Black hole in funding say scientists

By Susan Watts
BBC Newsnight, science editor

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Watch Jodrell Bank radio telescope in action

The young man at the back of the room got a big clap. "I'm a PhD student in solar physics. Why, in the current climate, should I and other students take the risk of continuing to do research in this area?" he'd asked the panel.

Nicholas Owen, from the solar theory group at St Andrews University, summed up the mood last week of astronomers gathered in Belfast for the annual meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Some, especially the younger ones, were resigned to having to get out of astronomy altogether.

Astronomy and fundamental physics in the UK are in the midst of their worst funding crisis for decades.

These are the scientists trying to make sense of the very big and the very small - the stars and the galaxies of the Universe beyond Earth, and the sub-atomic particles that make up everything on it.

That might seem esoteric, but as another solar physicist pointed out, his work on the activities of the Sun will help us to understand climate change or make communications satellites work better.

Physicists working on huge particle accelerators that smash electrons into each other are trying to create new light sources so focussed they can target cancers deep inside someone's brain - tumours it's too dangerous to treat with today's X-ray techniques. This is the type of science that created the iPod. All this is under threat from cuts.

Brian Cox explains how the funding crisis is hitting UK science

At the Belfast astronomy meeting, it was as if I'd stepped back in time to the 1980s. One of the first articles I ever wrote back then was for a series in New Scientist magazine called "Research in Peril".

The New Labour government vowed to rejuvenate science and put the UK back on track to create a "knowledge-based economy", as Gordon Brown is fond of putting it. And science in general is in relatively good health these days - getting closer to the level of funding it deserves.

Yet since last December, once again, we've seen senior astronomers and senior scientists from fundamental physics having to speak out to defend their subjects. So what's gone wrong?

The crisis has its roots in the merger last year of two of the government quangos that run UK research into one superquango, the Science and Technology Facilities Council, or STFC.

Ministers promised there'd be no reduction in funding, but with the Comprehensive Spending Review of December 2007 came news that although science had done well overall, the STFC was in dire straits.

The funding of the physical sciences is at a precarious state Prof Martin Rees

The STFC has so much of its budget tied up in long-term international projects, like Cern, the international particle physics facility in Geneva, and the European Space Agency, that it faces an £80m shortfall in cash over the next three years.

High-profile centres like Jodrell Bank and its radio astronomy Lovell telescope have question marks over their future. For the Astronomer Royal, Professor Martin Rees, the problem is symptomatic of a much bigger and more serious problem.

Professor Rees, who is also president of the UK's national science academy, the Royal Society, told me that the health of the physical sciences in Britain is not good.

He says it's time for a major re-think in the way the physical sciences are funded.

"Issues that have hit the headlines like serious cuts in physics departments and the cutting of high-profile projects like Jodrell Bank, those are the consequence of poor planning within the research council, not at government level. However, overall the funding of the physical sciences is at a precarious state in this country compared to the biomedical sciences.

"We are up against competition not just from the US but also from universities in the Far East. Unless we can compete we will fall behind, and unless in the UK we retain our competitiveness in these areas it's bad for the economy in general."

Cern's Atlas detector will search for the elusive "God particle"

The government has made much of wanting the UK to be a magnet for mobile talent. The cuts defy that goal.

Professor Swapan Chattopadhyay is director of the Cockcroft Institute at the Daresbury Laboratory near Manchester, where particle physics facilities and jobs are at risk. He was attracted to the UK as part of a reverse brain drain. Now he's thinking of going back.

"I would like government and the research council to take a serious look at how they are generating their future vision for science, and whether the community of scientists at large are participating in it or whether what's coming out is a quick response to a local fiscal problem."

So how does the chief executive of the STFC, Keith Mason, defend what's happening? Many of the scientists whose work is at risk hold him responsible. Some suspect the £80m shortfall is even there more by design than mismanagement, and that he is carrying out an agenda from government to move money away from pure science and emphasize the practical, the money-making. He says that's wrong.

