White House sets up panel to vet foreign student visas

Washington

Plans to vet foreign students applying to study at US universities were announced last week by the White House.

A new committee, the Interagency Panel on Advanced Science and Security, will review applications for courses such as nuclear physics and engineering, which contain content that could be useful to terrorists.

Government officials say that the panel, which will come under the control of the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, will examine a small number of applications to determine whether a visa should be issued. Applications will be chosen for review on the basis of the student's personal background and country of origin.

News that the US government was planing to vet applications from foreign students had led to fears that the new controls could stifle scientific exchange (see Nature 416, 111; 2002). But many scientific associations were reportedly satisfied with the case-by-case approach to be taken by the new committee.

Selective genetics exhibition leaves out Mendel's religion

Munich

Science has triumphed over religion in an argument over an exhibition about Gregor Mendel, the Augustine monk who discovered the laws of heredity.

Mendel's former home, the Abbey of St Thomas in Brno in the Czech Republic, will host the new exhibition, which is due to open next week. The current abbot had asked that the religious background to Mendel's life and work form part of the exhibition (see Nature 410, 6; 2001), but dropped this request after the abbey agreed to host annual workshops on bioethics.

Kim Nasmyth, scientific director of the Vienna-based Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, who helps to promote genome research in Brno, says that the temporary exhibition will eventually become a permanent museum of genetics, possibly with affiliated laboratories.

Movie mogul's millions make UCLA's day

San Diego

Hollywood executive David Geffen once used a fake degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, to land his first job in the entertainment industry. Now he has repaid his fictitious alma mater with a donation of $200 million.

Geffen, who is now a partner in the DreamWorks SKG entertainment company of Los Angeles, announced he was making the donation on 7 May. The money, thought to be the largest ever donation to a US medical school, will be used for research and teaching at the renamed David Geffen School of Medicine.

Biographies of Geffen record that in 1964 he claimed that he had a degree in theatre arts in order to win a job in the mailroom of a major talent agency. He went on to become a billionaire after founding and operating music, movie and theatre ventures. He has also made contributions to AIDS research.

I think, therefore I am head of French research (for now)

Paris

For the next month at least, French research has a philosopher at its head and an engineer at the controls.

Luc Ferry, a renowned specialist in the philosophy of politics, was named minister of a new superministry that brings together education, youth and research. The ministry forms part of the new interim government formed by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin after Jacques Chirac's re-election to the French presidency on 5 May. Ferry is supported by François Loos, an industrial engineer who has been given responsibility for research and higher education within the new ministry.

Ferry and Loos, both of whom have advised previous governments, may only have five weeks to reflect on the future of French research and education. Next month's legislative elections will install a government for the coming five years, and could result in a change in ministers.

Cash cut hits Italian neutrino detector

Rome

Physicists in Italy have been forced to rethink a major neutrino experiment after CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory, cancelled its support in response to financial difficulties.

The OPERA experiment is designed to study a beam of neutrinos sent from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, through the Alps to the Gran Sasso laboratory in central Italy. CERN agreed in 1999 to help fund the experiment (see Nature 402, 847; 1999), which is intended to probe oscillations between different varieties of neutrino. The laboratory now says that it is withdrawing support for the detector in order to save SFr12.5 million (US$7.8 million), but that it will continue to build the beamline.

CERN is currently reviewing its financial commitments following the announcement earlier this year that its next major project, the Large Hadron Collider, was some SFr850 million over budget (see Nature 413, 441; 2001). Paolo Strolin, a high-energy physicist at the University of Naples and spokesperson for the OPERA experiment, says that the decision was not unexpected, and that OPERA researchers are now trying to simplify the detector's design without compromising its performance.

No love nest for rarest birds as they fly towards oblivion

Maui

Safe hands: but are human efforts enough to help the last of the po'ouli ward off extinction? Credit: C. BROSIUS

An attempt to bring together a pair of the world's rarest known birds has failed after the female headed home without meeting her intended mate.

Only three po'ouli (Melamprosops phaeosoma) are thought to survive on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The home ranges of the two surviving females and one male do not overlap, stunting the love lives of the finch-like birds. Earlier this month, researchers caught one of the females and released her in the male's home range at dusk. But she was on her way home by the middle of the next day, apparently without having encountered the male.

“It's obviously disappointing,” says Jim Groombridge, head of the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project. With the breeding season over, he and colleagues are considering their next move — probably captive breeding, either away from the forest or in an on-site aviary. But the birds are getting old. “We do not have a great deal of time left,” he says.

Birds have come back from the brink of extinction before. During the 1970s, the population of Mauritius kestrels fell to four, and that of New Zealand's Chatham robins to six. Thanks to captive-breeding programmes, there are now hundreds of each species.