Los Alamos chief quits in wake of staff disaffection
The turbulent two-year reign of Los Alamos National Laboratory head Peter Nanos ended on 6 May with his resignation.
A former Navy admiral, Nanos was brought in after a series of embarrassing incidents at the lab involving classified material. But his aggressive management style prompted unrest among the lab's more than 10,000 employees, particularly when he accused researchers of operating in a "cowboy culture" (see Nature 433, 447; 200510.1038/433447a). One vocal insider website, "LANL: The Real Story", written by computer scientist Doug Richards, is said to have put particular pressure on Nanos.
Physicist Robert Kuckuck, a former senior administrator at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, will take over from 16 May, with Nanos moving to the defence department.
Power plant tests reactions to Chernobyl-style disaster
A nuclear power station in Romania was due this week to be the scene of a full-scale emergency operation for a nuclear accident — but it's only a simulation.
Officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will lead a team of seven international organizations on 11 May as they test the communication systems needed to deal with a Chernobyl-style accident. Plans for the initial reporting of an emergency and the health measures needed for those exposed to radioactive fallout will be assessed using a simulated disaster at the Cernavoda plant in eastern Romania.
The IAEA team will also track weather patterns to monitor where the fallout would land and which neighbouring countries to notify. Although the Chernobyl disaster occurred in what is now the Ukraine, much of the roughly 150,000 square kilometres of land that was contaminated lies to the north in Belarus.
Health agency logs on to beat fake drugs
The World Health Organization (WHO) is harnessing the power of the Internet in its fight against counterfeit drugs — fake products that contain little, no or the wrong active ingredients.
Counterfeit drugs account for up to 10% of all medicines and are believed to kill thousands each year across the developing world (see Nature 434, 132–136; 200510.1038/434132a). They are smuggled across international borders, with many originating in China and India.
To combat this, the WHO wants health officials and pharmaceutical companies in the Asia-Pacific region to share information about fake drugs on a new website. The Rapid Alert System, launched last week at a meeting in Manila, the Philippines, will be useful if users are committed to sharing information, experts say. In the past, drug companies have proved reluctant to disclose information about counterfeiting.
Europe prepares to launch grand vision for space
The European Space Agency (ESA) is this week set to put the finishing touches to its science programme for 2015–25. The final version of the plan, known as Cosmic Vision, is so grand that ESA will need to forge new links with international partners, say agency advisers.
The proposals include sending a fleet of small spacecraft to Jupiter and its moons, putting a probe carrying clouds of ultracold atoms into orbit to test quantum gravity, and launching a space interferometer that can image planets outside the Solar System in the infrared.
The budget, to be decided in December, is expected to total 
4 billion (US$5 billion). Some big programmes will have to be done cooperatively, say ESA science advisers, but the success of the Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn, a joint venture with NASA, and collaborations with Russia, China, Japan and India have paved the way, they add.
Who dares, wins a million for research
The pot of cash for science prizes just got bigger. In an attempt to expand on the fields covered by the Nobel prizes, philanthropist Fred Kavli has created three million-dollar awards in nanotechnology, neuroscience and astrophysics.
Norwegian-born Kavli, who made his fortune in California selling sensors for aircraft, says he hopes the prizes will be more responsive to current research than the Nobels. "I think we'll be more daring," he says. The Nobels include awards for physics, chemistry and medicine, but are often bestowed years or even decades after the events that merited them.
The three new prizes, which will focus on basic research and be decided by a panel of international experts, will be awarded every two years from 2008. They will be presented in cooperation with the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Norwegian government.
US gives stamp of approval to scientists
Four stamps that bear the portraits of famous American scientists were released on 4 May by the US Postal Service.
The 37-cent stamps, which were created by artist Victor Stabin, include one that features the mathematician and physicist John von Neumann. Born in Hungary in 1903, von Neumann made significant contributions to game theory and quantum mechanics. He was also dubbed the 'father of the computer' for his theoretical studies of memory and logic circuits.
USPS
The three other stamps feature geneticist Barbara McClintock and physicists Josiah Willard Gibbs and Richard Feynman. The US Postal Service has put out stamp series before on such themes as inventors or architects, but this is the first group of stamps featuring scientists.
