If you're a billionaire, what better way to spend your pocket change than to explore the deepest parts of the ocean? Deep sea diving is almost like being an astronaut, but you're more likely to find strange new lifeforms that no one has ever seen before. And so far, more people have been to the moon than to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. But that bit of trivia will likely change in the next few years.

• James Cameron has been down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and back -- filming a documentary for National Geographic. Are privately funded scientific efforts going to be a trend (like 3D movies)? [url]
• Sir Richard Branson has created Virgin Oceanic to explore the Earth's oceans. And it's not an April Fools joke like Virgin Volcanic. [url]
• Jeff Bezos has a privately funded team of deep-sea explorers, and they found discarded Apollo 11 rocket engines at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Bezos plans to bring at least one of these NASA artifacts of space exploration back to dry land. [url]
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One of the most fundamentally insane things about government and politics is the fact that evidence-based policy is frequently not the norm. It should be common sense that you don't create new laws and regulations without actual evidence that they will work, or even clear evidence on the scope of the problem they aim to solve. But as we know, things don't really work that way—it's a lot easier for politicians and legislators to make their push based on emotion and public perception.

As with any governmental problem, real change has to start with the citizens. We need to demand evidence, and try not to let ourselves or our peers rely on rhetoric when we discuss and debate important issues and participate in the political process. But governments are not blameless: too often, politicians treat evidence as an obstacle to their political goals, when it should be the motivator of them. Here in Canada, this issue has been slowly gaining attention over the past year with growing complaints that the current government requires scientists it employs to vet their results through a media office before releasing them, to ensure that they are politically on-message. The Globe & Mail recently published a firmly-worded editorial calling on the government to end this practice, and citing the many people who want the same:

Ottawa should respond to the growing controversy – outlined in the prestigious journal Nature – by freeing its scientists. The magazine is calling on the government to show that it will live up to its promise to embrace public access to publicly funded scientific expertise. The issue is serious enough that it was the subject of a panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held last month in Vancouver.

The Canadian Science Writers Association and the World Federation of Science Journalists have also sent an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, citing examples of researchers being prevented from sharing details about their published work on climate change, natural resources, health, and fisheries and oceans. In the case of studies involving collaborators from other countries, Canada often gets “scooped” by foreign media who are not subject to the same level of bureaucratic interference. That hardly qualifies as celebrating success in science.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has drawn criticism before for exerting tight control over the media and all communications coming from his government, but this situation goes a step further. To censor scientists in this way neuters them and turns them into glorified copywriters, because the objective reporting of all evidence is the crux of the scientific pursuit. If this is how the government treats its scientists, then the government is not employing scientists at all.

This is a betrayal of Canadian citizens. A portion of our tax dollars goes to funding public scientific research, because it is supposed to benefit us by informing smart, effective policy, and that money is being squandered. We must call on the government to put scientists in their proper role: as shapers of the political agenda, not slaves to it. Until that happens, Canada bears the shame of being a country without public science.

The scientific method relies on independent verification of measurements and results, but sometimes it's not easy to replicate experiments or measure things at the leading edge of science. Scam artists are often identified when they explain that their results are so far advanced that no one else can replicate them. Real scientists, though, don't buy that. Here are a few scientific discoveries that still need a bit more verification.

• Neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light don't seem to exist, and the CERN team that first said they saw some FTL neutrinos, now admit they made a couple mistakes. the CERN team, after reporting unusual data, determined definitively that it was caused by a mistake (and what that mistake was) with input from the broader scientific community. As some expected, there were systematic errors that produced a timing error of just 60 nanoseconds. [url]
• CERN scientists have trapped anti-hydrogen for a little over 15 minutes -- a new record that could allow them to determine more about how antimatter behaves. Does anti-hydrogen rise, fall or do nothing in a gravitational field? [url]
• The Large Hadron Collider is still hunting down the elusive Higgs boson which might not exist at all. This sub-atomic particle has been nicknamed the "God Particle" -- but it looks like it's just a matter of time before people either find it or start re-writing modern physics. [url]
• To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

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Lots of companies are trying to encourage budding scientists to test out their wacky ideas. We've covered some of the more well-known contests before, but here are a few not-as-widely-publicized challenges for young scientists out there.

