Tell Us What You Really Think, Professor Baltimore

By Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
15 February 2008

BOSTON--After expounding on the science of AIDS and the prospects for international scientific development, outgoing AAAS President David Baltimore wrapped up his opening address here Friday night with a strident election-year message: America needs a political change, and President George W. Bush has been bad for science and bad for the world.

"I've held my breath awaiting new leaders in Washington ... who I consider true Americans," said Baltimore, who spoke at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher). The lines elicited neither applause nor boos from the crowd of about 1200. He called for a science debate among presidential candidates. "The United States allowed itself to become mesmerized by the terrorist threat," he said. Baltimore marveled at "how much growth there is in Europe while the U.S. has been fighting in Iraq," blasted Congress and the White House for passing "a budget that does not meet the needs" of American science, and called on Americans to "hold our head low in penance for the horrors inflicted by our country in Abu Ghraib."

In the cocktail hour that followed, an informal and certainly unscientific straw poll yielded few scientists who disagreed. Physicist Burt Kendall of Qualcomm in San Diego, California, called Baltimore's remarks "a most reasonable discussion" and criticized what he called the Bush Administration's poor funding of science and an "antiscience attitude of the Administration." European Commission official Michel Claessens called Baltimore's political comments "courageous."

Hearing politics discussed so explicitly at a science meeting "is not something I'm accustomed to," said statistician Keith Crank of Arlington, Virginia. But did he find Baltimore's remarks unseemly? "No, I didn't. ... I do appreciate to have science as an agenda of the political process."

Not everyone approved. "I don't think that science should get involved with politics like we heard today," said physicist and AAAS fellow George Gamota, formerly a military science manager at the Pentagon. He said that although he had opposed going to war with Iraq, Baltimore's comments oversimplified the risks of leaving Iraq now. And he called the flat budgets for health sciences while politicians increased physical sciences "a rebalancing."

Presidential Campaigns Call for Big Boosts to Research Funding

By Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
16 February 2008

BOSTON?Representatives of the two remaining major Democratic candidates for U.S. president both endorsed big budget increases for federally funded basic scientific research at a debate before hundreds of scientists today, with Senator Hillary Clinton's (D?NY) team offering decidedly more specifics on their plans.

Apart from that distinction, few policy differences emerged during the hour-and-half debate, held at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher) to generally positive reviews. None of the details the campaigns laid out was new. In addition, neither committed to a proposed science debate for the candidates themselves, which would be supported by major research organizations and thousands of U.S. scientists and which would take place on 18 April in Philadelphia. And both camps trained more fire on outgoing President George W. Bush than they did each other.

Calling for a war on "politicization" of federal science by political appointees, Thomas Kalil, Clinton's campaign adviser, pledged to "restore" the role of the president's science adviser, saying that the Bush White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy had been "banished to bureaucratic Siberia." He called for a doubling over 10 years of the basic research budgets at the U.S. National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Pentagon, and National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Senator Barack Obama's (D?IL) campaign adviser Alec Ross spoke in more generalities, calling for a doubling of "basic science" funding in 5 years. He declined to say which agencies would get the boost. Ross did, though, repeatedly echo stump-speech lines by Obama calling for an end to the Washington influence of "special interests" and well-funded lobbyists. "We are going to restore science policy to science and scientists," said Ross. Among Obama's plans, Ross mentioned, was a call for $150 billion in new funds over the next decade to advance biofuels, hybrid cars, and improvements to the national power grid. We want "science not just for the sake of science," Ross said.

Kalil and Ross don't have a strong background in academic science or federal basic science policy. Neither, for example, had any names to offer when the moderator, Claudia Dreifus of The New York Times, asked which experts Obama or Clinton would appoint to an advisory council on bioethics. Ross, a social entrepreneur for a company that provides technology in poor communities, showed his relative inexperience with science policy by repeatedly sending the audience to "the Web site" for more details. (He did raise eyebrows, however, when he promised a space initiative that would hit "the newspapers" in the coming weeks.)

But Kalil, who worked on technology policy in Bill Clinton's White House and works as an administrator at the University of California, Berkeley, showed a bit more familiarity with the challenges facing federally funded scientists, declaring at one point that "these days, you have to do the experiment before you can write the grant."

