law will apply to new tests; those already available will be grandfathered under the less stringent previous guidance. </p> </div> <div> <span> IMMUNOLOGY </span> <h2> <span> Antibody for childhood malaria </span> </h2> <p> A single dose of an <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2312775"> experimental antibody drug protects children from malaria for up to 6 months </a> , a study has found. The therapy, an injectable monoclonal antibody called L9LS, offers a possible alternative to antimalarials used in areas where malaria is endemic; those drugs have to be taken for several days each month to be protective. Monoclonal antibodies can stop pathogens invading cells by binding to proteins on their surface. The study, reported last week in <cite> The New England Journal of Medicine </cite> , tracked more than 200 children in Mali who received a high or low dose of L9LS or a placebo. The team calculated that the high dose of L9LS was 70% efficacious at preventing infection and 77% efficacious at stopping disease. The low dose was about 65% efficacious in both cases. The price of a low dose, about $8, is competitive with the annual cost of treating a child with monthly antimalarials. The children studied were 6- to 10-year-olds, and the researchers are now investigating the drug in younger children. Malaria caused an estimated 608,000 deaths in 2022, about three-quarters of them among African children under 5 years old. </p> </div> <div> <span> PHYSIOLOGY </span> <h2> <span> All dog noses are created equal </span> </h2> <figure> <div> <img alt="Face of a black lab with focus on the nose" src="https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.zif3k23/files/_20240425_on_dog_noses_lede.jpg"/> </div> <figcaption> <span> <span> JUSTIN PAGET/GETTY IMAGES </span> </span> </figcaption> </figure> <p> Sherlock Holmes could have used a pug, not his favored bloodhound, to sniff out clues and gotten the same results, a study suggests. Despite perceptions that some domestic dog breeds, including German shepherds and Labrador retrievers, detect scents better than others, new research indicates there's no genetic or physiological explanation. Instead, some breeds seem to sniff better because of generations of breeding for trainability and listening skills. In a preprint study posted last month on bioRxiv, researchers reported using CT scans of skulls of 45 dog breeds to measure a bony structure, the cribriform plate, that is perforated by olfactory nerves. They also looked for differences in the number of copies of genes associated with detecting scent. No breed stood out, and all were bested on the same tests by wolves and coyotes-perhaps, the study's authors say, because domestication slackened the evolutionary pressure for a sharp olfactory sense to find food. </p> </div> </div></article>]]></content:encoded> <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.science.org/content/article/news-glance-infrared-telescope-debuts-gm-rice-stumbles-maternal-mortality-drops</guid> <enclosure url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/6fea49e96b.jpg" length="44322" type="image/jpg"/> <pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2024 09:01:00 -0400</pubDate> <media:thumbnail url="https://feeds.science.org/rss/images/science-news/6fea49e96b.jpg" height="529" width="800"/> </item> </channel></rss> If you would like to create a banner that links to this page (i.e. this validation result), do the following:
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