"The mantra is not that we want to do less cutting edge pure science, we want to do more.

"But we need to farm the knowledge that we get more effectively so that we can afford to do more of it because, ultimately, the amount of astronomy and particle physics and pure science we can do depends ultimately on how well our economy is doing - and we should be contributing to that, too."

That may well confirm the worst fears of the astronomers and particle physicists under threat.

If you cared about money you wouldn't be a scientist at all would you John Womersley STFC

"It's quite clear to us," he went on, "that we do need to get better economic impact from the stuff that we invest in. It's taxpayers' money, and taxpayers have a right to a return from it. You won't have innovation without the science - but equally people have to face the fact that you won't get pure science unless you also get the value out of it and get the innovation, too."

I'm told by the Astronomer Royal that he thinks Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope itself was never under serious threat. What was at risk was something called eMerlin, an array of radio telescopes, including the Lovell dish, for sensitive radio mapping of the skies. Now, after all the attention, it seems even eMerlin will be "re-prioritised".

There are even signs that the secretary of state at the Department for Innovation Universities and Skills, John Denham, has woken up to the seriousness of the situation over which he is presiding. Last night, Downing Street responded to the 17,000-plus e-petition over the cuts.

A number of scientists said astronomy was not being rewarded properly

The amount of money to be saved is small, and dwarfed by the impact it's having. Senior scientists say the situation is serious enough that the government should step in, and find some extra cash to tide the STFC over. Working out the "nitty gritty" of the finances of the STFC, to really understand what's gone wrong, will take a bit of work. At the Belfast meeting, Keith Mason offered the books up for astronomers to examine. They will surely take him up on this offer.

So what of Nicholas Owen, the student who's wondering if he should carry on?

The answer he got, from John Womersley, director of science programmes at the STFC, was criticised as patronising: "If you cared about money you wouldn't be a scientist at all would you," he told the students in the hall.

"You may feel it's a bigger gamble than you want to make, knowing what you do about future funding.

"But if it's not rewarding, and it's not exciting and you don't feel you can make a contribution, then don't do it. If you can, then let's figure out a way that you can. The future budgets make it tough, I can't deny that."

He's a particle physicist not an astronomer. Certainly what he said was insensitive. He badly mis-read just how angry and dismayed that room full of astronomers felt. And it was a desperately sad note to end on.

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Faces give away giveaways - psych profs' amazing claim

In today's pseudoscience news, the quality press is alive with the findings by UK psych researchers that people can fairly reliably tell how slutty someone is merely by looking at a picture of their face.

Psychologists at several UK universities teamed up on the research, which will plainly lead in short order to the betterment of humanity. The link between looking dirty and being a tramp was firmly established for both sexes.

This was done by asking students to fill out questionnaires regarding how likely they were to put out, how often they had done so lately etc. Data from such questionnaires is well known to be solidly grounded in fact. This done, the subjects were photographed.

Other students were then asked to look at the photographed faces and say how easy they reckoned the pictured individual might be. In a staggering 72 per cent of cases, they correctly guessed whether the person in the portrait was or was not a slag. Or at least, whether or not they were likely to admit being a slag on an anonymous questionnaire.

"We may be subtly aware of other people’s attitudes to sex," says Dr Lynda Boothroyd of Durham Uni, lead author of the groundbreaking slapper-spotting research.

"What is far more interesting is that despite the subtlety of the explicit awareness... there is a very strong tendency for women to be attracted to... men who are less interested in casual sex. Men have the opposite preference with female faces; they strongly prefer the [easy] women."

Participants were also asked to rate faces on how masculine/feminine they looked, and the researchers believe this shows a connection between masculine aspect in men and a tendency to be anyone's after a couple of drinks. It seems that the study also supports the idea that "male masculinity" has "negative connotations... for long term partnerships".

In other words, manly men are easy, and women don't like that. Or put another way: "Androgenisation in men is related to less restricted sexual behaviour... women are averse to unrestricted men."

Comfort, then, for any chaps out there who don't look very studly and don't get much action - it seems women are much more attracted to your type. Even if they sometimes have an odd way of showing it.

