In science news around the world, conservation biologists and the federal Bureau of Land Management are wrangling over protection of the greater sage grouse in Wyoming, an independent report finds that France's research funding system is too "rigid," scientists discovered six forgotten vials of smallpox virus in a storage room at the National Institutes of Health, U.S. lawmakers have accused a Chinese scientist of conspiring to smuggle patented corn seed to China, and more. Also, physicists have identified a "hotspot" source of ultra–high-energy cosmic rays in the sky, and an Indonesian scientist is pursuing a controversial archaeological excavation of what he says is the world's oldest civilization.
Last week, Brazilian officials announced that an isolated Amazonian tribe took a momentous and potentially tragic step. Emerging from dense rainforest along the Upper Envira River in the state of Acre, Brazil, the group willingly approached a team of Brazilian government scientists on 29 June and made peaceful contact with the outside world. Officials suspect that the tribe fled illegal logging and drug trafficking in their traditional homelands in Peru. The meeting was Brazil's first official contact with an isolated Amazonian tribe in 20 years. Anthropologists remain deeply concerned about the tribe's future as it encounters novel diseases and resource-hungry outsiders. Many previous contacts have ended in tragedy, as diseases such as influenza and whooping cough ravaged tribes.
If a rogue nation tries to hide a nuclear test, a faint whiff of radioactive xenon leaking from the test site can unmask it. But a peaceful nuclear technology—the manufacture of medical isotopes—can produce almost identical emissions, confounding detection. Now, medical isotope–makers are pledging to help tame the problem; this month, the list of cooperating companies reached six. At stake is a worldwide network of hundreds of detectors—including 80 for radionuclides—that the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization is setting up to sense any violations of the treaty. If plants' emissions mask the signal of an actual bomb, it will be much harder to verify an apparent violation and hold a country to account.
More than 300 neuroscientists have signed an open letter sent to the European Commission on 7 July to complain about the Human Brain Project (HBP), a hugely ambitious research effort led by Henry Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. HBP, which will receive up to
