»in the media«

Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff joins an expedition to Svalbard, an archipelago midway between Norway and the North Pole. Recently, scientists found geological formations on Spitsbergen (its largest island) that resembles Martian minerals (so called blueberries). Kleine-Brockhoff reports in Die Zeit (11.5.2006) about the work of the international research team, the comparisons drawn between geology on Earth and Mars, the possibility of ancient life forms on our neighbour planet and options to reveal them. Preliminary studies to test for the latter have been done on Svalbard.

Paul Crutzen, the Nobel laureate of 1995 in chemistry for unravelling the chemical mechanisms behind the ozone layer's destruction, initiates a heavy debate among climate scientists: In a forthcoming article of the journal Climate Change he proposes an artificial injection of sulphur into the upper atmosphere. Thus, sulphuric aerosols or particles will reflect sun light or lead to cloud formation to reflect the light. Climate will cool down. For Crutzen who is the very senior scientist in climate change his initiative is some kind of last resort. He doesn't believe politics to succeed in cutting greenhouse gases. Well, as Samiha Shafy reports in Der Spiegel (10.7.2006) Crutzen has critics in his community. On the one hand they say the climate system is too complex to consider a simple measure to fit for everything. Nobody knows exactly how the ten million tons of sulphur needed will behave in altitudes between ten and 50 kilometers. On the other hand you might think: well, there's something at hand to geo-engineer our climate, take it easy, relax and return to business as usual.

The United Nations environment programme UNEP and the Council of Europe demand more action to protect the environment and biodiversity in Europe. Actually, there's lots of paperwork (treaties, legislations, programmes) but little efforts bring them to practice. Most discrepancies are in the protection of fisheries and woods, writes Inke Suhr in Süddeutsche Zeitung (28.2.2006). In 2003 an agreement was reached to stop the sprawling of urban areas. But up to now many European countries didn't even manage to figure out how much land is lost to urbanisation. Further, to little efforts are made to prevent the introduction of alien species.

A star is exploding as a super nova next door, and astronomers are pointing their devices on it, reports Andrew Pollack in the NY Times (24.2.2006). Actually, it's beyond the unaided eye; some 440 million light-years away in the constellation Aries.

A controversial paper suggests that prions, particular proteins, may not be the cause for mad cow disease or scrapie. Well, that's a quite provoking news, because the prion hypothesis won a Nobel Prize, and then became a dogma. The point is, what the fellow experts think. Aren't they convinced or sure of their evidence? "Experts contacted by Nature Medicine declined to comment on the controversial paper," writes Micheal Hopkin in Nature Medicine (27.4.2006). Strange.

In a comment on future energy supplies the NY Times (1.5.2006) favours ethanol as a substitute for fossil fuels. In particular cellulosic ethanol which is produced "from a range of crops, native grasses like switchgrass and even the waste components of farming and forestry" is promising as for it consume less energy for producing it than ethanol from corn. However, lot of research and investment is necessary to substitute a relevant share in petrol use. The company Iogen which is already deploying the technique calculates the investment of 300 Dollars for a first commercial plant. Well, President Bush only allocates some 150 Million Dollars for research, development and production altogether. The critics point, according to a news report by AFP (2.5.2006), onto the energy costs you have for ethanol production, pesticides and fertilizer usage for the fields which may pollute water, and necessary changes in infrastructures both for filling stations and agriculture.

Robert Rentzsch arranges for Nature online (24.2.2006) a FAQ on blood doping, a method that may be used by athletes at the Olympic Winter Games in Turin, Italy, to boost their performance. Includes also a brief description of the role of EPO in doping.

It's a rare event that pure science from a European institution makes it into a NY Times editorial (22.7.2006). This time it's the project by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome. "The hope is that the Neanderthal genome will answer basic questions about those hominids that scientists have been unable to resolve using only the fossil evidence. Could Neanderthals talk? Did they interbreed with humans? These are some of the things the genome might reveal.
But the real question to be answered is this: Which genes in our own genome do we share with Neanderthals and which belong uniquely to us?" asks the editorial of the NY Times.

Christopher Schrader writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung (28.9.2006) about the climate researcher James Hansen of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies who published a recent review on climate change. According to Hansen global average temperatures rise now at a rate of 0.2 degrees Celsius a decade. That's roughly according to Hansen's earlier predictions that were criticized heavily by novelist Michael Crichton in his book State of Fear. Hence, commentators regard Hansen's paper in first line as a rebuttal of Crichton's attack on the integrity of Hansen.

Munich is about to become Germany's academic powerhouse after two universities of this city won the country's Excellence Initiative, writes Gretchen Vogel in her piece for Science online (13.10.2006). The results of the competition, designed to crown a sort of German Ivy League, brought good news to southern Germany. Two of the three big winners are in Munich: the Technical University Munich (TUM) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU). The third is the Technical University Karlsruhe, in southwest Germany.

The Excellence Initiative aims to promote some lighthouses in German science that might compete with universities like Oxford and Cambridge (that btw ranked first and second in a recent worldwide comparison). Three top universities get now some extra money to pursue some kind of scientific business plan for excellence and quality. Several other universities get money for smaller scientific programmes like graduate schools or so called excellence clusters.