• BioCurious and Assay Depot have a opened up a challenge asking for testable hypotheses and research plans that could be tested at a community laboratory or posted on Assay Depot's online marketplace for scientific research. A 1-2 page proposal is due by April 15th, 2012, and winners will be selected in May. [url]
• The American Chemistry Council recently stopped accepting submissions for videos that explain how chemistry can help create energy solutions. Science geeks might want to make friends with more videographers for other contests like this... [url]
• The YouTube Space Lab was looking for some suggestions for space experiments to be done on the International Space Station. The winners will be announced on Feb 21st, and the experiments will be streamed on YouTube when they're performed. [url]
• To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

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Replicating experiments is an important part of science. If you can't repeat an experiment, then whatever you observed could just be a fluke. But even if measurements can be repeated reliably, it doesn't mean that they can be explained easily. Here are just a few examples of some weird measurements that physicists are still trying to explain.

• Neutrinos have been observed to travel faster than the speed of light -- twice, in two different experiments. But the two experiments were done by the same group of physicists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, so independent verification is still pending and these weird measurements could just be an error of some kind. [url]
• There are many unsolved mysteries in the field of physics. Here's a list of just ten. Nice job security in waiting for a proton to decay in a billion trillion trillion years.... [url]
• The Large Hadron Collider could get a glimpse of the 'God Particle' after searching through the remnants of hundreds of particle collisions. Physicists expect to find the Higgs boson at around 120 to 125 GeV.... [url]
• To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

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There is a general belief that science proceeds by smooth cycles of discovery and sharing – that scientists formulate theories, investigate problems, produce data and then publish results for other scientists to check, reproduce and then build on.

That may be the theory, but in practice the frictionless sharing of scientific results is greatly impeded by two factors: the huge profits that scientific publishers make from acting as a tollgate for knowledge through their journals, and the Bayh-Dole Act that encourages educational establishments to try to make money by not freely sharing the discoveries of their academics, but patenting them instead.

Open access arose in part to combat the first of these, and now there's a new project that wants to build on its achievements by updating scientific knowledge more rapidly:

We want to change the way research is communicated, both amongst researchers, as well as with health practitioners, patients and the wider public. Inspired by Beethoven, we want to build a research version of his repository and try to tackle the question "What if the public scientific record would be updated directly as research proceeds?"

"Inspired by Beethoven" refers to this quotation from one of his letters, written in 1801:

There should be only one repository of art in the world, where an artist would only need to bring his creations in order to take what he needed.

Here's how this new project hopes to start creating a repository for science:

There are already over 100,000 scholarly articles available online under a Creative Commons Attribution License and thus free for anyone to read, download, copy, distribute, modify and build upon, provided that proper attribution is given. We will start building Beethoven's open repository by taking 10,000 of these (especially review articles), convert them into a common format, interlink them like topics are linked on Wikipedia, and update them with fresh information as new research findings become available. This will turn the original 10,000 articles into Evolving Review Articles - in other contexts called Living Reviews - available under that same Creative Commons license. We expect that this will help research to be communicated faster, with the ability to promptly correct errors or misconceptions, and in a way that better incorporates the interests of the public. The Evolving Reviews will have a public version history, so that anyone can see in what state the article was at any given time in the past. Over time, this feature can develop into an important tool for exploring the history of science, or of ideas more generally.

Obviously this idea is close to that of wiki-based projects like Wikipedia, and that's no bad thing, since the format has proved its power in multiple contexts. Interestingly, the people behind what they seem to be calling "Beethoven's open repository of research" want to write some new software for the job:

we think that Beethoven's open repository of research should be federated rather than centralized. This means that if you edit a page in the repository, this act will create a personal copy for you. You can decide whether you want to feed these changes back to others, they can decide whether they accept your changes, and there must be options for authorizing certain versions for certain purposes. Such federated systems for the collaborative structuring of knowledge are only just emerging, and producing a working prototype platform that allows anyone to contribute to Beethoven's open repository is an important milestone in our project. Once the platform is up and running, the 10,000 seed articles will have to be imported, and a selection of them will be used to demo the Evolving Review concept. You can help shape the project by making suggestions as to what topics we should concentrate on. Finally, we want to facilitate the reuse of the Evolving Reviews in contexts outside research, especially in education and in supporting patients.

