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OPERA apparatus. Credit: CERN

One of the biggest stories in science last year was the announcement by a European physics collaboration that neutrinos can seemingly travel faster than light. Most physicists were skeptical of the result, which would upend a well-tested tenet of modern physics—namely, that nothing outpaces light. And the researchers on the OPERA experiment that made the measurement were themselves very cautious, stating only that they had found a discrepancy that they could not get rid of.

Today reports emerged that problems with GPS synchronization could explain away the anomalous neutrino velocities, although specific details have yet to be confirmed. ScienceInsider’s Edwin Cartlidge reported that a “bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame” but cited only anonymous “sources familiar with the experiment.”

The Associated Press got an official if unspecific confirmation from CERN spokesperson James Gillies that “a problem in the GPS system used to time the arrival of neutrino particles was discovered earlier in February.” CERN is the Geneva laboratory for particle physics where the neutrino beam originates; OPERA detects the particles hundreds of kilometers away, in a lab buried in an Italian mountainside, and clocks their velocity on the journey.

Now MSNBC’s Alan Boyle reports that two potential issues have been identified:

One has to do with a fiber-optic connector that sends a GPS time stamp to the experiment’s master clock. That connector may not have been functioning correctly when the neutrino-timing measurements were made, and as a result, the recorded flight time would be shorter than the actual time. That alone could explain the seemingly faster-than-light results.

Another potential problem has to do with the oscillator that was used to generate the time stamps for GPS synchronization. This problem could have made the flight time look longer than it really was.

Boyle’s sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak yet on the subject. OPERA, he reports, will issue an official statement on Thursday about the new information. That means that we should know more soon, although it may take some time before physicists can test the effects of any potential glitches.

UPDATE (6:35 P.M.): Nature News is reporting that an official statement from OPERA confirms that two possible GPS-related problems are being investigated.

It’s easy to find an online test that will purportedly tell you how happy you are. But how happy are the people of an entire nation? And which nation’s people are happiest?

That’s hard to measure. So for decades world organizations like the United Nations that concern themselves with improving people’s well-being have used a single proxy for happiness: gross domestic product, or GDP. The loose logic is that as people attain a higher standard of living, they will feel less burdened by basic survival and have greater means for everything from decent food to recreation.

But new research indicates that two other factors are even better predictors of a nation’s well-being: According to Roly Russell, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Sandhill Institute for Sustainability and Complexity in Grand Forks, British Columbia, a nation’s human capital (social structures) and natural capital (nature) are more influential in determining happiness than financial capital (income). Russell presented his data over the weekend at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver.

Russell studied numerous studies about happiness in many nations, assessing 248 variables that the various investigations had relied on. The variables ultimately fell into three broad groups of factors: financial and infrastructure (traits such as GDP and gross domestic savings); human and social (years of schooling, freedom of choice); and natural (health of land on which people live, access to nature). He then correlated those factors with the degree to which people said they were happy. Preliminary results indicated that financial factors reflected only about half the variability in happiness across countries, but human and natural capital each accounted for about two thirds of the difference.

Costa Rica had the highest score for life satisfaction among the 123 countries that were represented, even though its GDP is in the world’s lowest third. The single leading factor determining people’s happiness there was a strong social support network.

As countries try to set policies to improve well-being, Russell concluded, they have to get away from using just GDP as the de facto predictor. “We can expand our vision of ‘development’ as more than just improving GDP,” he noted. Although measuring factors such as human and natural capital can be difficult, he added, “What’s difficult to count may be the most important. The path to becoming a happy country might well involve greater focus on maintaining or promoting healthy natural and social systems, and less on simply producing more ‘stuff.’”

To hear Russell explain his conclusions and why Costa Ricans win the happiness stakes, listen to our exclusive podcast with him.

And yes, if you want to test your own happiness and compare it with results from the U.S. and other countries, you can take our quiz.

Photo of happy girl in Costa Rica courtesy of canonsnapper on Flickr

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/vladacanon

Scary antibiotic-resistant infections aren’t just lurking in the hospital anymore. They’re in gyms, at the beach, and increasingly, on the farm.

One strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) known as CC398 has been rapidly spreading through poultry and pig farms, infecting people who work with the animals around the world (up to 26.5 percent of farm workers sampled in the Neatherlands), and popping up in nearly half of all meat sampled in the U.S.

A new genetic study shows that this form of staph started out in humans as a more standard, susceptible strain. But only once it jumped to livestock did it become resistant to common antibiotics methicillin and tetracycline, according to the research, published online Tuesday in mBio, the journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

For the study, researchers sequenced the genomes of 89 samples of the strain from humans and livestock, which were collected from 19 countries on four continents. “Retracing the evolutionary history of MRSA CC398 is like watching the birth of a superbug—it’s simultaneously fascinating and disconcerting,” Lance Price, director of Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health in Phoenix, and study co-author, said in a prepared statement.

From the genetic data, the researchers could ascertain what this strain originally looked like—and how it spread. “Most of the ancestral human strains were sensitive to antibiotics, whereas the livestock strains had acquired resistance on several independent occasions,” Ross Fitzgerald, of the University of Edinburgh, who reviewed the paper, said in a prepared statement.

A 2010 study sequenced strains of hospital-acquired MRSA from around the world and found that those strains, too, had acquired resistance multiple times in different geographic locations.

The detailed new study helps to clarify how this new breed of drug-resistant staph, known as livestock-acquired MRSA, has become so prevalent among livestock so quickly—after only having been spotted spreading back to humans about a decade ago. “We can’t blame nature or the germs,” Paul Keim, director of TGen’s Pathogen Genimics Division and co-author of the study, said in a prepared statement. “It is our inappropriate use of antibiotics that is now coming back to haunt us.”

“The most powerful force in evolution is ‘selection,’” Keim said. “And, in this case, humans have supplied a strong force through excessive use of antibiotic drugs in farm animal production.”

In the U.S. and many other countries, farmers don’t just use antibiotics to treat sick animals. Many producers feed it to their livestock in low levels as a preventive measure to keep animals that are in confined feeding operations, such as feed lots, from getting sick while being in such close proximity to one another. These low levels, however, are thought to be an excellent evolutionary pressure to select for strains that are resistant to these drugs—drugs that we also rely on to cure bacterial infections in people. [Read more about the use of antibiotics in farming in "Our Sick Farms, Our Infected Food" and "Our Big Pig Problem" in Scientific American.]

