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Members of the National Science Board today delivered to the President and the Congress Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 (SEI'08), the Board's biennial report on the state of science and engineering research and education in the United States. Called the "gold standard," it is the most comprehensive source of information on research and development conducted by universities, industry, the federal government and the international science and engineering enterprise.
The highlights; we spend a lot overall but not enough on basic research, the public supports science and spending, and researchers are perhaps a little too reliant on federal funding.
In addition to SEI'08, the Board, concerned that the data revealed disturbing trends with serious policy implications, published a companion piece, Research and Development: Essential Foundation for U.S. Competitiveness in a Global Economy. In this policy statement and in presentations in the U.S. House of Representatives, National Science Board Chairman Steven Beering, Subcommittee Chairman on SEI'08 Louis Lanzerotti and SEI'08 Subcommittee Member Arthur Reilly stressed the need for increased government and industry sharing of funding for basic research.
"These indicators come at an important time," said Chairman Beering. "The confluence of a range of indicators raises key questions about future U.S. high-technology industry's competitiveness in international markets and implications for highly skilled jobs at home."
The Board made three major recommendations:

By the time Congress mandated ethanol subsidies and usage in 2005, it was difficult to find anyone in the environmental community who thought it was a good idea - even Al Gore, who championed it for almost two decades, is against it now.
Worse, while in vogue it overshadowed something that was both more cost- and energy-effective; algae.
Microbiologists have always known that algae contains oil that can be turned into diesel fuel - and in better quantities than other alternatives. Soybeans produce about 50 gallons of oil per acre per year, and canola produces about 130. Algae, however, can produce about 4,000 gallons per acre a year. Algae requires only sunshine and non-drinkable water to grow.

In a ceremony at the National Federation of the Blind, NASA unveiled a new book that brings majestic images taken by its Great Observatories to the fingertips of the blind. The book will be available to the public through a wide variety of sources, including NASA libraries, the National Federation of the Blind, Library of Congress repositories, schools for the blind, libraries, museums, science centers and Ozone Publishing.
"Touch the Invisible Sky" is a 60-page book with color images of nebulae, stars, galaxies and some of the telescopes that captured the original pictures. Each image is embossed with lines, bumps and other textures. These raised patterns translate colors, shapes and other intricate details of the cosmic objects, allowing visually impaired people to experience them.

Probiotics, foods containing live 'friendly' bacteria that some evidence suggests helps in digestion, have a tangible effect on the metabolism, according to the results of a new study in the journal Molecular Systems Biology.
The research is the first to look in detail at how probiotics change the biochemistry of bugs known as gut microbes, which live in the gut and which play an important part in a person’s metabolic makeup.

Researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center have attempted to count the number of genes that contribute to obesity and body weight - and it isn't a pretty number.
The findings suggest that over 6,000 genes, almost 25 percent of the genome, could help determine an individual’s body weight.
“Reports describing the discovery of a new ‘obesity gene’ have become common in the scientific literature and also the popular press,” notes Monell behavioral geneticist Michael G. Tordoff, PhD, an author on the study. “Our results suggest that each newly discovered gene is just one of the many thousands that influence body weight, so a quick fix to the obesity problem is unlikely.”

Neutron stars can be considerably more massive than previously believed and it is more difficult to form black holes, according to new research developed by using the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Paulo Freire, an astronomer from the observatory, will present his research at the American Astronomical Society national meeting in Austin on Jan. 11.
In the cosmic continuum of dead, remnant stars, the Arecibo astronomers have increased the mass limit for when neutron stars turn into black holes.
“The matter at the center of a neutron star is highly incompressible. Our new measurements of the mass of neutron stars will help nuclear physicists understand the properties of super-dense matter,” said Freire.

Did Columbus and his men introduce the syphilis pathogen into Renaissance Europe after contracting it during their voyage to the New World? Or does syphilis have a much longer history in the Old World?
The most comprehensive comparative genetic analysis conducted on the family of bacteria (the treponemes) that cause syphilis and related diseases such as yaws, published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, supports the so-called “Columbian theory” of syphilis’s origins.
Kristin Harper (Emory University, Atlanta, USA) approached this centuries-old debate by using phylogenetics — the study of the evolutionary relatedness between organisms — to study 26 geographically disparate strains of treponemes.

A 53-page study designed to provide a comparison between the KC-767 Advanced Tanker (AT), based on the 767, and its major competitor in the U.S. Air Force's KC-135 Tanker Replacement Program states that a commercial 767 airplane is substantially more fuel efficient than the larger Airbus 330 - the 767 fleet burned 24 percent less fuel than the A-330s and would save approximately $14.6 billion in fuel costs.
That number is significant since the Air Force spent approximately $6.6 billion on aviation fuel costs in 2006.
The study used published data to calculate the fuel consumption of flying a fleet of 179 767-200ER and Airbus 330-200 airplanes over a 40-year service life.

It's a marketing expert's dream; if you want people to like your product more, charge a higher price.
Hilke Plassmann, et al, writing in PNAS, had test subjects undergo functional MRIs while they sipped wine. They were given 5 wines at 5 different prices.
Except there were only 3 wines. 2 were identical and just had different prices. People enjoyed the $90 wine more than they did when told the price was $10. Likewise a $5 wine was better when told it cost $45.

Dinosaurs had pregnancies as early as age 8, far before they reached their maximum adult size, a new study finds.
Researchers at Ohio University and University of California at Berkeley have found medullary bone – the same tissue that allows birds to develop eggshells – in two new dinosaur specimens: the meat-eater Allosaurus and the plant-eater Tenontosaurus. It’s also been found in Tyrannosaurus rex.
The discovery allowed researchers to pinpoint the age of these pregnant dinosaurs, which were 8, 10 and 18. That suggests that the creatures reached sexual maturity earlier than previously thought, according to the scientists.

Writing in Genes & Development, a research team led by Dr. Richard Behringer at MD Anderson Cancer Center report they they switched the mouse Prx1 gene regulatory element with the Prx1 gene regulatory region from a bat and the resulting transgenic mice displayed abnormally long forelimbs despite being separated by millions of years of evolution.
While forelimb length is just one of several key morphological changes that occurred during the evolution of the bat wing, this unprecedented finding demonstrates that evolution can be driven by changes in the patterns of gene expression, rather than solely by changes in the genes, themselves.
Prx1 is a paired-box homeodomain transcription factor, with an established role in limb bone growth. Dr.

Psychotherapies such as cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) are under-regulated in the UK and should be subject to the same standards of evidence as drugs, assert two experts in psychological medicine writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.