Having come to expect bad news, British astronomers were given a ray of hope in February, when the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) reversed its decision to withdraw from the Gemini project. Gemini's telescopes in Chile and Hawaii offer peerless views of the entire sky at visible and infrared wavelengths, and the original decision of the STFC was seen as devastating.
But sadly it's now business as usual, as the STFC has said that the e-Merlin project is threatened with closure even before it starts. e-Merlin is an upgrade of Merlin, a system that sends the signals of six radio telescopes around Britain by radio link-up to Jodrell Bank near Manchester. The new system will replace the radio links with optical cables, which will be faster and able to carry more data. It will boost the sensitivity of observations by a factor of 30, revealing things which cannot be seen at present—for example, how discs of dust around stars evolve into planetary systems.
e-Merlin is nearly complete, but the STFC may pull its funding in 2009. That would surely axe jobs at Jodrell Bank and the astronomy department at Manchester University, and harm Britain's international standing in radio astronomy. With more than ten other projects on the STFC's endangered list, scientists are wondering where the next blow will fall. There are no obvious duds on the list, yet the STFC has to make up its £80m deficit somehow. But it is the opaque and high-handed way the decisions are being taken that is creating such fury.
Of hobbits and homo floresiensis
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. The rest of the story is not fit for children, mired as it is in accusations of grave-robbing and incompetence. The "hobbits" in question are tiny humans, some just three feet tall, whose bones have been found in caves on islands in Micronesia, in the south Pacific. The discoverers, Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and his colleagues, think this casts doubt on the status of the diminutive Homo floresiensis remains found in Indonesia in 2003. H floresiensis was believed to be a new species that lived until 13,000 years ago. But Berger's bones date from 1,400 years ago, and, the thinking goes, if humans could be that small that recently, H floresiensis may not be a new species after all.
But others say Berger's team are misrepresenting their find. They claim the new bones are no smaller than those of currently existing "pygmy" groups, and so may not be significant. And the species status of H floresiensis does not rest on size alone, but on anatomical analysis.
Berger's team also face accusations of cultural insensitivity for poking into caves that locals regard as sacred burial places. And Berger's work was partly funded by the National Geographic Society, whose film about the study was released before Berger's paper was published. Berger insists that he wasn't told about that, but to other scientists, it seems suspiciously like grandstanding. "This looks like a classic example of what can go wrong when science and the review process are driven by popular media," palaeoanthropologist Tim White told Nature.
Nuclear aid with strings attached
As well as sabre-rattling, the Bush administration has a softer strategy for dealing with nuclear rogue states. In 2006, it set up a club for suitably vetted nations called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). Group members with "secure, advanced nuclear capabilities" provide nuclear fuel to, and deal with the waste from, other nations who agree to peaceful uses of nuclear power only. It's a kind of "nuclear aid" scheme with strings attached: we give you the fuel and clean up after you, as long as you use it the way we tell you to. Members will share information on reactor design, for example, but not on reprocessing of spent fuel, which can be used to extract military-grade fissile material. Waste will be shipped to a select band of reprocessing nations, including China, Russia, France, Japan and the US itself.
The GNEP is not without merit. It may, as claimed, promote non-proliferation of nuclear arms, and it makes sense for the burden of generating energy without fossil fuels to be shared internationally. But the prospect of large amounts of nuclear waste being shipped around the planet is worrying. More troublingly still, many nuclear advocates think the reprocessing technology is not up to the task. John Deutsch of MIT, a specialist in nuclear energy and security, calls GNEP "hugely expensive, hugely misdirected and hugely out of sync with the needs of the industry and the nation."
The US department of energy's related plans to build a massive reprocessing facility have been called "a recipe for disaster" by the Federation of American Scientists, which adds that "GNEP has the potential to become the greatest technological debacle in US history." The federation accuses the department of misselling the idea as a green-sounding "recycling" scheme. Nonetheless, in February Britain signed up as the GNEP's 21st member, even though we already face an estimated £30bn bill for cleaning up our own reprocessing facility at Sellafield.