“Staph thrives in crowded and unsanitary conditions,” Price said. “Add antibiotics to that environment, and you’re going to create a public health problem.” A new form of MRSA was reported in humans and dairy cows in 2011.

Despite the increased spread of MRSA CC398 from animals to people in Europe, genetic changes in the strain seem to inhibit its spread among humans. The next step, say researchers, will be to look more deeply into the bacteria’s genome to see what elements make it such an agile jumper among species—and what mutations could potentially make it even more so.

Scanning tunnelling microscope image of a silicon surface lithographically prepared for two electrodes and a single transistor atom in the center. Credit: ARC Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication, at UNSW

The shift from fragile, bulky vacuum tubes to solid-state transistors paved the way for the information age. And the steady downsizing of transistors has made the devices of the information age ubiquitous, thanks to processors that become smaller, cheaper and faster with each passing year. Now a group of physicists has demonstrated how far that downsizing can proceed by shrinking transistors down to the atomic scale.

In a report published online February 19 in Nature Nanotechnology, researchers in Australia, the U.S. and South Korea announced that they built an operational transistor based on a single phosphorus atom. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Transistors are key processor components because they control the flow of electronic signals through a device; they can be used as switches or to amplify those signals. In the new demonstration, the researchers used a phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal as the transistor, mediating the flow of electric charge between two electrodes, each of which was about 10 nanometers from the phosphorus atom. A second set of electrodes, positioned about 50 nanometers on either side of the phosphorus atom, set the state of the transistor. The voltage between those more distant electrodes determined how much current the atomic transistor allowed to pass.

Another group in 2002 reported using single atoms of cobalt as transistors, but those atoms were contained within larger, specially designed molecules. The new approach produces a smaller transistor by placing a lone phosphorus atom onto the silicon wafer using atomic-scale lithography techniques. “This is the first time anyone has shown control of a single atom in a substrate with this level of precise accuracy,” Michelle Simmons, a University of New South Wales physicist and study co-author, said in a prepared statement.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/sjlocke

The number of people who die from HIV-related causes each year in the U.S. is now down to about 12,700—from a peak of more than 50,000 in the mid-1990s—thanks to condom education and distribution campaigns, increased testing and improved treatments. But now a different infectious disease is quietly killing even more people than HIV is: Hepatitis C.

The majority of the 3.2 million people who are estimated to have chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the U.S. are baby boomer adults.

And most of those infected with the virus do not know that they have it, which means they could easily be spreading it to others via exposure to blood—or, occasionally, sexual contact.

Although long-term intravenous drug users are at particular risk, so are “those who experimented with  [such] drugs for a limited time in their youth,” Harvey Alter and T. Jake Liang, both of the National Institutes of Health, wrote in an essay published online Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. “These bygone experiences do not often connote risk to the affected persons nor serve as a reason to seek testing,” they noted, making this slow-developing disease difficult to catch before it develops into cirrhosis or liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma). Their essay was part of a four-paper special series on hepatitis C.

More than 15,000 people died from hepatitis C-related issues in the U.S. in 2007—about three quarters of whom were people aged 45 to 64, according to Alter and Liang. And that number is expected to double as the bulk of the population with the disease get older. The cost of treating all of these people is likely to top $6.7 billion in the decade of 2010 to 2019.

Much of that growth is anticipated because those infected with hepatitis C often don’t seek treatment until the disease has caused serious damage, according to another paper published Monday in the same issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. “Hepatitis C virus infection is often asymptomatic or causes nonspecific symptoms (depression, arthralgia and fatigue) for decades,” Kathleen Ly, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and her colleagues wrote in their paper.

The good news for those who do get diagnosed is that new hepatitis C drugs are coming onto the market. But they are not cheap. One new promising one, a protease inhibitor called boceprevir, runs about $1,100 per week, which when added to the double-drug cocktail of interfearon and the antiviral ribavirin, makes for especially expensive treatment. Some researchers have proposed that testing patients for a genotype that has a cure rate of less than 40 percent with previous treatment might help make treatment the more cost effective.

A new analysis in the same issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, led by Shan Liu of the Center for Health Policy at Stanford University, found that giving HCV patients of all genotypes a triple-drug cocktail is, indeed, cost-effective for allowing patients to live longer, healthier lives. And as Alter and Liang pointed out, as opposed to HIV or even hepatitis B, HCV can often be effectively cured after six months to a year of antiviral treatment. “Every effectively treated high-risk individual diminishes the infectious pool and the likelihood of secondary transmission.”

With treatment options expanding, many researchers are turning their attention back to the question of locating patients. “As innovative treatments for hepatitis C follow their now-destined progression, the most burning question will not be whether to treat, but rather how to identify the many chronic HCV carriers who are unaware of their infection and are at risk for cirrhosis, end-stage liver disease, or hepatocellular carcinoma,” Alter and Liang wrote.

Knowing that those born between 1945 and 1964 are at the highest risk for HCV infection could help guide screening, according to another study published in the same issue of the journal, led by David Rein, of the CDC. “Because HCV progresses slowly, the risk for serious complications is increasing among infected Americans as time passes,” he and his colleagues wrote. “Without changes in current case identification and treatment, deaths from HCV are forecasted to increase to 35,000 annually by 2030.”

VANCOUVER—Resistance to hydraulic fracturing in the U.S. has risen steadily in recent months. Citizens and politicians are worried that fracking deep shales to extract natural gas can contaminate groundwater, trigger earthquakes and release methane, the potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. But a panel of experts not tied to industry told a large audience at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting here yesterday that the primary concerns can be solved if drilling and gas companies would impose tougher controls on their own operations, and if regulators would stiffen safety rules and crack down on violators who break them.

That realistic but optimistic tone arose primarily from conclusions made in a new study released a day earlier by the Energy Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. The study of shale drilling and gas extraction in Texas and Pennsylvania determined that three basic operations at the surface of wells have the greatest potential to taint drinking water with chemicals or methane. “We did not find that fracking the shale itself was likely to contaminate groundwater,” said Chip Groat, a geologist and professor of geoscience at the university who led the study. “We did find contamination from surface spills and leaks” at the top of the well.

The main culprits were above-ground spills of chemicals used in fracking; poor installation of metal casings and concrete in the top of the well that are supposed to prevent chemicals sent down the bore hole that later come back up, as well as the methane itself, from leaking; and sloppy handling of that “flowback” water plus other wastewater when it is transferred and stored in open pits or closed tanks.

