• Courts & scienceCourtrooms Seldom Overrule Bad Science

    In television crime dramas, savvy lawyers are able to overcome improbable odds to win their cases by presenting seemingly iron-clad scientific evidence. In real-world courtrooms, however, the quality of scientific testimony can vary wildly, making it difficult for judges and juries to distinguish between solid research and so-called junk science.

  • AliensCould Invisible Aliens Really Exist among Us? An Astrobiologist Explains

    By Samantha Rolfe

    Life is pretty easy to recognize. It moves, it grows, it eats, it excretes, it reproduces. Simple. In biology, researchers often use the acronym MRSGREN (Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, and Nutrition) to describe it. It stands for movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition. But Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut and a chemist at Imperial College London, recently said that alien lifeforms that are impossible to spot may be living among us. How could that be possible?

  • Argument: China syndromeThe Chinese Threat to U.S. Research Institutions Is Real

    The Chinese government is pursuing a comprehensive, well-organized, and well-funded strategy to exploit the open and collaborative research environment in the United States to advance their economic and military expansion at our expense. Josh Rogin writes that for too long, U.S. research institutions have been asleep to Beijing’s efforts.

  • Stealing U.S. Science R&DU.S.-Funded Research, Scientists Help China’s Drive to Become World S&T Leader

    The U.S. government has so far failed to stop China from stealing intellectual property from American universities. Moreover, the Trump administration lacks a comprehensive strategy for dealing with the threat. These are the conclusions of a new report issued on Monday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The report says problem is especially urgent because billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded research have “contributed to China’s global rise over the last twenty years” and to its goal of becoming a world leader in science and technology by 2050.

  • Stealing U.S. Science R&DU.S. Investigating Universities over Russian, Chinese, Saudi Donations

    U.S. officials have asked MIT to turn over documents regarding the university’s contacts with foreign governments and donations from foreign sources, including those coming from Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. The University of Maryland received a similar demand from the Education Department. MIT has been under scrutiny for a while, after accepting $300 million from Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch and a close ally of Vladimir Putin. Veklesberg is close to several of Donald Trump’s family members and members of the Trump organization. He was involved in the Moscow Trump Tower project. In 2018 MIT removed Veklesberg from its board — to which he was elected in 2013 — after the U.S. Treasury Department listed him and his business group among the Russian officials, “oligarchs,” and companies to be penalized for advancing Moscow’s “malign activities.”

  • Perspective: UFOsMysterious Case of the Vanishing UFOs

    All over the rest of the world UFOs are in sharp decline, and may soon disappear altogether. People are simply not spotting unidentified spacecraft like they used to. Alien abductions are at an all-time low. UFO-spotting organizations are closing down. Since 2014 alien sightings have halved. The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, and dropping. “Where have all the UFOs gone?” Ben Macintyre asks in The Times, noting that “The recent drastic worldwide decline of unexplained phenomena is one of the odder unexplained phenomena of modern times.”

  • PerspectiveFor Scientific Integrity in Government, Fix Political Appointments Process

    The list of scandals featuring senior U.S. officials who subsumed scientific integrity to their political or personal interests numbers 60 entries in a new report from a bipartisan task force that traced practices under the past three presidents. The examples range from downplaying the connections between climate change and carbon emissions under George W. Bush to understating the risks of fracking on drinking water under Barack Obama, and on to retaliation against economists, biologists and climate scientists under Donald Trump. While the vast majority of the incidents listed occurred under the Trump administration, the task force warns that the pattern represents a kind of continuum: that abuses of the past weakened the guardrails of democracy to allow what’s happening today, and that the trend could escalate in future administrations unless Congress takes steps to strengthen safeguards. And at the root of each instance are the individuals who committed the abuses, whether the president or his political appointees.

  • Water securityNew $100M Innovation Hub for a Secure Water Future

    The National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), which is led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has been awarded a five-year, $100-million Energy-Water Desalination Hub by DOE (pending appropriations) to address water security issues in the United States.