Reaction by the crowd was mostly warm. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, medical geneticist Gilbert Omenn, a former head of AAAS, gave his approval to both candidates, lauding their respective "big, extensive programs" in science. Union of Concerned Scientists representative Michael Halpern said that both campaigns were "cautious" in their details but added that their presence showed "a wish to engage the scientific community." Molecular biologist Michael Chou, a graduate student at Harvard Medical School in Boston, was less kind: "It wasn't very deep."

The presumptive Republican candidate, Senator John McCain (R?AZ), was invited but sent regrets, said Albert Teich of AAAS. "They apparently would have liked to come." Representative Ron Paul (R?TX) and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee did not respond to AAAS's invitation. The Association of American Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges co-organized the event.

Although neither campaign would commit to a future science debate, Ross told the scientific community to continue to organize on science issues in the coming months. "You have to pound on the candidates," he said, emphasizing that his attendance showed how seriously the campaigns were taking the issue. "We get hundreds of these [requests], and we take very, very few of them," he added.

Warm Sea Urchins on Acid

By Erik Stokstad
ScienceNOW Daily News
18 February 2008

BOSTON?Marine biologists break out in a cold sweat when they think about the impact of greenhouse gases on the oceans. It's not just the fact that global warming raises the temperature of the sea, scientists are also worried about acidity. The burning of fossil fuels pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and when it gets absorbed by seawater, it turns into carbonic acid and makes the oceans more acidic (ScienceNOW, 17 February 2007).

Warmer waters are stressful for marine life, making organisms such as coral more vulnerable to disease. A lower ocean pH--i.e., a more acidic environment--makes it harder for marine invertebrates to construct their shells. But there has been little work looking at the combined effects of warmer waters and stronger acidity.

At a symposium here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher), physiologist Gretchen Hofmann of the University of California, Santa Barbara, reported that the combination can be deadly for the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, that she works on. DNA studies are also revealing details about how the urchins battle the stress. "This is cutting-edge," says marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University in Corvallis.

The first step in the research was to see what damage is caused by simply altering acidity alone. Hofmann has several tanks that contain water with varying acidity. Some are filled with normal seawater, whereas others have the stronger acidity that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts will plague ocean waters in 2100. In the more acidic tanks, it became harder for sea urchin larvae to build their skeletons, Hofmann reported. DNA microarrays by postdoc Anne Todgham showed that genes involved in constructing calcium carbonate skeletons were three times more active than normal. "The larva is desperately trying to make its body," Hofmann said.

The effort takes a toll on the larvae. Those in the most acidic water grow "short and stumpy" skeletons, according to unpublished work by graduate student LaTisha Hammond and postdoc Mike O'Donnell. Other students in Hofmann's lab are modeling how those deformities might affect the distance larvae travel before settling down. It's not clear what the impact might be on adults, but Hofmann suspects that they could end up smaller than usual. That could hurt the valuable fishery for urchins, which are harvested for their eggs.

In other experiments, Hoffmann's team added the additional stress of heat to the acidic water. Postdoc Nann Fangue found that larvae survive brief stints in warmer water just fine if they live in normal temperature or high acidity. But subject them to water 9%26deg;C warmer, and about 7%26#37; of the larvae in higher acidity water die, compared with 2%26#37; of those in water with normal acidity. Double the temperature and roughly 29%26#37; of larvae in acidic waters keel over, compared with 16%26#37; of controls.

Although average ocean temperatures aren't expected to rise that high, they can rise about that much in tide pools, for example. And the results show that even greater mortality can result from the effort to cope with greater acidity. "Gretchen has the story dead on with the urchins," says Andrew Baker of the University of Miami in Florida, who is studying the effects of temperature and acidity on corals. "Clearly the effects are worse together than separate."

Hofmann is now working with Victoria Fabry of California State University, San Marcos, to study the impact of acidity and temperature on another organism, Limacina helicina. This pteropod, roughly the size of a peppercorn, is a key part of the food web in the southern ocean. Hofmann and Fabry did experiments in Antarctica last month, and the frozen samples are being flown back to her lab for DNA analysis.

Related site

A report on the impact of ocean acidification on marine organisms

A Grand Diversion in Louisiana

By Erik Stokstad
ScienceNOW Daily News
18 February 2008

BOSTON?Decades of draining, dredging, and other mistreatment have taken a severe toll on Louisiana wetlands. Hurricane Katrina focused a spotlight on the need to restore the marshes, which can lessen the risk of water surging toward New Orleans. But any such plan would have to compete for money with other flood-protection projects, such as raising levees. Results of a new model, unveiled here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher), may help win support for repairing the wetlands.