Several concrete steps (pun intended) could clean up this act, according to David Layzell, head of the University of Calgary’s Institute of Energy, Environment and Economics.

• Impose tougher regulations on how wells are constructed, and increase inspections and penalties when it’s done badly, to prevent leaks.
• Clean and recycle the wastewater so it can be used again, instead of dumping it into ponds, which can leak, or injecting it back down into deep rock formations under high pressure for permanent storage, which has been linked to earthquakes.
• Require well operators to capture methane that now escapes from the top of the well into the atmosphere, which Layzell estimated at 4.0 to 7.5 percent of the gas that flows back up the well.

Groat added that industry and regulators must show that “these curable issues can get cured,” in order to build public confidence that fracking can be done cleanly and safely. “I would think the gas industry, in its own self-interest, would want to do that,” Groat said.

Layzell also called for more basic research, so industry and the public have a much more exact picture of how fracking changes the environment. “How much methane is already in groundwater” before fracking begins?” he asked. “How much methane is actually leaked at the well head? There is a crying need for better baseline data.” The panel agreed that the science of fracking lags behind the spread of the technology—and that it’s high time to catch up.

Photo of drilling tower in Lycoming County, Pa., courtesy of Ruhrfisch at WikiCommons

If you ever wondered how your body handled all those packaged ramen noodles you ate during college, this video’s for you. Stefani Bardin, a TEDxManhattan fellow, wants to learn how digestion differs between food chock full of preservatives and food that can actually go bad in a day.

To create this video, she and her collaborator swallowed a camera pill along with their meals (which included Gatorade and Gummi bears). The camera—here, called an M2A pill (for “mouth to anus”)—produced a stop-motion video down to the small intestine. Such cameras have limited medical uses, but boy, they sure do create a fun “Fantastic Voyage”-like experience. The video’s actual alimentary angle begins at the two-minute mark.

Next on the list ought to be hot dogs, considering all the chemicals in them.

VANCOUVER—Last fall, the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois shut down for good. The long-running accelerator had been eclipsed by the vastly more powerful Large Hadron Collider outside of Geneva, Switzerland, which since 2010 has been generating data at an impressive rate. The move appeared to quash any hopes that Fermilab had of discovering the Higgs boson, the last great known unknown of modern particle physics.

Yet according to Rob Roser, the leader of the CDF experiment at the Tevatron, we shouldn’t count Fermilab out quite yet. Though the machine is no longer generating data, physicists have not had time to properly analyze all the data that has been collected thus far.  Today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Roser announced that Fermilab will reveal its final Higgs results in March. “We will be able to say something interesting,” he said, “though whether it is that we don’t see it or we do see it remains to be seen.”

Asked to clarify, Roser said that if the Higgs has a mass of around 125 gigaelectron volts—the mass that recent LHC results seem to indicate is most likely—the Tevatron would be able to identify the Higgs with “three-sigma” certainty. This is a statistical term that indicates the finding only has a tenth of a percent chance of being due to a random statistical fluctuation. Such a result would still fall short of being considered a “discovery,” however, as the field of particle physics has adopted the more stringent five-sigma standard—a one-in-a-million chance.

Another soon-to-come announcement from Fermilab will also illuminate the hunt for the Higgs. On February 23, the CDF experiment will announce a new, more precise result for the mass of the W boson. “And if you know the mass of the W and the top [quark],” said Roser, “you will know the Higgs mass perfectly.” Even if the Tevatron can’t lay claim to discovering the Higgs, its last revelations will show the rest of the world where to look.

Image courtesy of Fermilab / Reidar Hahn

McGill researchers test a rat's pain threshold

One of brain researchers’ closest brushes with science fiction in the last 10 years came with the discovery of a chemical that could completely wipe out memory, a molecule that evoked a real-life version of the scenario depicted in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a couple undertakes a procedure to erase their memory of each other when the relationship falls apart.

Fortunately, the artificial amnesia occurred only in laboratory rats. But the experiment raised an obvious question: What would anyone do with a drug that essentially reformats your mental hard drive?

Who would be interested besides a neurotic Woody Allen trying to reboot his life, or a sadistic Josef Mengele type attempting to conduct the kind of scientific experiment that would be judged a war crime at The Hague?

A group of researchers have now come up with a more pragmatic answer to this question than incorporating the memory-erasing agent as a plot device in a cyberpunk novel

Neuroscientists at McGill University and collaborators have just reported in Molecular Pain that the chemical with the evocative acronym ZIP can selectively wipe out the nervous system’s “memory” of the chronic aches and pains that plague about one in four North Americans, apparently leaving other memories intact.

Pain that persists more than a few minutes leaves a memory trace—that’s why just a light touch is sometimes enough to produce a yelp of agony months after an injury. The archetypal example is the soldier with an amputated leg whose phantom limb still aches years after being severed.

In the experiment at McGill, ZIP administered to the spinal area of rats wiped out pain memories in hind paws that had become tender and hyper-sensitized from the application of capsacin, the compound that produces the burn of chili peppers.

ZIP is the Eternal Sunshine chemical that was spritzed into the memory-forming locus of rat brains to make the animals forget their past. One of the McGill co-authors, Todd C. Sacktor of SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, led the original research that discovered ZIP (zeta inhibitory peptide) along with the memory-preserving enzyme PKM-zeta, which it inhibits.

Years of experimentation and testing would be required to determine exactly where it should be administered to selectively wipe out pain memories without obliterating a lifetime of family recollections. And even then, ZIP will never be an over the counter drug. To be used in medicine, it would need to be injected into the spinal cord to reach the neurons involved with storing the pain memory.

Still, the experiment will leave neuroscientists with a better understanding of the molecular players involved in establishing pain memory. “It gives a clue as to a potential target for influencing persistent and chronic pain,” says Terence J. Coderre, a professor of anesthesiology and neuroscience at McGill who headed the research team.

Even if ZIP never makes its way down the lengthy drug development pipeline, it lays the groundwork for other chemicals that could permanently annul the pain memory that results in the persistent discomfort that turns walking, sitting or even lying down into a daily ordeal for so many.