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Vanished: A Pueblo Mystery

Perched on a lonesome bluff above the dusty San Pedro River, about 30 miles east of Tucson, the ancient stone ruin archaeologists call the Davis Ranch Site doesn’t seem to fit in. Staring back from the opposite bank, the tumbled walls of Reeve Ruin are just as surprising.

Some 700 years ago, as part of a vast migration, a people called the Anasazi, driven by God knows what, wandered from the north to form settlements like these, stamping the land with their own unique style.

“Salado polychrome,” says a visiting archaeologist turning over a shard of broken pottery. Reddish on the outside and patterned black and white on the inside, it stands out from the plainer ware made by the Hohokam, whose territory the wanderers had come to occupy.

These Anasazi newcomers — archaeologists have traced them to the mesas and canyons around Kayenta, Ariz., not far from the Hopi reservation — were distinctive in other ways. They liked to build with stone (the Hohokam used sticks and mud), and their kivas, like those they left in their homeland, are unmistakable: rectangular instead of round, with a stone bench along the inside perimeter, a central hearth and a sipapu, or spirit hole, symbolizing the passage through which the first people emerged from mother earth.

“You could move this up to Hopi and not tell the difference,” said John A. Ware, the archaeologist leading the field trip, as he examined a Davis Ranch kiva. Finding it down here is a little like stumbling across a pagoda on the African veldt.

For five days in late February, Dr. Ware, the director of the Amerind Foundation, an archaeological research center in Dragoon, Ariz., was host to 15 colleagues as they confronted the most vexing and persistent question in Southwestern archaeology: Why, in the late 13th century, did thousands of Anasazi abandon Kayenta, Mesa Verde and the other magnificent settlements of the Colorado Plateau and move south into Arizona and New Mexico?

Scientists once thought the answer lay in impersonal factors like the onset of a great drought or a little ice age. But as evidence accumulates, those explanations have come to seem too pat — and slavishly deterministic. Like people today, the Anasazi (or Ancient Puebloans, as they are increasingly called) were presumably complex beings with the ability to make decisions, good and bad, about how to react to a changing environment. They were not pawns but players in the game.

Looking beyond climate change, some archaeologists are studying the effects of warfare and the increasing complexity of Anasazi society. They are looking deeper into ancient artifacts and finding hints of an ideological struggle, clues to what was going through the Anasazi mind.

“The late 1200s was a time of substantial social, political and religious ferment and experimentation,” said William D. Lipe, an archaeologist at Washington State University.

“You can’t have a situation where it just happens that hundreds of local communities for their own individual, particularistic reasons decide to either die or get up and move,” Dr. Lipe said. “There had to be something general going on.”

When scientists examine the varying width of tree rings, they indeed see a pernicious dry spell gripping the Southwest during the last quarter of the 13th century, around the height of the abandonment. But there had been severe droughts before.

“Over all conditions were pretty darn bad in the 1200s,” said Timothy A. Kohler of Washington State University. “But they were not maybe all that worse than they were in the 900s, and yet some people hung on then.”

Even in the worst of times, major waterways kept flowing. “The Provo River didn’t dry up,” said James Allison, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University. “The San Juan River didn’t dry up.”

“Climate probably explains a lot,” Dr. Allison said. “But there are places where people could have stayed and farmed and chose not to.”

Some inhabitants left the relatively lush climes of what is now southern Colorado for the bone dry Hopi mesas. “Climate makes the most sense for this big pattern change,” Dr. Lipe said. “But then you think, So they went to Hopi to escape this?”

Hopi was far from an anomaly. “The whole abandonment of the Four Corners, at least in Arizona, is people moving to where it’s even worse,” said Jeffrey Dean, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

Some archaeologists have proposed that colder weather contributed to the downfall. Measurements of the thickness of pollen layers, accumulating over decades on the bottom of lakes and bogs, suggest that growing seasons were becoming shorter. But even when paired with drought, the combination may have been less than a decisive blow.

