Bill Gates spurs disease research with $250 million
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is to plough an extra quarter of a billion dollars into research on neglected diseases.
The money will be channelled through the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, which was set up to fund studies of 14 major scientific obstacles to the treatment and control of killer diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.
The initiative, a joint project between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, based in Seattle, Washington, and the US National Institutes of Health, was launched in 2003. With the new funds it will have almost half a billion dollars to distribute to research projects (see Nature 421, 461–462; 200310.1038/421461a).
The first round of grants, chosen from 1,500 proposals received from more than 10,000 scientists in 75 countries, are expected to be confirmed this summer.
Gates made his announcement on 16 May when he addressed ministers from 192 states at the annual assembly meeting of the World Health Organization in Geneva.
NASA team digs deep to ease that sinking feeling
NASA/JPL
Pitting their wits: NASA researchers use a model to test ways of freeing their stranded Mars rover.
Scientists at NASA have got out their buckets and spades in a bid to work out how to free Opportunity, the Mars rover that has been stuck in a sand dune since 26 April.
The researchers have placed a clone of Opportunity in an artificial dune at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. When the dune was made of beach sand, a test rover easily got itself out, so the team switched to a mix that included clay powder, which more closely resembles the powdery low-traction Mars sand.
Their tests suggest that after spinning its wheels a bit, the rover should be able to get moving without sinking further into the sand. The plan could be put into action next week.
Poor countries slip further behind in health research
Low-income countries are publishing a smaller fraction of health-related scientific papers than they were a decade ago, say researchers at the World Health Organization.
The team, which looked at almost 3.5 million articles published in more than 4,000 journals between 1992 and 2001, found that output from the world's 63 poorest countries had dropped by about a tenth to just 0.3% of all health publications. Whereas middle-income nations such as China and Turkey have boosted their output by some 20–30%, just one poor nation — India — produced a substantial number of papers (G. Paraje, R. Sadana and G. Karam Science 308, 959–960; 2005).
Centenary stimulates top scientists' wish-list
What's the one thing you wish more people grasped about science? That was the question posed to some 270 leading scientists, whose responses have now been published for all to ponder on the Internet.
The results from the survey, commissioned by the online magazine Spiked to mark the centenary of the equation e=mc2, reveal the desire of many scientists to show what sets the scientific method apart from other spheres of intellectual endeavour.
"I should teach the world that science is the art of doubt, not of certainty," reads the contribution from Frances Ashcroft, a physiologist at the University of Oxford, UK. "Science is the antithesis of faith, and of the popular view that science provides immutable theories and fixed facts about the world in which we live."
The survey was launched on 10 May with a panel discussion at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London.
Rival bidders shape up in fight to run Los Alamos
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico will almost certainly be run by an academic–industrial partnership when the current contract to manage the labs expires on 30 September.
The University of California, which has operated the giant nuclear-weapons research facility for more than 60 years, announced on 11 May that it is joining forces with an industrial team led by Bechtel to bid for the new contract.
Bechtel, a global construction and management firm based in San Francisco, will collaborate on the bid with two nuclear-industry firms: BWX Technologies of Lynchburg, Virginia, and the Washington Group International of Boise, Idaho.
The only other bidder — technology firm Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, Maryland — said on 12 May that it would work with the University of Texas on its proposal. Texas regents have set aside $1.2 million for the bid.
Tsunami silt brings dark prospects for coral reef
Last December's tsunami in southeast Asia blanketed the coral reefs of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands with thick layers of silt and sand. Removing it will require "huge effort and several years", say Indian oceanographers.
By shutting off sunlight, the sand will eventually choke the marine species that coexist with the corals, upsetting the intricate ecological balance, according to researchers who returned from a ship-based survey on 7 May. The reef, which stretches for 800 kilometres from Indonesia to Myanmar, is home to 200 coral species — second only to Australia's Great Barrier Reef in species diversity.
In a parallel survey using Global Positioning System satellites, Indian geologists found that the 9.3-magnitude quake that triggered the tsunami also shifted the Nicobar Islands southwest by about five metres and sank some of the Andaman Islands by as much as one metre. Officials say the satellite and coral-reef observations will continue on a long-term basis.