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Image courtesy of Save the Tasmanian Devil Program

A killer cancer that is threatening to wipe Tasmanian devils off the map for good has been spreading—from an original infected female 15 years ago—via live cancer cells, according to evidence from genome sequences of the cancer and the animal, published online Thursday in Cell. Finding out how this happened could help save this species from extinction—and it could also prepare researchers for the unlikely event that a contagious cancer ever appeared in humans.

The facial cancer, which is spread through bites, has plagued this animal’s precarious population for more than a decade. Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) are the largest surviving carnivorous marsupials and live on Australia’s island state Tasmania. [Read more about this scourge in "The Devil's Cancer," from Scientific American's June 2011 issue.] All of the tumors afflicting the animals today contain cells from one original devil, genetic sequences show. “I call her the immortal devil,” Elizabeth Murchison, a researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and co-author of the new paper, said in a prepared statement. “Her cells are living on long after she died.”

An earlier version of the Tasmanian devil genome was published last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and revealed some secrets about why the cancer hasn’t killed off the species already. One of the two devils sequenced, named Cedric, showed resistance to at least two strains of the cancer, although he later succumbed to a third.

“The Tasmanian devil cancer is the only cancer that is threatening an entire species with extinction,” Murchison said. After the first tumor appears on the doomed animals face, it will likely die within three months.

But by turning to genetics, researchers and conservationists hope to be able to find clues to at least slow the cancer’s spread. The researchers studied tumors from 104 tumors collected from Tasmanian devils from various locations on the island and found that there were separate geographic groups of cancer types—but that all of them contained cells from the original female. “Sequencing the genome of this cancer has allowed us to catalogue the mutations that caused this cancer to arise and to persist,” Murchison said. More detailed genetic details could point the way to targeted cancer drugs. It might also suggest how the cancer is able to sneak past the immune system and start its explosive growth so quickly.

“Tracing the evolutionary history and spread of this cancer helps us to understand not only what caused this disease but also to predict how it might behave in the future,” David Bentley, chief scientist at Illumina Cambridge, Ltd. and study co-author, said in a prepared statement.

The Tasmanian devil’s cancer has more than 17,000 mutations. “This is fewer mutations that are found in some human cancers and indicates that cancers do not need to be extremely unstable in order to become contagious,” Bentley said. Only one other type of contagious cancer is known—a venereal tumor that infects dogs and wolves. The next step is “to use the genome sequence to understand more about how this cancer became transmissible,” Michael Stratton, director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and study co-author, said in a prepared statement. “Cancers that transmit through populations are obviously incredibly rare,” he said, “but we should use the Tasmanian devil example to be prepared in the extremely unlikely event that such an epidemic ever occurs in humans.”

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Back in December 2011, The Guardian USA and New York University’s Studio20 (see their Tumblr – note: I am associated with the program) announced a new joint project – US presidential election 2012: the citizens agenda. Here is some background information from that time:

The Guardian USA:

The citizens agenda: making election coverage more useful: We invite you to help refresh the media’s tired templates of campaign coverage to address issues people really care about

Studio 20:

Studio 20 Will Collaborate With The Guardian on How to Improve Election Coverage: On Dec. 8, Studio 20 and The Guardian US jointly announced that they will collaborate in the development of a “citizens agenda” approach to election coverage during the 2012 campaign for president.

Nieman Journalism Lab:

Civic journalism 2.0: The Guardian and NYU launch a “citizens agenda” for 2012: Jay Rosen and Amanda Michel reunite for a project that aims to inject citizen voices into campaign coverage.

PressThink:

The Citizens Agenda in Campaign Coverage: The idea is to learn from voters what those voters want the campaign to be about, and what they need to hear from the candidates to make a smart decision. So you go out and ask them: “what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes in this year’s election?”

Nadja Popovich:

Re-thinking Elections 2012: As part of the Studio 20 graduate program at NYU, we’re partnering with the Guardian on a big question: how do we make election coverage more useful to the average user? So, today we launch the “Citizens Agenda”, an attempt to do just that.

What does that all mean?

The idea is for a media organization with a strong reputation, large audience, and necessary resources to team up with a group of smart, dedicated, innovative, tech-savvy and Web-savvy students of journalism to explore and analyze the questions posed by the media to the presidential candidates (most notably during the presidential debates), to see what questions are asked frequently, what questions rarely, and what questions not at all – and then to provide the citizens with the opportunity to have their own voices heard, adding questions they want to ask, inquiring about topics they care about the most:

Have the 839 GOP debate questions reflected the ‘citizens agenda’?: By studying the 20 Republican presidential debates of this election season, we can better see if the questions being asked correspond with the issues voters actually care about.

Some questions that may be of great interest or importance to the voters may be tip-toed around or completely ignored by the media, while other questions that are asked often may not be as informative to the public. For example:

Don’t ask, don’t tell: Mormonism mentions scant at GOP debates: Despite being the religion of two candidates, only three questions over 20 debates have dared to utter the M-word.

There have been 20 presidential debates so far this season, generating a total of 839 questions. The students have analyzed the questions, classified them and are starting to publish the details of the analysis – this is the first one, with more to come over the next several days:

The GOP debates: what questions do journalists like to ask? We looked at all the questions that have been posed to the Republican candidates in the 20 debates since May 5, 2011.

Interestingly, most of the questions were quite serious and substantial, but a small percentage could be characterized as “fluff” questions, designed primarily to entertain the audience, and secondarily hoping that a candidate may trip up or say something unusual or revealing:

The nine quirkiest questions from the Republican debates: There have been some strange moments over the last 20 debates involving the GOP candidates. Here are our favourites.

Interestingly, in some of the debates, the candidates were asked questions posed by the public, either by the members of the audience in the room, or from Twitter. Those questions were much different – they covered different topics, were often quite tough, and usually had a personal story as a starting point. By posing problems, the audience questions forced the candidates to abandon the talking points and put themselves in a “problem-solving mode”, which may be potentially much more useful to the television viewers at home:

At the GOP debates, ‘regular people’ didn’t shy away from tough questions: When the mic was handed over to audience members, they framed their questions around personal stories – and big issues

What was asked so far?

According to the first analysis (and more is upcoming), there are certain topics or types of questions that were asked at the debates very frequently. For example: on the economy and jobs (227 questions), the candidates’ lives and records (223 questions), fixing government and reducing the debt (188 questions), foreign policy and national security (160 questions), strategy and maneuvering among the candidates – the “horse-race journalism” focused on polls, electability and mutual criticisms of candidates, attempting to provoke a fight between them on the stage (113 questions), and the “How conservative are you?” type of question (104 questions).

