Hannah Hoag

Tag: Nature News

  • Canada urged to tackle scientific misconduct

    More education, advice and transparency needed to improve integrity.

    As cases of questionable conduct among scientists stack up around the globe, a report commissioned by the Canadian government calls for a rethink of the country’s research system to boost honesty and curb misconduct.

    The recommendations, if implemented, would relax privacy laws that hamper the identification of individuals and institutions found guilty of research misconduct, and create an independent council to promote best practices and prevent research misconduct.

    The Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) — a not-for-profit corporation based in Ottawa that independently assesses science relevant to public issues — released the report1 today. “We look reasonably good compared to other countries in the world, but it is the committee’s conclusion that we have to do better,” says Paul Davenport, chairman of the panel responsible for the report and former president of the University of Western Ontario in London.

    In the current system, researchers aren’t assured of equal treatment from one university to the next when accused of misconduct, says James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers in Ottawa. “It is a dog’s breakfast. It is not a suitable way to deal with such an important issue, and it doesn’t instil confidence into the public, which is vital,” he says.

    Keep reading over at Nature News.

  • Sizing up the spill

    When the government began releasing estimates of the size of BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil well leak, scientists and environmental groups questioned the figures, certain the leak was larger. New research supports that notion. According to the study, published in Science, some 4.4 million barrels of oil has escaped into the ocean. It is the first independent, peer-reviewed paper on the size of the leak. (doi: 10.1126/science.1195840)

    Timothy Crone, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in Palisades, New York arrived at the estimate using a video analysis technique originally designed to study hydrothermal vents. He had spent years developing optical techniques to measure the flow of the underwater plumes that spew buoyant, superheated mineral-rich water. “Those flows are similar to what we were seeing in the oil flow event, and people were interested in what my estimates would be. People were asking what my estimates were, and I suppose I thought it was my duty,” he says.

    The story continues at Nature’ blog The Great Beyond.

  • Collapse of the ice titans

    Collapse of the ice titans

    Nature

    Monitoring Greenland’s melting glaciers from a 15-metre long sailboat.

    In early August, a 260-kilometre-square chunk of ice broke off the Petermann Glacier — the largest iceberg to calve in the Arctic Ocean since 1962.

    The collapse didn’t surprise Richard Bates, a geophysicist from the University of St Andrews, UK. During a visit to Petermann last summer, with glaciologists Jason Box of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University in Columbus and Alun Hubbard of Aberystwyth University, UK, the three noted rifts and meltwater — a sign of pending collapse. They installed time-lapse cameras atop the 900-metre-high cliffs and placed eight Global Positioning System (GPS) units along the glacier’s centre line to monitor the event.

    The researchers returned to Greenland late last month to retrieve the equipment and make other oceanographic and geophysical measurements, but were thwarted in their attempts to reach Petermann by ice. Nature caught up with Bates soon after he stepped off the Gambo, the sailboat that voyaged to the north end of Humboldt Glacier, which the team is also studying.

    What did you see while sailing up the Greenland coast?

    We saw a lot of calving glaciers. One 400-metre-long section of the glacier broke off just after we surveyed it. On our way to the Humboldt Glacier we got close to some major calving. It can seem very dangerous to have such a small boat in front of these glaciers, but you can be a lot more reactive and nimble than in large research vessels. But once you’re stuck in the ice, you’re stuck. We were pushing it a bit last week.

    Richard Bates.

    What work did you have planned for this trip?

    We worked our way up from central Greenland — the Lille, Store and Rink glaciers. We took time-lapse measurements and looked at the submerged portion of the glacier to see how fast the front is changing. We’ve been finding out that the submarine melt rates can be 20–100 times faster than the above-surface melt rates. We’re using a laser scanner to measure the changes above the water and using a sonar to look at the melt rates below the water.

    → Read the entire Q&A with Richard Bates at Nature.

    Richard Bates photo courtesy of Richard Bates, Petermann Ice Island photo courtesy of NASA.

  • Taxing times for Canadian postdocs

    Trainee researchers struggle to make ends meet after the government clarifies tax rules for grants.

    Staff, student or employee? The employment status of Canadian postdoctoral researchers remains unclear — and many are struggling with the tax issues that arise from the ambiguity.

    Some of Canada’s postdocs are categorized as associates with benefits, others are fellows with no employee status and, until recently, some had a tax-exempt status on a par with students. “We fall into this no-man’s land,” says Marianne Stanford, chair of the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars (CAPS) and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Ontario.

    Earlier this year, the federal government put an end to the tax-free wages that some postdocs had been enjoying since 2006. “Now there’s a two-tier system in labs where some of the people earning the degrees are getting more than those who already have them,” says Stanford. The move was a blow to postdocs, some of whom were recruited with the promise of tax-free earnings, and who put up with the wages because they were tax-free — although many feel they’re underpaid relative to their level of education.

    The tax-free wage came about in 2006 when the federal government introduced tax exemption for fellowships and awards. But as the government made clear in March, the exemption was only intended to apply to students enrolled in an educational programme. In a 2009 CAPS survey of 1,200 postdocs, 23% were not paying taxes on their fellowships. Many of those were in Quebec, where the provincial government considers postdocs to be stagières, or trainees, lumping them in with students.

    → Keep on reading the story in Nature

  • River metals linked to tar sand extraction

    River metals linked to tar sand extraction

    Researchers find that pollutants in Canada’s Athabasca River are not from natural sources.

    Oil-mining operations in Canada’s main tar sands region are releasing a range of heavy and toxic metals — including mercury, arsenic and lead — into a nearby river and its watershed, according to a new study.

    Research published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that 13 elements classified as priority pollutants (PPEs) by the US Environmental Protection Agency were found in the Athabasca River in the province of Alberta1. Seven of these were present at high enough concentrations to put aquatic life at risk. The findings are also of concern to human health.

    Almost all of Alberta’s known oil reserves — 172 billion barrels — are found within tar sands. The provincial government expects that oil production will increase from about 1.3 million barrels per day to 3 million barrels per day by 2018.

    Tar sands mining and upgrading — the process of extracting fuel from the mix of petroleum and sand or clay — produces sand, water, fine clays and minerals that are contained within tailing ponds.

    A team led by ecologist David Schindler of the University of Alberta in Edmonton set out to test the government and oil industry’s claims that the concentrations of elements in the Athabasca River and its tributaries were from natural sources and not tar sands development.

    The team took samples of surface water from the waterways upstream of the tar sands region and compared them with samples taken within the region — both upstream and downstream of mining projects. The researchers also looked at snow samples from many of the same areas towards the end of winter to look for airborne sources of PPEs, which would be discharged to surface waters when the snow melted.

    → Keep on reading at Nature

    Image courtesy of NormanEinstein and Wikimedia Commons.