In a unanimous vote last month, the Regents of the University of California created a corporate entity that, if spread to all UC campuses as some regents envision, promises to further privatize scientific research produced by taxpayer-funded laboratories. The entity, named Newco for the time being, also would block a substantial amount of UC research from being accessible to the public, and could reap big profits for corporations and investors that have ties to the well-connected businesspeople who will manage it.

Despite the sweeping changes the program portends for UC, the regents’ vote received virtually no press coverage. UC plans to first implement Newco at UCLA and its medical centers, but some regents, along with influential business leaders across the state, want similar entities installed at Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, and other campuses. UC Regents Chairwoman Sherry Lansing called Newco at UCLA a ‘pilot program’ for the entire UC system.

The purpose of Newco is to completely revamp how scientific discoveries made in UC laboratories – from new treatments for cancer to apps for smartphones – come to be used by the public. Traditionally, UC campuses have used their own technology transfer offices to make these decisions. But under Newco, decisions about […]

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Barack Obama has rewarded some of his most active campaign donors with plum jobs in foreign embassies, with the average amount raised by recent or imminent appointees soaring to $1.8m per post, according to a Guardian analysis.

The practice is hardly a new feature of US politics, but career diplomats in Washington are increasingly alarmed at how it has grown. One former ambassador described it as the selling of public office.

On Tuesday, Obama’s chief money-raiser Matthew Barzun became the latest major donor to be nominated as an ambassador, when the White House put him forward as the next representative to the Court of St James’s, a sought-after posting whose plush residence comes with a garden second only in size to that of Buckingham Palace.

As campaign finance chairman, Barzun helped raise $700m to fund President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. More than $2.3m of this was raised personally by Barzun, pictured, according to party records leaked to the New York Times, even though he had only just finished a posting as ambassador to Sweden after contributing to Obama’s first campaign.
Matthew Barzun, new US ambassador to London Obama’s chief money-raiser, Matthew Barzun. Photograph: Alamy

State Department veterans are increasingly concerned about the size of […]

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Large earthquakes around the world have been found to trigger tremors at US sites where wastewater from gas drilling operations is injected into the ground, a US study said Thursday.

For instance, the massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake in Japan in 2011 set off a swarm of earthquakes in the western Texas town of Snyder near the Cogdell oil field, culminating in a 4.5 magnitude quake there about six months later, said the research in the journal Science.

Similarly, small to mid-sized quakes were observed near active injection wells in Prague, Oklahoma following an 8.8 magnitude quake in Chile in 2010.

Uncommon seismic activity stirred that region 16 hours after the Chile quake with a 4.1 magnitude tremor, and it continued until a 5.7 magnitude quake in November 2011, said researchers at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The 2010 Chile quake also led to heightened seismic activity in Trinidad, Colorado, including a 5.3 magnitude quake in August 2011, in an area where methane is extracted from the coal bed and wastewater is reinjected into the Earth.

‘We weren’t really confident until we found the same pattern of little bursts of seismicity following the passage of seismic waves from several of these big earthquakes,

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A recent study suggests that Neandertals shared speech and language with modern humans

Fast-accumulating data seem to indicate that our close cousins, the Neandertals, were much more similar to us than imagined even a decade ago. But did they have anything like modern speech and language? And if so, what are the implications for understanding present-day linguistic diversity? The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson argue in their paper in Frontiers in Language Sciences that modern language and speech can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago.

The Neandertals have fascinated both the academic world and the general public ever since their discovery almost 200 years ago. Initially thought to be subhuman brutes incapable of anything but the most primitive of grunts, they were a successful form of humanity inhabiting vast swathes of western Eurasia for several hundreds of thousands of years, during harsh ages and milder interglacial periods. We knew that they were our closest cousins, sharing a common ancestor with us around half a million years ago (probably Homo heidelbergensis), but it was unclear what their cognitive capacities were like, […]

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WASHINGTON — In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for ‘high-risk persons or behaviors

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