They've launched an appeal for funds using RocketHub, a platform similar to Kickstarter, and are seeking a fairly modest $12,000. But you have to wonder whether that's really enough for what sounds an interesting but ambitious project.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

We're generally interested in government policies that affect the discovery of information or the creation of new works. Usually this means we focus on copyright issues, but science policies are also important to us -- so here are just a few gov't policies that have been released.

• US research in synthetic biology isn't subject to a lot of new government regulations (yet), but there will be an exhaustive evaluation of current government funding for synthetic biology projects. That exhaustive report should be available to the public in a few more months... [url]
• The National Science Foundation (NSF) is trying to make it a bit easier to be a scientist by allowing for some flexibility for budding scientists -- such as cutting back on the demands to travel to NSF headquarters for renewals/applications. The new rules will also allow grant recipients to defer their projects for up to a year to raise children. [url]
• The US government's policy for isolating scientific research from politics was released last year. The guidelines set "minimum standards" for federal agencies to meet, and didn't really spell out many specifics. [url]
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The science of food has led to some pretty important discoveries as modern technology is applied to more and more food processing techniques. While some folks are suspicious of foods that have indefinite shelf lives, being able to avoid billions of tons of food waste can't be all bad. Here are just a few quick links on some interesting food findings.

• Food scientists now know that the melting point of sucrose depends on how fast you heat it. Apparently, sugar decomposes with heat, and knowing this, researchers could develop tastier candies or better pharmaceuticals. [url]
• Some harmless bacteria in the human gut produce bisin -- which could be the next "organic" food preservative. Bisin kills off stuff like E. coli, salmonella and listeria -- and could allow foods like meat, dairy and eggs to go unspoiled for years. [url]
• Would you really want to eat a chili pepper that requires protective gear to harvest? The secret to growing them could be "worm juice" in the fertilizer. [url]
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Biology always seems like the messy and gooey branch of science. Biology contains a bunch of strange phenomena that seemingly exist just because they're possible. Here are just a few quirky biological discoveries.

• Asteroids could have been the original source of chirality in our biological history. Some carbon-rich meteorites seem to have an excess of L-isovaline (a chiral isomer of the biologically important amino acid, L-valine), but the reason why the excess exists is still a mystery. [url]
• There's a type of slime mold that has been dubbed the 'smallest farmer' -- since it can store and grow its own food. The single-celled amoeba eats bacteria and carries around its favorite food just in case local supplies run out. When it eats up all the bacteria in its neighborhood, it moves on and grows bacteria where it settles down next. [url]
• Japanese researchers have created a genetically engineered mouse that tweets like a bird. The research is supposed to investigate the origins of animal language, and it'll be really amazing when they grow a mouse that can tweet... on Twitter. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

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We've talked a lot about how patents actually hinder the rate of innovation in many research areas. That's because nearly all innovation does not work on "the one big breakthrough" theory, but on incremental improvements over time, that all add up to big changes. But when you put a tollbooth and a decades-long monopoly on each incremental change, you massively slow down the rate of innovation. And, it's even worse in scientific research areas. That's because a lot of successful scientific innovation comes about from researchers sharing data and information with each other to get the ideas and inspirations to make the next leap. But with the rise in patenting basic science, scientists have been holding back information, slowing down their own breakthroughs.

Thankfully, more and more people are recognizing this issue. Scientists working on things involving embryonic stem cell research are complaining that patents are massively hindering their ability to advance their research, and it may be holding back cures for paralysis, diabetes and blindness, among other things.

Lanza recalls bumping up against his company's main competitor, Geron Corporation, when it came to researching stem cells in reversing diabetes, a process he said he had been working on with animals for many years.

"When I came to ACT to try to do it with stem cells I couldn't because the rights to use embryonic stem cells for diabetes had been exclusively licensed to Geron," he said.

"Here I was, a scientist trying to cure diabetes and I couldn't use my entire lifetime of expertise to try and develop that technology," he said.

The article notes that if the US keeps this up, other countries are likely to leapfrog us in terms of the research that they do, creating huge commercial opportunities and life-saving treatments, while the US wastes away fighting each other in court. Yet another reason why President Obama's suggestion that we're more innovative because we get more patents is completely off the mark.