Upstart forum created for German conferences

Several key players in the prestigious but troubled Dahlem Conferences, which have organized some 90 international, multidisciplinary meetings in Berlin since 1974, have resurfaced in Frankfurt as founders of a new forum. The FIAS forum, based at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, is meant to restore “the format and philosophy of the original Dahlem Workshop model,” the founders say.

Dahlem was integrated into the Free University Berlin in 1990. Troubles surfaced publicly in early 2005 when several senior scientists threatened to resign from the Dahlem board in protest against the firing of programme director Julia Lupp by Free University administrators (see Nature 433, 446; 2005). The protestors also alleged that Free University administrative actions had slowed down publication of manuscripts and undermined Dahlem's independence.

Lupp is now in Frankfurt, as programme director and series editor for the new forum. The forum will organize three or four workshops a year with “the same broad focus of the Dahlem workshops,” says Wolf Singer, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, and a driving force behind the new forum.

MIT team calls for carbon storage underground

Several new techniques are being tested to store carbon emissions. Credit: L. LEE PHOTOGRAPHY/CORBIS

Carbon from coal-burning power plants must be pumped underground to stop it contributing to climate change, according to a report, The Future of Coal, from scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The team used a computer model to simulate a world in which carbon emissions come at a price. When the cost to emit a tonne of carbon reaches about US$30, it will begin to make economic sense to pay for it to be sequestered underground, the study found.

The authors call for the construction of up to five large-scale installations, in different locations with different geologies, to show that carbon sequestering can work well. Current projects, they say, are too small and are not monitored well enough to provide useful information.

Big donor cuts Stanford cash because of oil ads

Gatherings of California's Bing family, the mega-donors to Stanford University, could have more energy now that the son has withdrawn a gift of $2.5 million promised to the university his father supports.

Hollywood movie producer Steve Bing last week withdrew the final instalment of a $25-million pledge to the university. A major backer of alternative energy, he rescinded the loan after citing television ads by oil giant ExxonMobil that hyped its own $100-million research grants to Stanford.

His parents, Helen and Peter Bing, have pledged more than $85 million to Stanford, where Peter Bing served on the board for 31 years, including five as chairman. Steve Bing is now calling on others to halt gifts to Stanford, an aide said.

Microsoft provides cash for synthetic biology

The burgeoning field of synthetic biology has a new supporter: Bill Gates.

On 13 March, Microsoft Research in Richmond, Washington, announced the award of $570,000 to six scientists in the United States and Canada to “stimulate foundational research in synthetic biology and DNA nanotechnology by identifying and addressing the unique computational challenges of these areas”. The grants will support projects that take computational approaches to tackle biological problems, such as rational gene, genome and protein design and construction.

One grant will help Herbert Sauro of the University of Washington in Seattle build a software tool to aid the assembly of biological devices. 'Plug-and-play' assembly of such devices has been hampered by a lack of standardized information about each biological part created by scientists. Sauro therefore hopes to use part of his grant to start working towards a consensus on design standards.

Germany counts the cost of climate change

Climate change could cost the German economy up to €800 billion (US$1.1 trillion) by 2050, according to a study by the Berlin-based German Institute for Economic Research (DIW).

The authors modelled the effects of a 4.5 °C warming on all economic sectors. Unstopped warming would cause an average loss of 0.5% in national economic growth per year, they conclude.

Few studies on the economic effect of climate change go down to the level of individual countries. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published last year, predicts long-term global economic losses of 5–20% if nothing is done to slow global warming (see Nature 444, 6–7; 2006). The less pessimistic predictions by the DIW are based on 'damage functions' developed by Richard Tol of Princeton University, who says that the Stern Review over-estimates the future costs of global warming.

Changing spots

The clouded leopard found on Borneo and Sumatra is an elusive, reclusive creature that lives in mountainous rainforest. So perhaps it is not a surprise that scientists have only now realized that this leopard is a different species than the clouded leopard of mainland Southeast Asia.

Credit: A. COMPOST/WWF-CANON

Genetic tests done at the US National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, suggest that Borneo's clouded leopard diverged from the mainland cat some 1.4 million years ago. Comparative studies of skins and furs held in museums also support the idea of separate species, say Andrew Kitchener of the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh and his colleagues in a recent paper in Current Biology.

In Borneo, the last holdout of the clouded leopard is an area of rainforest the size of Kansas, which government officials last month signed an agreement to protect.