Louisiana wetlands face extreme challenges. Sea level is rising and the ground is sinking, both of which threaten to drown the marshes. Normally, sediment deposited by the Mississippi River helps build up the delta, allowing the marshes to stay above water. But engineering of the river to make it better for shipping has caused much of its sediment to flow into deep water.

One proposal to fix this is to divert river water out of the main channel so that it flows closer to shore. As sediment gets dumped there, it would build land that would turn into wetlands. It's never been clear exactly how much land would be created, however. That makes it harder to sell the concept to politicians, says ecologist Robert Twilley of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

So Twilley teamed up with geoscientist Christopher Paola of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and others. About 15 years ago, Paola helped design a computer model that predicts how rivers create deltas. It has been used extensively to help mining companies figure out how sediment from tailings will fill up their storage ponds. With conservative assumptions about sea level rise and the subsidence of the area, two diversion structures--large concrete sluices placed in the river embankment--would create about 700 square kilometers of land over 30 years, said Gary Parker of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. If sea level rises more slowly and land sinks less, the structures would build up 1000 square kilometers off the present coast.

"This is the largest and most aggressive element of a comprehensive plan," Twilley says. It would cost perhaps $500 million a year to build and operate. He hopes that the new analysis will persuade state legislators of the importance of the project. "They are going to have to put this in the top basket. I feel confident that the state will do that."

Denise Reed of the University of New Orleans in Louisiana agrees that the project is a good idea and that the new analysis may help win support for it. "This is pretty crucial information," she says.

I Hear You, My Monkey Brother

By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
11 February 2008

Monkeys have a brain region that responds selectively to the voices of other monkeys, according to new research. The finding should pave the way for studies on the neural basis of voice recognition and may help shed light on how the human brain changed as speech and language evolved.

In people, a small patch of the temporal lobe of the brain revs up in response to human speech but not to other sounds. This region is thought to play a role in recognizing individuals by voice, a talent we share with many animals. Yet little is known about the neural basis of voice recognition in any species. Recent studies with monkeys have claimed to demonstrate a voice region analogous to that in humans, but not all scientists have been convinced.

In the new study, neuroscientists led by Christopher Petkov and Nikos Logothetis, both of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in T?bingen, Germany, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor brain activity in macaques while the monkeys listened to a variety of sounds. Those included coos, grunts, and other macaque vocalizations, as well as the calls of other animals and natural noises such as thunder and running water. A small region of the monkeys' temporal lobes became active in response to monkey voices but not to other sounds, the researchers report online this week in Nature Neuroscience. The team also found that this brain region can distinguish the voices of individual monkeys: Responses diminished when the researchers played one monkey's voice repeatedly but perked up again when a new voice was played.

The monkey voice region may provide clues to the evolution of speech, Petkov says. One possibility, he notes, is that neural circuits in the brains of our distant primate ancestors, used for recognizing and evaluating the calls of other individuals, became the precursors for the neural circuits that evolved to handle more complex verbal communication such as speech.

"They've done a really nice job" of demonstrating that monkeys have a voice region very similar to that in the human brain, says neuroscientist Asif Ghazanfar of Princeton University. It's noteworthy, however, that the monkey and human voice regions are positioned somewhat differently in their respective temporal lobes, Ghazanfar says. He suspects that the voice-recognition region of our primate ancestors' brains migrated toward more recently evolved regions that decode and produce speech in the human brain--an example of the kind of neural reorganization that happened as language evolved.

