Swift response by NASA satellite records a burst of activity

Washington

Well, that was quick. NASA's Swift satellite, launched on 20 November last year to speed up astronomers' responses to short-lived γ-ray bursts, has already started returning results. It bagged its first detection on 17 December while its main instrument, the Burst Alert Telescope, was still being calibrated. Four more detections followed in the next three days. By 10 January, the count was up to nine.

As soon as Swift detects a γ-ray burst, it zooms in with its X-ray, ultraviolet and optical telescopes (see Nature 431, 1035; 2004 ), although so far this has been done manually. If scientists are to learn about the origins of γ-ray bursts — the collapse of a star into a black hole, perhaps — Swift must respond quickly, as these elusive events last barely a few minutes.

Project scientists had initially predicted that Swift would see at least 100 bursts a year. But “it looks like we'll have more than that,” says principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Auctioneers size up domed project for Arizona spa

San Diego

Paradise cost: Biosphere 2 is offered for sale, at an unspecified price, for miscellaneous use. Credit: CBRE

An Arizona research centre designed to test man's impact on the environment is up for sale.

Opened in 1991, Biosphere 2 was the $200-million dream of Ed Bass, a Texas billionaire interested in the environment. The 1.3-hectare greenhouse ecosystem near Tucson was intended to mimic the Earth's environment and conditions for future space colonies. It was home to eight ‘biospherians’ for two years, before the experiment was wound up amid bickering and health concerns (see Nature 368, 88; 1994 10.1038/368088a0)

In 1996, New-York-based Columbia University took over the complex, seeking to make the facility an environmental research laboratory. But by 2003, the university had stopped managing the project.

With no other universities interested, the 56-hectare site, including 70 buildings, was put on the market by Bass's company Decisions Investment of Fort Worth, Texas. A Tucson-based real-estate agent, CB Richard Ellis, has offered it for bids, with no price listed, as a potential health spa, school or biotechnology facility.

United States cottons on to Monsanto bribery

San Diego

The agrochemical company Monsanto last week agreed to pay the US government US$1.5 million to settle charges that it had bribed Indonesian officials in an attempt to win regulatory approval for its genetically modified cotton seed. The charges were brought by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Monsanto, based in St Louis, Missouri, acknowledged that its employees had paid $700,000 in bribes to unnamed Indonesian government officials between 1997 and 2002. The Monsanto employees failed to secure the legislative change they sought.

A federal criminal charge against the corporation for violating the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act will be held in abeyance for three years while Monsanto's performance is monitored by an outside auditor. The charge will be dismissed if no other problems arise.

“Monsanto accepts full responsibility for these improper activities,” said company counsel Charles Burson. He added that the employees involved had been fired.

Boost for Indian science as advisory board is revived

New Delhi

India's prime minister Manmohan Singh has announced the resurrection of a high-level scientific advisory council. The council will be headed by chemist C. N. R. Rao, who founded the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore. Rao is also president of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, based in Trieste, Italy. His new position may carry the rank of government minister, although this will depend on future discussions.

Rao headed the earlier council until the fall of the Congress government in the 1996 elections. Although the council continued to exist on paper, it was in practice moribund. Its revival under the dynamic Rao has been widely welcomed by Indian scientists. Rao says his priorities will be to reduce bureaucracy, strengthen the science base in universities and make science a stronger component in development efforts.

Oxford to bridge gap between faith and fact

London

Subjective human experience and the abstract world of belief will be the focal points for a newly set up Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind.

The UK centre is being funded for its first two years by a US$2-million grant from the John Templeton Foundation in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, which supports research on the interface between science and religion.

The work will be coordinated by six departments at the University of Oxford, and will be headed by neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Among the projects to be tackled are how social phenomena such as terrorism are driven by religious beliefs.

Young talent unveiled in Titan art competition

Munich

Credit: X. FANG/THE PLANETARY SOCIETY

Two 15-year-old girls have landed top prizes in a competition to depict what might lie beneath the haze that envelops Saturn's biggest moon.

Chelsey Tyler, from Harrisburg, North Carolina, beat 435 people from 35 countries to scoop the overall prize with “Chaos Beneath the Veil”, and Xinlu Fang, currently living in McAllen, Texas, took a first prize with “By the Shores of Titan” (pictured right).

Fang imagined a landscape of lakes and mountains based on what scientists had expected to find — she describes it as “a plausible, yet slightly idealistic image”. But low-resolution radar images of Titan taken last month by the Saturn probe Cassini failed to show evidence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. If all goes well, images of what the surface really looks like will be beamed back by the Huygens craft, which has disengaged from Cassini and will parachute through Titan's atmosphere on 14 January.

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