Interestingly, concerning foreign policy questions, out of 200+ countries of the world, only a handful were mentioned in the questions, most frequently Iran and China, while many other countries, regions and entire continents were completely ignored (including very rare mentions of Iraq).

On the other end of the spectrum, restoring American greatness (“Are we still as powerful as we once were?” – 9 questions), human interest fluff (12 questions), education (12 questions) and religion (24 questions, but see above for lack of questions on Mormonism), were not often asked. There was nothing about, for example, women’s issues (apart from abortion), or about small-business owners.

In the middle are: immigration (61 questions to multiple candidates, 16 to Gingrich, nine to Romney, six to Santorum, six to Paul), healthcare (53 questions), social issues: abortion and gay rights (46 questions), and social spending: Medicaid, Medicare, social security and unemployment (42 questions).

Science and technology questions, including space and climate, were in the middle of the pack, with a total of 44 questions asked to date. Here are some examples:

On climate change:

John Harris (Politico): Governor Perry — Governor Perry, Governor Huntsman were not specific about names, but the two of you do have a difference of opinion about climate change. Just recently in New Hampshire, you said that weekly and even daily scientists are coming forward to question the idea that human activity is behind climate change. Which scientists have you found most credible on this subject?

And a follow up: John Harris (Politico): Just to follow up quickly. Tell us how you’ve done that. [applause] Are there specific — specific scientists or specific theories that you’ve found especially compelling, as you? (both from September 7, 2011 | Republican Candidates Debate in Simi Valley, California)

On stem cell research:

Shannon BREAM: Alright, Governor Pawlenty, just days ago a Federal court struck down the ban on using Federal funds for embryonic stem cell research. You identify yourself as strongly pro life, but you don’t oppose government funding for research on existing stem cell lines already derived from embryos, but is that still spending tax payer money on elements that were generated by, at some point destroying an embryo. (MAY 5, 2011 | FOX SOUTH CAROLINA DEBATE)

On energy and environment:

Brian Williams (NBC News): Governor, time. Congresswoman Bachmann, a question about energy, back to that subject for a moment. Were you quoted correctly — and do you stand by it — as wanting to drill in the Everglades in Florida? (September 7, 2011 | Republican Candidates Debate in Simi Valley, California)

On green energy:

Bret Baier (Fox News): Governor Perry, you — you have railed against the special treatment of Ford and Solyndra as have the other candidates here tonight. And particularly the tax code incentives for green technologies and allowances that have been made for this industry. But it’s nexus, governor you have afforded the same attention to the oil industry. Back in 2003, you signed a bill that reduced the tax paid by some natural gas companies that have helped them reap since, better than $7 billion in tax savings. So I — I guess what I’m saying is, are you guilty of the same behavior as governor, favoring an industry, that you claim this president has, favoring the green industry? (December 15, 2011 | Republican Candidates Debate in Sioux City, Iowa)

On the EPA:

John DISTASO: Speaker Gingrich, what exactly is an Environmental Solutions Agency? I don’t — I think a lot of people might not know or understand that — why you want to disband the EPA and set up — set up something that kind of looks like the EPA? (Republican Candidates debate in Concord, Hampshire January 8, 2012)

On nuclear energy and the Yucca Mountain:

Q from audience: QUESTION: My question for you is, do you support opening the national nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain? ANDERSON COOPER: Speaker Gingrich, we’ll start with you. [crosstalk] ANDERSON COOPER: Sorry, go ahead. ANDERSON COOPER: Is Yucca Mountain that place? ANDERSON COOPER: You were for opening it in Congress, right? (Republican Candidates debate, Las Vegas, Nevada October 18, 2011)

On the space program:

WOLF BLITZER, CNN: We have a question. I want to speaker to weigh in as well. [applause]This question is related from — we got it from Twitter. Speaker Gingrich, how do you plan to create a base on the moon while keeping taxes down in eight years? [laughter] (January 26th, 2012 | Republican Candidates Debate in Jacksonville, Florida)

How to build a citizen’s agenda?

Next presidential debate will be on Wednesday, February 22nd, moderated by John King of CNN. Another four debates have been scheduled in case no clear candidate emerges in the meantime. After that, there will be general election debates between the candidates of the two major parties. As the year progresses, the program will evolve, adapting to the circumstances on the ground.

In this first phase, between today and the next debate, the citizens (both of the USA and other countries) will be encouraged to post their questions – what they would like to see the candidates asked – in the comment sections of this post. Alternatively, people can tweet their suggested questions at @JohnKingCNN using the hashtag #unasked. The students will also do a quick classification of all the questions to send to John King’s producer just before the debate.

Will there be many questions? Will they be much different from what the media asks anyway (after all, the mass media shapes the public opinion)? Will a few of those questions emerge as strong contenders by being asked repeatedly by many people? Will John King actually ask one or more of these questions? Will moderators of future debates ask the citizens’ questions? Will other media outlets pick up these questions and ask the candidates whenever they have the opportunity to do so? That is still to be seen.

Asking about science?

Many important policy questions are in some way related to science or rely on scientific information. The same can be said of medicine, environment and technology.

While many science publications collect candidates’ quotes on scientific matters every four years (including us, just a couple of weeks ago), attempts to get presidential candidates to answer science questions have been made in the past without much success. Most notably, ScienceDebate.org managed to get some answers from both Obama and McCain four years ago, and intends to try to do the same this year. Occasionally a very lucky blogger may get an exclusive interview with one of the candidates specifically about science (I was that lucky four years ago, interviewing then presidential candidate John Edwards).

But questions posed by a large number of citizens are harder to ignore than questions posed by an organization, be it a specialized science media organization, or an organization of scientists (which can be dismissed as an “interest group” by the politicians). Also, questions about science, when placed in the mix with other questions of interest to the public, may have a better chance to get answered than if science is kept in isolation and treated as a special topic.

I am confident that the readers of Scientific American would love to ask science-related questions of the candidates, and can come up with good, well-informed questions that can lead to important and informative answers. This is your chance to influence the Citizen’s Agenda, by posting science-based questions on the Guardian site or on Twitter. Let’s see if we can influence the Citizen’s Agenda, and if that, in turn, may affect what questions get asked of the candidates in the mass media.