Solid-State Drive Tech Breaks a Few Records

Pushing the envelope in solid-state drive (SSD) performance isn't anything to scoff at. But industry-watchers are far more excited about the potential impact that Texas Memory Systems' latest results could have in encouraging enterprises to adopt the technology. The vendor's RamSan-400 SSD product hit 291,208.58 input/output requests per second (IOPS), with an average response time of 0.86 milliseconds -- a record for benchmarking tests conducted through the Storage Performance Council (SPC), a storage industry association and standards body. Prior to the testing -- aimed at simulating typical online transaction processing environments -- IBM had held the SPC-1 performance record for a system built around its System Storage and SAN Volume Controller. Perhaps just as importantly, the latest test results also set a new price/performance record of 67 cents per IOPS. According to the SPC, the audited benchmark results validate that high computing performance can be achieved at a reasonable cost. "This makes the assertion that the technology can deliver at a price that's reasonable and demonstrates outstanding performance," Walter Baker, the association's administrator, told InternetNews.com. "It's not the end-all or be-all -- nothing's hit that level -- but if a enterprise needs speed and performance, it can be achieved at a good cost." The news comes as RAM- and flash-based SSD are gaining prominence, but the high costs and low capacities compared to magnetic media have thus far limited uptake among enterprise buyers. RAM-based solutions like Texas Memory's differ from flash-based offerings by nearly eliminating I/O wait time -- flash offers fast read rates but far slower write capability -- and application performance similar to hard disk RAID systems. Solutions based on RAM are typically much more pricey than flash offerings, however, with prices at about $700 per gigabyte compared to a $150 range. Additionally, both types are dramatically more expensive than magnetic media. The news also comes shortly after enterprise storage giant EMC began adding flash-based SSDs to its high-end Symmetrix DMX-4 systems -- a move lauded by industry experts as signaling to businesses that flash-based storage may be ready for prime time. However, one industry analyst noted that many of today's enterprises are taxing limits in compute workloads and RAM-based SDD could prove to be the right solution for specific needs. "This technology is still costly, much more expensive than smaller flash-based SSD options, but then again, the two approaches meet different needs," Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis, told . "The question is whether you need one big system, a powerful system like Texas Memory's, or can you get needed results in smaller, flash-based solutions that cost much less." "What this %26#91;benchmark results%26#93; will do, however, is help make people much more aware of the performance you get with pure SSD," he added. Not surprisingly, Texas Memory Systems is also proud of the record-setting performance. "These results tell a few different stories," Woody Hutsell, executive vice president at Texas Memory Systems, told InternetNews.com. "One, it tells our customers we have the number-one component to use. It demonstrates our technology has the best performance of any storage company when it comes to benchmarks. So when organizations need to buy high-performance they know we offer the lowest-cost solution. "It also pushes this technology further in adoption and improves the confidence factor," he added. The company set the new record using standard white box servers with 4GB RamSan-400 SSDs. QLogic QLE2462 host bus adapters and SANbox 5600 fabric switches were the only SAN elements included in the benchmarking. The results mark the second time Texas Memory has put its product through benchmark testing. The first effort, four years ago, also proved record-setting, Hutsell said. "A few years have passed and we knew the product had improved and we wanted to take the record back," he said.

With EqualLogic Buy Done, Dell Intros New Storage Line

SAN FRANCISCO -- Dell has just closed its acquisition of storage vendor EqualLogic and is wasting no time in ramping up its offerings. At a press briefing here the company today announced its first Dell-branded product, the Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series, a mid- to high-end storage offering that fills out Dell's product line. The PS5000 line is for companies with little or no Fibre Channel networking because it uses iSCSI (define) instead. The iSCSI protocol is an IP-based specification that allows SCSI devices to be controlled over an IP network. There will be three versions of the new storage line, the PS5000E, PS5000X and PS5000XV. The "E" model will be the high-capacity serial ATA unit, while the "X" will use serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives. The "XV" is based on high-speed, 15,000 RPM SAS drives, according to Praveen Asthana, director of enterprise storage at Dell. The PS5000E, because it uses SATA drives, is meant for high-capacity needs that can get by with slower performance. Using 1TB drives in the PS5000's four-by-four chassis, it can hold up to 16TB of storage. The higher-performance SAS drives used in the X and VX lines have much lower capacity: 6.4TB max for the X and 4.8TB for the XV with all 16 bays filled. All three units of the PS5000 line sit between Dell's mid-range AX series and the high-end CX series, which the company built in cooperation with EMC -- a partnership that Dell said it plans to continue. "This makes Dell an extremely broad provider of storage, meeting all of our customer needs, and provides a really broad product portfolio for our customers," he said. Additionally, the PS5000 series is backward-compatible with existing EqualLogic systems and can be run from the same console management software. EqualLogic makes Dell a player in storage, an area where it's been lacking, said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT Research. "If you look at HP and IBM and even Sun, there's a real benefit to a server vendor to offer a full storage solution, and Dell was finding it harder to compete without one," he told InternetNews.com. Prior to the acquisition, the best Dell could manage for storage was entry-level products like the MD3000i, he added.