Recently in Science In Society

MacGregor Campbell, contributor

In a unanimous decision, the US Supreme court ruled on Wednesday that scientists and engineers working on government space programmes must submit to extensive background checks as a condition of their employment.

New Scientist reported on this case back in October, when oral arguments were heard. At issue was a 2005 lawsuit filed by 28 employees at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The suit sought to bar the institution from requiring background checks that the plaintiffs claimed violated their privacy.

Colin Barras, environment and life sciences news editor

(Image: Tom Hauck/Getty)

It might or might not be one of the greatest upsets in NFL history, but one thing is beyond doubt: Marshawn Lynch's heroic 67-yard touchdown that snatched an unlikely victory for Seattle Seahawks against New Orleans Saints moved the Earth - literally.

John Vidale at the University of Washington in Seattle is director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network - a collection of seismograph stations in Washington and Oregon used to monitor the Cascadia subduction zone. He's also one of the unlucky Seahawks fans who missed this week's game. But when Vidale caught up with the game highlights online, he saw something unusual.

Maggie McKee, physical sciences news editor

And then there was one. The ageing Tevatron collider will bow out of the race to find the elusive Higgs particle, thought to endow other particles with mass, later this year, leaving the task to its rival, the Large Hadron Collider.

The Tevatron, based at Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois, was set to shut down in September 2011. But last year, a panel that advises the US government on physics matters recommended extending (pdf) the Tevatron's operations by three years, to 2014, if additional funds could be added to the budget for high-energy physics.

Now, the US Department of Energy, which funds Fermilab, says no such funding is forthcoming. "Unfortunately, the current budgetary climate is very challenging," writes William F Brinkman, director of the DOE's Office of Science in a letter (pdf) to the advisory panel.

Debora MacKenzie, contributor

Scientists tend to feel they are singled out for more woe than most in the job stakes. But are they justified in their moaning?

A California-based job-search company called CareerCast has for several years compiled a ranking of jobs according to a desirability measure that goes well beyond income. For each type of job CareerCast figures in rankings of stress, physical demands, hazardous or unpleasant working environments, whether there's a lot of jobs going, and likelihood of pay increases, as well as salary.

And surprise, scientists and engineers come out looking rather good. 

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter

The announced closure of the Forensic Science Service - a leading research centre based in Birmingham, UK - will harm research, innovation and even the justice system, according to forensic scientists.

The decision to "wind down" operations to a close by March 2012 has been met by "disbelief and dismay" by campaigners who remain wary of the UK Home Office's claim to "ensure the orderly wind-down of FSS does not impact on police service customers or the wider criminal justice system".

Phil McKenna, contributor

(Image: Rex)

The US Senate is inching closer to voting on a US-Russian treaty that would significantly reduce both countries' nuclear arsenals.

Even if the US Congress ratifies the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), signed by US President Barack Obama and the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in April, the White House also announced support earlier this year for $80 billion of funds (pdf) over the next decade to sustain and modernise the US nuclear weapons stockpile, a 10 per cent increase from existing funding levels.

Does this new infusion of funding undermine the spirit of the treaty, by perpetuating America's "military-industrial complex", as arms control advocates and left-leaning bloggers have claimed? Or is it a savvy investment, needed to maintain even a reduced stockpile of weapons?

At first blush, the money appears to be a political scheme by Obama to secure Republican votes for arms reduction.

Djuke Veldhuis, contributor

A shortage of the sedative used during lethal injection executions in the US has spurred the search for a substitute. Last week, John David Duty became the first man to be executed in Oklahoma using pentobarbital, a drug normally used to sedate animals.

According to CBS news, Duty had challenged the state's decision to use pentobarbital, arguing it could be inhumane because there was a risk he might be paralyzed but still aware when a painful third drug is administered to stop the heart.

After a difficult gestation of 18 months, Barack Obama's administration has finally released guidelines (pdf) intended to provide scientific integrity in government. The goal is to ensure that scientists can do their research and provide advice to the US government without political interference.

John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, launched the four-page memo with a blog post, writing:

"The new memorandum describes the minimum standards expected as departments and agencies craft scientific integrity rules appropriate for their particular missions and cultures, including a clear prohibition on political interference in scientific processes and expanded assurances of transparency."

James Brooks and Djuke Veldhuis, contributors

If you thought the information displayed in the periodic table was set in stone, think again. In a change that may see high school chemistry students shaking their heads in dismay, more information is to be added to the tables that appear in the fronts of textbooks.

The way the atomic weights of ten elements - including hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen - are expressed is being modified to more accurately reflect their natural "isotopic" variation.  

Since its introduction in 1869, the periodic table of the elements has accumulated many new entries. Only last year, copernicium was accepted into the table as element 112. The latest change is quite different, however.

Elements occur in different forms, known as isotopes. Carbon, for example, exists as three isotopes, each with different atomic weights (C-12, C-13, and C-14) and these are found in differing concentrations in different places. As a result, the periodic table currently contains atomic weights as an average of these different isotopic weights.

Jamie Condliffe, reporter

The latest way to save the planet isn't to install solar panels on your house or drive a Toyota Prius - it's to save your computer files differently.

The conservation organisation WWF has launched its own file type. So now as well as saving documents as .docs or PDFs, you can also save your work as a WWF file. It's just like the humble PDF, with one key difference: it can't be printed. It's a simple way to try to curb the amount of waste paper created in offices around the world.