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Image: Nadja Popovich

Credit: Andrew Quitmeyer

An ant colony, made up of many thousands of individuals, actually functions more like one giant organism. Ants use their unified strength to build bridges, raft across rivers and even wage war on neighboring colonies (as scientist Mark Moffett explains in a recent Scientific American feature). But what if you want to study the behavior of a single ant amidst the ebb and flow of the colony? How would you go about it?

The answer lies in a canister of CO2 gas, a stereoscope and a tiny paintbrush. Andrew Quitmeyer, a PhD student in the Bio-tracking Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, created the video below, which gives the step-by-step recipe for ant color-coding. It is an elegant, if painstaking, way to track the movement of one ant among many. The technique has found use in labs such as that of scientist Stephen Pratt at Arizona State University, who studies emergent behavior in groups of insects.

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Video courtesy of Andrew Quitmeyer/Georgia Institute of Technology

Xombie rocket with GENIE system. Credit: Draper Laboratory

When I was a kid, I spent an awful lot of time and money on model rockets. I loved the whole process—picking out which Estes rocket kit to buy, carefully assembling the thing, and, most important of all, igniting a solid-fuel engine to shoot a high-velocity projectile into the sky. The problem was, I would often get to enjoy only one or two launches before the rocket crash-landed or, more often, drifted so far during its parachuted return that my friends and I couldn’t find it. I always lamented that there was no way to control where the rocket went—you just glued the fins on as straight as you could, launched when the wind was mellow, and hoped for the best.

Hoping for the best isn’t quite good enough when you move from the world of model rockets to real interplanetary missions, though. So engineers are constantly working to devise better descent and landing systems. (The Mars-bound Curiosity rover may have the most elaborate landing scheme ever.) Some landers use airbags, some use parachutes, and some use retrorockets to lower the craft to the surface. The video below shows an example of the latter approach—a rocket-powered descent, controlled by a computerized guidance system that flies the craft after liftoff.

The video, filmed February 2 at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, documents a test of the Xombie, a rocket built by Masten Space Systems that runs on isopropyl alcohol and liquid oxygen. The test was the first successful free flight of the Xombie under the control of Draper Laboratory’s autonomous GENIE flight system (short for Guidance Embedded Navigator Integration Environment). In the test, the Xombie lifts off from one launch pad, rises to an altitude of 50 meters, hovers there before flying sideways 50 meters, and then lowers itself to a controlled landing on another pad. Needless to say, the 10-year old rocketeer in me is very impressed.

Laser photo: FastLizard4/Flickr

The quantum phenomenon known as entanglement keeps spreading its arms to hold ever more particles in its spooky embrace.

Quantum entanglement is an effect through which multiple particles share correlated properties—across arbitrarily large distances—that snap into place instantaneously. For instance, a pair of entangled photons in different locations might be joined by their polarizations, a property that describes the orientation of a light wave’s oscillation. Measure one photon’s polarization, and the polarization of the other instantly assumes the same value. In other words, the photons are either both horizontally polarized or both vertically polarized, but neither assumes a definite value until one or the other is measured.

If that strikes you as more than a little counterintuitive, you’re in good company. Albert Einstein once disparaged quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” As he and his colleagues wrote in 1935, “No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this.” Reasonable or no, entanglement indeed appears to be a part of reality, as numerous experiments have demonstrated.

Now, experimenters at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Shanghai have entangled not one but four pairs of photons, linking the polarizations of eight photons. The achievement, described in a study published online February 12 in Nature Photonics, extends the range of previous experiments that had entangled up to six photons. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Even larger ensembles have been entangled using individual atoms as the particle of choice, but entangled photons hold much promise for quantum communication schemes, since they can carry messages across large distances.

Entanglement is a fragile state, and entangling photons with any efficiency is a major challenge; physicists generally produce a huge number of photons for every pair of successfully entangled particles. The difficulty of creating multiple pairs of entangled photons grows exponentially as more are added. Xing-Can Yao and his colleagues at USTC calculated that if they simply extended previous six-photon experiments to include another pair of entangled photons, it would take roughly 10 hours of experimental time to generate one entangled eight-photon set. (Physicists verify the presence of entanglement by running statistical tests that require large samples of photons, so an experiment that takes hours to produce a single entangled state is impractically slow.) To overcome that limitation, the researchers used an optical scheme that filters out fewer photons and hence boosts the output of entangled photons.

With a “bright” source of entangled photons, the researchers managed to generate four mutually entangled pairs with much greater frequency. They reported detecting hundreds of sets of entangled photons, at a rate of about nine per hour, which sufficed to run the kinds of statistical tests needed to verify that all eight photons were indeed linked at the quantum level.

For a lighthearted, conceptual take on entanglement, check out the recent video that I made with Scientific American‘s resident entanglement expert George Musser, along with our colleagues Mary Karmelek and Eric Olson.

The ability to make batteries lighter, cheaper and longer lasting is crucial to the development and adoption of next-generation electronics—from mobile phones and tablets to electric cars. Advances in lithium ion batteries have helped slim down smart phones and put cars like the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt on the road. Yet lithium can also be volatile and has been accused of causing electrical fires in gadgets and even Volt test vehicles. Investigating the failure of a lithium ion or any other battery is difficult because any post-mortem requires opening, and thus destroying, the battery to see inside. A new technique could sidestep that problem.

A team of researchers from Cambridge University in England, New York University (NYU) and Stony Brook University in New York say they have developed a way to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to inspect batteries noninvasively. The researchers focused on better understanding how and why lithium deposits build up on electrodes and elsewhere after charging.

Normally it’s best to avoid having any metal near an MRI, for fear of turning that metal into a projectile. (The MRI’s powerful magnetic field will strongly attract any nearby metallic objects.*) In addition, a metal’s conducting surfaces block radio frequency fields, so an MRI would not reveal much information about what’s deep inside a metallic object.

Not a problem, the researchers reported Sunday in Nature Materials. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) An MRI’s radio waves may not penetrate the metals in a battery, but they can scan and measure features on the battery’s surface. These measurements can be used to recreate two- or three-dimensional digital images of the battery, including any lithium deposits that may have gathered on the battery’s electrodes. Such deposits can contribute to overheating, battery failure and possibly even a fire or explosion, according to the researchers.

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy in 2001 to first study the movement of lithium ions within a battery from the outside (pdf), but this work “does not offer the level of detail provided by our technique,” says Alexej Jerschow, an NYU chemistry professor who contributed to the research. “For example, we were able to obtain 3-D images of a battery before and after charging.”

