Science, 6 March 2015;347:1041-1168 (table of contents)
(has many articles besides the following)
Marcia McNutt - Editorial (benefits of poster presentations and suggestions), 1047
Former Iowa State HIV researcher Dong-Pyou Han admits to fraud, 1050; Iowa State returned $500,000 to NIH.
Muons probe Fukushima's ruins, p1052 - "... countless muons, generated as cosmic rays slam into the upper atmosphere, are streaming through the reactor innards. Every minute, 10,000 or so of these wispy particles, cousins of the electron, hit every square meter of Earth's surface. Most flow through solid objects unmolested. But a few get absorbed or deflected in proportion to a material's density and thickness, a phenomenon physicists first put to use in the 1950s to study the geology of an underground hydroelectric facility in Australia and, in the 1960s, to show that no undiscovered chambers are hiding in the Pyramid of Khafre in Egypt ..."
Why many U.S. biology teachers are 'wishy-washy', p1054 -
"The Penn State paper, which labels such future teachers 'Enablers of Doubt,' is one of 15 articles on 'The Politics of Science' appearing this month in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The package explores why many people–regardless of their education or ideological and cultural affiliations–routinely disregard solid scientific evidence in forming their views (http://sci.ag/scienceattitudes).
"In their earlier study, in 2007, Berkman and Plutzer surveyed a national sample of 926 high school biology teachers to better understand teachers' role in the country's long-running battle over evolution. They found that 13% were openly sympathetic to creationism, while 28% provided students with a thorough understanding of evolution.The rest, which researchers label 'the cautious 60%,' spent as little time as possible teaching this most fundamental concept in modern biology."
A sustainable model for antibiotics, 1062
A return to the pre-antimicrobial era?, 1064
Being smart about SMART environmental targets, p1075 [SMART = specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic, and time-bound] - focus on the negotiation process
Rulers of the roost, p1077 - review of "Why did the chicken cross the worls? The epic saga of the bird that powers civilization, by Andrew Lawler.
Beyond general relativity, p1078 - review of Einstein's Unification, by Jeroen van Dongen. "Another factor accounting for the shift in Einstein's methodology was his gradual loss of confidence in the power of experimentation to settle fundamental issues. Van Dongen highlights two 1926 experiments, proposed by Einstein and performed by Emil Rupp, to probe the nature of light. Despite strong warning signs, Einstein failed to recognize that Rupp had forged his data to match Einstein's expectations. In 1935, Rupp was forced to retract the results of several other fraudulent experiments. Even after he realized that Rupp had fabricated his data, however, Einstein stood by his theoretical considerations (p.87)."
Special section: Einstein's vision, p1083
Einstein's milestones
Emily Conover, 1085-1097
In the century since Einstein formulated general relativity, scientists have built on his theory, with developments that were groundbreaking, tragic, and just plain strange.
"For theorists–if not for the rest of the world–seeing gravitational waves for the first time will be something of an anti-climax. 'We are so confident that gravitational waves exist that we don't actually need to see one,' says Marc Kamionkowski, a theorist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland."
Battle erupts over black holes, p1088 sidebar -
"In the 1930s, an up-and-coming physicist clashed with a distinguished member of the old guard over cosmic implications of general relativity.... The young rising star was the Indian-born physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, known as Chandra; his opponent, the astronomical powerhouse Arthur Eddington (see p.1085).... Chandra calculated that very massive stars were unstable and would collapse into nothingness at the end of their lives, producing black holes–a name coined decades later."
"Eddington was well known for viciously laying into prominent physicists. The British scientists James Jeans and Chandra's mentor, Edward Arthur Milne, had both suffered similar tongue-lashings. Yet Eddington's rejection hurt Chandra both personally and professionally. He left Britain for the United States and began working on other topics.
"Chandrasekhar's radical conclusions eventually did gain acceptance, as other physicists followed up on his results, and astronomers began seeing hints of black holes in exotic corners of the universe. The ultimate vindication came in 1983, when he won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work."
Einstein eschews peer review, p1092 sidebar - Einstein became indignant when he learned that his paper had received a critical review and withdrew it. The reviewer delicately approached Einstein and convinced him of an error. "Even though peer review had helped Einstein save face, he stuck to his guns and never published another scientific paper in the Physical Review."
Bringing general relativity down to earth, p1093, sidebar - "According to general relativity, time slows in a gravitational field; as a result, clocks closer to a gravitational mass run slower than those farther from it - an effect known as time dilation....For GPS to function, clocks on satellites and on the ground have to stay in sync, ..."