[News Focus] Welcome to Beringia
Archaeologists once considered Beringia, a now partly submerged landmass that once stretched from Siberia to northern Canada, as chiefly a highway between continents. Now, a flurry of studies suggests that this lost world could have been an ice age haven, dotted with game and wildflowers, for both animals and humans. According to one model, the ancestors of today's Native Americans may have stayed in Beringia for thousands of years before coming to the Americas.
Author: Heather Pringle (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 28, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Heather Pringle Source Type: research
[News & Analysis] Atmospheric Evolution: New Look at Ancient Mineral Could Scrap a Test for Early Oxygen
Sniffing out how much, if any, oxygen Earth's atmosphere contained eons ago depends on understanding how, when, and where minerals that "gauge" the amount of oxygen available at the time actually formed. A new study of 2.5-billion-year-old Australian rocks suggests that the oxygen-rich mineral hematite in them formed hundreds of millions of years later than had been thought. The study will likely send researchers back to the lab to sharpen their own ancient atmosphere analyses.
Author: Richard A. Kerr (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 28, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Richard A. Kerr Tags: Atmospheric Evolution Source Type: research
[News & Analysis] Europe: E.U. Privacy Protection Bill Would Hamper Research, Scientists Warn
Biomedical researchers in Europe are worried about a new privacy protection bill under discussion in the European Parliament. Last year, a parliamentary committee added provisions to the bill to make it more difficult to use patients' data without their consent. That would render some important studies impractical or impossible, scientists say. Research organizations are lobbying national governments and the European Parliament, which is set to vote on the bill in March, to change the text.
Author: Tania Rabesandratana (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 28, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Tania Rabesandratana Tags: Europe Source Type: research
[News & Analysis] Social Science: Twitter Offers Entire Data Pool, but Some Wary of Diving In
With the announcement of its new Data Grants program, Twitter is inviting academic researchers to propose experiments that take advantage of the full "firehose" of its 500 million daily tweets. But some researchers worry that the terms of the deal give Twitter ownership of their ideas.
Author: John Bohannon (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 28, 2014 Category: Science Authors: John Bohannon Tags: Social Science Source Type: research
[News & Analysis] Energy: New Review Slams Fusion Project's Management
ITER, the international fusion reactor project in France, is reeling from an assessment that found serious problems with the project's leadership, management, and governance. The report is so damning, Science has learned, that after a 13 February special session that reviewed and accepted the report's conclusions and recommendations, the ITER Council—the project's governing body—restricted its readership to a small number of senior managers and council members. ITER leaders fear that the damning assessment, combined with expected delays, could cause backers to pull their funding.
Author: Daniel Clery (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 28, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Daniel Clery Tags: Energy Source Type: research
[News & Analysis] Science and Politics: Science Misused to Justify Ugandan Antigay Law
When Ugandan researchers were asked to advise President Yoweri Museveni on the science of sexual orientation so he could decide whether to sign an antigay law, they tried to explain the science in good faith. But they are now crying foul, claiming that their conclusions were distorted by both the president and his ruling party, and that Museveni would have signed the law no matter what they said.
Author: Michael Balter (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 28, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Michael Balter Tags: Science and Politics Source Type: research
[News of the Week] Random Sample
The new Beautiful Science exhibit at the British Library in London highlights scientific data visualization through the centuries. (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 28, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Stewart Wills (mailto:swills at aaas.org) Source Type: research
[News of the Week] Newsmakers
Physicist and U.S. Representative Rush Holt (D–NJ), who announced last week he won't run for reelection, describes today's climate for science-based politics. And primatologist Alison Jolly, known for her work on the evolution of primate intelligence, has died at age 76. (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 28, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Stewart Wills (mailto:swills at aaas.org) Source Type: research
[News of the Week] Around the World
In science news around the world, China cracks down on research graft in Guangdong province, Europe announces a new search for habitable planets beyond our solar system, and more. (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 28, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Stewart Wills (mailto:swills at aaas.org) Source Type: research
[News of the Week] This Week's Section
Follow the links below for a roundup of the week's top stories in science, or download a PDF of the entire section.
Around the WorldFindingsNewsmakersRandom Samples (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 27, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Stewart Wills (mailto:swills at aaas.org) Source Type: research
[News Focus] Eavesdropping on Ecosystems
Advances in cheap, tough automated recorders and powerful sound-analysis software are inspiring scientists to launch increasingly ambitious efforts that use sound to document and analyze ecosystems. A growing community of self-described soundscape ecologists are capturing thousands of hours of sound—from birdsong and insect choruses to rushing water, thunderclaps, and even the drone of cars and airplanes. Converting complex soundscapes into relatively simple numerical indices of biodiversity is proving difficult, and researchers are struggling to turn huge collections of digital recordings into something they can use. Bu...
Source: Science: This Week - February 21, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Kelly Servick Source Type: research
[News & Analysis] Astronomy: Rival Detectors Prepare to Take Snapshots of Distant Worlds
In the coming months on two mountaintops in Chile, two new state-of-the-art instruments—the North American Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) and the European SPHERE—will start scanning the skies for planets around other stars. The vast majority of the roughly 1000 exoplanets identified so far have been found using indirect methods because starlight swamps their faint optical signals. GPI and SPHERE, however, will see planets directly. Fixed to two of the world's biggest telescopes, they push optical technology to the limit. They are likely to be the prime instruments for exoplanet imaging until the next generation of 30- to 4...
Source: Science: This Week - February 21, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Daniel Clery Tags: Astronomy Source Type: research
[News & Analysis] Climate Change: Atlantic Current Can Shut Down for Centuries, Disrupting Climate
The last time the planet had a breather between ice ages, the supposedly reliable flow of deep water southward down the Atlantic slowed or even stopped, only to recover centuries later. That's according to new isotopic analyses of tiny seafloor fossils. If the Atlantic were to respond in the same way to global warming, it could alter climate near and far and dramatically raise sea level along the North American coast.
Author: Richard A. Kerr (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 21, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Richard A. Kerr Tags: Climate Change Source Type: research
[News & Analysis] U.S. Science Policy: Antarctic Scientists Continue to Reel From Shutdown
U.S. scientists working in Antarctica continue to feel the negative effects of last fall's government shutdown. The shutdown created a logistical backlog that curtailed this season's activities, jeopardizes many projects scheduled for next season, and raises the bar for new applicants.
Author: Jeffrey Mervis (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 21, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Mervis Tags: U.S. Science Policy Source Type: research
[News & Analysis] Genomics: DNA Sequencers Still Waiting for the Nanopore Revolution
Two years ago, Oxford Nanopore Technologies demonstrated a revolutionary new sequencing technology at a meeting for genomicists, but it's taken until now for it to show more data and to begin to share its new cheap, hand-held device with researchers. Meanwhile, Illumina, by far the biggest maker of sequencing machines, is about to introduce a 10-machine system that can produce 18,000 human genomes per year for less than $1000 a piece. But the machines cost $1 million apiece. Both promise to change the face of sequencing.
Author: Elizabeth Pennisi (Source: Science: This Week)
Source: Science: This Week - February 21, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Elizabeth Pennisi Tags: Genomics Source Type: research