MRI also proved more accurate than NMR, which doesn’t provide detailed information about what’s happening inside the battery. Scanning electron microscopy, another tool that has been used to study batteries, requires cutting a battery open. “Not only does one destroy the battery in the process, but also exposure to air alters the surfaces, so this technique does not really study the electrodes in their working condition,” Jerschow says. “MRI is nondestructive, so you can take a functioning battery and take an image of it, much like one can take an MRI of the human body.”

Jerschow and his colleagues are continuing to refine their approach to improve image resolution and reduce the amount of time it takes to obtain an image.

*Clarification (2/15/12): Neither the battery used during testing nor lithium itself is magnetic.

Image: MRI in the pristine (uncharged) state and after passing current. Courtesy of S. Chandrashekar, Nicole M. Trease, Hee Jung Chang, Lin-Shu Du, Clare P. Grey, Alexej Jerschow, and Nature Materials

When a couple plays online games together, they say they are happier in their marriage than couples in which only one spouse games (Credit: Elvis untot, Wikimedia Commons)

If someone asked you to sketch a portrait of a gamer who spends countless hours each week inhabiting an avatar—say, an elf or a warlock—in a virtual fantasy world, what kind of person would you draw? A teenage boy whose pimply forehead hovers mere centimeters from the computer screen?

Needless to say, such stereotypes are misleading. Since 1999, Nick Yee of the Palo Alto Research Center in California has surveyed more than 35,000 players of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as World of Warcraft. He has found that only 25 percent of MMORPG players are teenagers. What’s more, nearly 36 percent of players are married and 22 percent have children.

Michelle Ahlstrom and Neil Lundberg of Brigham Young University and their colleagues decided to study married gamers. Does devoting so much time to online games change how couples feel about married life? The answer is Yes—sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. What makes a difference is whether couples game together or alone and—when they game together—how they interact online. The new study appears in the February 15 issue of the Journal of Leisure Research.

Ahlstrom and Lundberg advertised for study volunteers on Facebook and MMORPG forums and settled on 349 married, heterosexual, English-speaking couples from across the United States. In 132 of those couples, only one person played MMORPGs—usually the husband. In the other 217 couples, both partners gamed, but one—again, usually the husband—played more often than the other. The couples played many different games, including World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Guild Wars, Everquest and City of Heroes.

When one member of a couple spent far more time gaming than the other, the couple typically reported dissatisfaction with their marriage. They generally quarreled a lot as well. No surprise there. However, the number of gaming hours did not matter as much as the answer to one very specific question: Did gaming interfere with “bedtime routines”? Couples who did not go to bed at the same time reported less satisfying marriages. Since earlier research by Yee has documented that 82 percent of gaming occurs between 6 and 11 p.m., it is reasonable to assume that gaming interferes with nighttime activities of all kinds.

“Activities that stand in the way of bonding, routines and intimacy are obviously bad,” says Lundberg, “and online gaming is just an additional example.”

But what about couples who game together? Whereas nearly 75 percent of couples with a lone gamer reported that gaming hurt their marriage, 76 percent of volunteers in mutual gaming relationships said that MMORPGs improved their marriage. “We thought that gaming might be an issue for some marriages and we confirmed that,” says Lundberg, “but there was a flip side. We didn’t expect that some couples would game together as a way to spend time together. These folks really came through in the sample and said, ‘We enjoy interaction in gaming—it’s kind of like an online date. We see this as a really positive thing for our relationship.’”

(Credit: Mjrmtg, Wikimedia Commons)

There is a caveat, however. Although couples enjoyed interacting in virtual worlds, spouses that played on the same team—the same “guild” or “clan”—were less satisfied with their marriages than spouses playing on separate teams. Ahlstrom and Lundberg suspect that the more experienced gamers probably got frustrated with their spouses for not keeping up when the team was on a crucial mission. Fortunately, the researchers have some advice for couples whose gaming talent is lopsided: Remember, they say, that one spouse can help the other “level up”—grow as a character by gaining new talents and abilities, such as more powerful spells—even though they are not part of the same guild or clan.

And, apparently, spending time together online also helps some couples level up their marriage IRL (in real life).

The aftermath of a particle collision at the LHC that included debris consistent with a Higgs boson. Credit: CERN

Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, already the most powerful particle collider in history—and by a wide margin at that—is about to break its own record.

The collider outside Geneva will run at an energy of 4 trillion electron-volts (TeV) in 2012, up from 3.5 TeV in 2011, CERN announced February 13. (CERN is the European physics laboratory that operates the LHC.) The collider accelerates beams of protons to fantastic energies before smashing them together head-on. Those collisions take place inside colossal detectors that can register short-lived particles in the debris that are rare in everyday, low-energy life. With the increased energy of the beam and continued improvements in luminosity (the rate of collisions), LHC scientists are aiming to take three times as much collision data this year as was captured in 2011.

In the particle hunt, the most prized quarry is the elusive Higgs boson, a massive particle whose existence springs naturally from the leading explanation for why particles have mass. The LHC has already narrowed the window where the Higgs might be hiding, and in December project scientists announced that they had caught a tantalizing, preliminary and ultimately inconclusive whiff of the particle. When the collider starts back up in March after its annual winter shutdown, it will begin the run that ought to put to rest any questions about the existence of the Higgs. The run will end in November, when the LHC shuts down for 20 months while CERN beefs up the machine for even higher-energy running, approaching the collider’s maximum energy of 7 TeV, in late 2014 or 2015.

“By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs,” Sergio Bertolucci, CERN’s research director, said in a prepared statement.

If all goes according to plan, LHC physicists will have an exciting new discovery to celebrate—and, of course, to ponder the implications of—during the long layoff.

PET image of an Alzheimer's brain

The pharmaceutical industry has beat a concerted retreat from developing drugs for diseases that affect the brain, stymied by the lengthy development times for these agents and a string of failures. Despite the evident risks,  a new study shows how industry leaders should perhaps be taking the long view.

The report online last week in Science that an already approved cancer drug showed promise in mice in correcting both the molecular pathology and cognitive decline of Alzheimer’s has patients and their families clamoring for the compound.

Those suffering are asking by the hundreds for the drug despite warnings that evidence in mice often does not translate into later success in humans. Gary Landreth of Case Western Reserve University received a flood of requests from desperate families.