  • Perspective: ExtinctionHumans “Extinct by 2100” as Intelligent Life Annihilates Itself Says Oxford Prof

    There is almost a one-in-five chance that humans will be wiped out before this century is over, according to an Oxford University department. The overall probability — or “existential risk” — of human extinction by 2100 is worryingly high, at 19 percent, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute has calculated. Nick Bostrom, director of the Institute, notes that we should worry about the fact that aliens have not yet visited planet Earth: With billions of stars in our galaxy, it is proposed that statistically there is a very high chance of an alien race existing which has mastered space travel. But we have never found any evidence for interstellar tourists. This intriguing contradiction is known as the Fermi Paradox. Bostrom says that the fact that we have so far failed to discover another intelligent existence in space may mean that other intelligent races on other planets, if they had ever existed, may have doomed themselves to extinction by their own advanced technologies.

  • Perspective: Tech raceThe Quantum Revolution Is Coming, and Chinese Scientists Are at the Forefront

    Quantum technology — an emerging field that could transform information processing and confer big economic and national-security advantages to countries that dominate it. To the dismay of some scientists and officials in the United States, China’s formidable investment is helping it catch up with Western research in the field and, in a few areas, pull ahead. Beijing is pouring billions into research and development and is offering Chinese scientists big perks to return home from Western labs. Last year, China had nearly twice as many patent filings as the United States for quantum technology overall, a category that includes communications and cryptology devices. China’s drive has sparked calls for more R&D funding in the United States.

  • Perspective: BiotdefenseHow Does USAMRIID Shut Down Impact Nation’s Bioterrorism Laboratory Response Network?

    The Laboratory Response Network (LRN) is a collaborative federal effort run by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in cooperation with other federal agency and public health partners. The U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) Special Pathogens Laboratory at Fort Detrick is one of only three National Laboratories at the top of the protective umbrella of the LRN structure, along with those operated by the CDC and the Naval Medical Research Center (NMRC), responsible for specialized characterization of organisms, bioforensics, select agent activity, and handling highly infectious biological agents. It begs the question then, what happens when an important component of the nation’s biopreparedness infrastructure fails to meet CDC biosafety requirements and has its Federal Select Agent certification pulled?

  • Perspective: Science & politics Upholding Scientific Integrity at Federal Agencies

    Republicans and Democrats on a House subcommittee on Thursday agreed that science-related policy decisions should be based on facts, but differed on how to protect the federal scientists who gather and analyze those facts from undue influence. 

  • WMD detectionEpigenetic Tool for Detecting Exposure to WMD

    With a $38.8 million award from DARPA, researchers are working on developing a field-deployable, point-of-care device that will determine in 30 minutes or less whether a person has been exposed to weapons of mass destruction or their precursors. The device will be capable of detecting the health effects of a number of substances associated with weapons of mass destruction, including biological agents, radiation, chemicals and explosives. The detection devices will scan potential exposure victims for epigenetic changes, that is, chemical modifications that affect genes, altering their expression while leaving the genetic code intact.

  • Sonic weapons40 U.S. Diplomats in Cuba Have Suffered Brain Damage: Medical Report

    Brain imaging of 40 U.S. government personnel who served at the U.S. embassy in Havana in 2016, and who experienced a host of neurological symptoms after possible exposure of an unknown source, revealed significant differences in brain tissue and connectivity when compared to healthy individuals, according to a new report. Images reveal key brain differences, particularly in the cerebellum, between impacted patients and healthy individuals, which may underlie clinical findings previously reported by brain experts.

  • AnthraxFighting anthrax by removing the bacterium’s armor

    Anthrax is a deadly and highly resilient disease, caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis. Historically, it was a major cause of death in humans and cattle. has shown that removing the armor of the bacterium that causes anthrax slows its growth and negatively affects its ability to cause disease.