Landreth, the lead researcher on the study, did not hype the results. He acknowledged that bexarotene rapidly cleared the toxic amyloid peptides and seemed to improve cognition in mice. But he also emphasized  that rodents differ from humans—and that examining whether the drug can eliminate amyloid in a small human trial must be demonstrated now before moving forward to a larger test to ascertain whether cognition improves as well. In our story last Thursday, Landreth cautioned:

“Don’t try this at home because we don’t know what dose to give, we don’t know how frequently to give it, and there are a few nuances to its administration. So one shouldn’t be prescribing it off-label.”

It is also unclear whether a drug like bexarotene, even if it were a success for patients in the early stages of the disease, would work later as the pathology progresses and nerve cells start to perish.

The fallout from this story turned up  in our comments section. One reader,  identified only as Jeff_Davis, responded to another’s remarks by saying:

“You write: …’I'd be very worried about off-label use…’

“I guarantee you, this is way past ‘worry.’ A tsunami of off-label use is underway even as we speak. Friends, already in the grip of the Alzheimer’s horror — loved ones in their care, mostly — are already in contact with their physician, saying, ‘Will you prescribe this drug, or do I have to find someone who will?’”

The Case Western Reserve researchers are heading up an effort to move the drug quickly into human trials. Things should move along at a good clip because the safety profile is relatively well known for this nearly 13-year-old drug.

Patients and their families should hold tight because without drug trials that conform to well-established testing protocols, it will be impossible to know whether a drug originally approved for cutaneous T cell lymphoma will work for Alzeheimer’s. Using the drug off label now will be be like ingesting nothing more than a sophisticated dietary supplement. At the same time, drug manufacturers should take notice of the huge pent-up demand and think twice about scrapping their neuro development programs.

Image: Wikipedia Commons

The vocal folds (seen from above) sit within the larynx, between the throat and the trachea. When hemorrhaging occurs on either flap, the normally flexible folds swell and impair proper functioning. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

You would never have known it from her performance at the Grammy Awards ceremony on Sunday night, but the British singer Adele was not even allowed to speak for most of November and December. She had just undergone laser surgery to remove a polyp from her vocal folds, a small growth that forced her to cancel a U.S. tour and threatened to damage her sultry voice permanently. It was an extreme form of an injury that anyone can get simply by yelling too much.

The problems began last May, Adele wrote in her blog: “I made a Skype call in the morning on the day of the show and during it my voice suddenly switched off like a light! It was literally as if someone pulled a curtain over my throat.” At a show soon afterward, Adele described feeling a “ripping” sensation in her throat, which her doctors diagnosed as a hemorrhage. They ordered her to rest her voice and reschedule several performances.

Credit: Flickr/AlexKormisPS (ALM)

A vocal cord hemorrhage such as Adele’s happens because of the physical stresses of singing or speaking. When Adele first began noticing problems with her voice, she said she had never sung so much in her life. When vocal cords are overworked or injured, they can bruise just like other body parts—in the larynx, blood escapes the tiny blood vessels and floods the vibrating flaps that allow a person to talk or sing. The bleeding and subsequent swelling can stiffen the vocal cords and interfere with their undulations, leading to hoarseness, or in some cases (such as Adele’s) the inability to speak at all. Many people experience minor vocal cord damage after yelling at a sporting event or noisy bar. In most cases, these can be treated by simply resting the voice.

Adele’s throat problems resumed in October, prompting her doctors to take a closer look. They discovered the polyp, which was possibly caused by previous damage that hadn’t healed properly and which may have been aggravated by the singer’s cigarette smoking.

Because polyps can predispose a singer to repeated hemorrhaging, leading to vocal cord scarring and permanent hoarseness of the voice, laryngeal surgeon Steven Zeitels from Massachusetts General Hospital decided to remove the polyp in November. To do so, he used a laser to snip it off and cauterize the ruptured blood vessels—an hour-long procedure that Zeitels has also performed on Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Roger Daltrey from the Who and several other professional singers.

Adele’s performance last night was her first since October. Judging from the standing ovation she received (not to mention the six Grammys she took home), the operation was a success.

Artist's conception of ExoMars mission, from which NASA has withdrawn. Credit: ESA

NASA just released its presidential budget request for 2013 and, as expected, the space agency’s planetary science program takes a big hit. The budget document (summary pdf) is merely the first volley in an often drawn-out exchange between the White House and Congress, but still sets the general direction for the space program. Although the Obama administration’s proposal would slice less than 1 percent from NASA’s current budget, it proposes some major shifts of funds within the agency.

The planetary science program, which received $1.5 billion for 2012, would take a 20 percent cut. NASA would still fly the Mars MAVEN atmospheric mission in 2013 but would back away from two joint missions with the European Space Agency:

NASA is terminating further activity on the formulation activity for the NASA/ ESA ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter 2016 (EMTGO) mission and planning for the previous NASA/ESA Mars 2018 mission concept.

The latter mission would have included the first direct search for life on Mars since the Viking landers of the 1970s. With NASA bailing out, ESA is now casting around for another partner.

The planetary science community has seen this coming for some time now. In September, a group of 18 prominent planetary scientists signed an open letter warning that the James Webb Space Telescope (NASA’s costly, complex planned successor to the Hubble Space Telescope) was eating up funds previously earmarked for planetary missions. Ed Weiler, who had been NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, resigned in September, partly in protest over the impending cuts. “The Mars program is one of the crown jewels of NASA,” Weiler told Science. “In what irrational, Homer Simpson world would we single it out for disproportionate cuts?”

The Webb telescope is indeed taking an ever larger slice of a slowly shrinking pie. Under the proposal, it would get $627.6 million for 2013, up from $518.6 million in 2012 and $476.8 million in 2011. An even more dramatic boost, albeit one outside the NASA sector that includes planetary science and the Webb telescope, would go to programs that stimulate the commercial spaceflight industry. The Obama administration wants private firms such as SpaceX and Boeing to launch future U.S. astronauts to orbit, a job that has traditionally been NASA’s. With the retirement of the space shuttle, the next time NASA astronauts lift off from U.S. soil they will likely do so as paying customers on commercially operated rockets. The president asked for $829.7 million for commercial spaceflight for 2013, more than double what those programs received in 2012.

The details of NASA’s final budget will take months to work out, but it looks as if the agency’s next stab at looking for life on Mars will hit the NASA scrapheap, joining other once-promising missions such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna and the Space Interferometry Mission as victims of the current budget morass.