Soon after the abandonment, the drought lifted. “The tree-ring reconstructions show that at 1300 to 1340 it was exceedingly wet,” said Larry Benson, a paleoclimatologist with the Arid Regions Climate Project of the United States Geological Survey. “If they’d just hung in there . . .”

Though the rains returned, the people never did.

“Why didn’t they come back?” said Catherine M. Cameron, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado. “Why didn’t anyone come back to the northern San Juan? It was a fine place, and apparently by 1300 it was very fine.”

In the remains of Sand Canyon Pueblo, in the Mesa Verde region, Kristin A. Kuckelman of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colo., sees the story of a tragic rise and fall. As crops withered, the inhabitants reverted from farming maize and domesticating turkeys to hunting and gathering. Defensive fortifications were erected to resist raiders.

The effort was futile. Villagers were scalped, dismembered, perhaps even eaten. Families were slain inside their dwellings, and the pueblo was burned and abandoned. Curiously, as was true throughout the region, the victors didn’t stay to occupy the conquered lands.

But violence was not always an obvious factor. Throwing a wrench into the theories were those curious wanderers from Kayenta. They thrived in their pueblos until about 1290 — some 15 years after the Great Drought began. And when they finally departed for the San Pedro Valley and other destinations, the evacuation was orderly.

“I don’t see any evidence of violence, cannibalism or even defensive posturing,” Dr. Dean said. “The abandonment seems to be different. You get lots of evidence that people intended to come back.”

At Kiet Siel, a cliff dwelling now part of Navajo National Monument in northeast Arizona, people sealed the openings of granaries with carefully fitted rock slabs, caulking the edges with a collar of clay. Finally the evacuees blocked the entranceway to the settlement with a large wooden beam.

“It’s pretty clear that these people weren’t freaking out or weren’t in a hurry when they left,” Dr. Dean said.

Ultimately the motivation for the abandonments may lie beyond fossils and artifacts, in the realm of ideology. Imagine trying to explain the 19th-century Mormon migration to Utah with only tree rings and pollen counts.

By studying changes in ceremonial architecture and pottery styles, Donna Glowacki, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, is charting the rise of what may have been a new puebloan religion. For more than a century, the established faith was distinguished by multistory “great houses,” with small interior kivas, and by much larger “great kivas” — round, mostly subterranean and covered with a sturdy roof. Originating at Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, the formidable temples seem designed to limit access to all but a priestly few.

Though Chaco declined as a regional religious center during the early 1100s, the same architecture spread to the Mesa Verde area. But by the mid 1200s, a different style was also taking hold, with plazas and kivas that were uncovered like amphitheaters — hints, perhaps, of a new openness. At some sites, serving bowls became larger and were frequently decorated with designs, as though intended for a ritual communion. If the pueblo people had left a written history perhaps we would read of the Anasazi equivalent of the Protestant reformation.

But the analogy can’t be pushed too far. The new architecture also included multiwalled edifices — some round, some D-shaped — that might have been chambers for secret rituals.

Though the dogma may be irrecoverable, Dr. Glowacki argues that it rapidly attracted adherents. A center of the movement, she said, was the McElmo Canyon area, west of Mesa Verde. Excavations indicate that the population burgeoned along with the new architecture. An influx of different pottery designs suggests immigrants from the west were moving in. Then around 1260, long before the drought, the residents began leaving the pueblo, perhaps spreading the new ideology.

Other archaeologists see evidence of an evangelical-like religion — the forerunner, perhaps, of the masked Kachina rituals, which still survive on the Hopi and Zuni reservations — appearing in the south and attracting the rebellious northerners. Salado polychrome pottery may have been emblematic of another, possibly overlapping cult.

In an effort to draw together the skein of causes and effects, Dr. Kohler and members of the Village Ecodynamics Project are collaborating with archaeologists at Crow Canyon on a computer simulation of population changes in southwest Colorado from 600 to around 1300. Juxtaposing data on rainfall, temperature, soil productivity, human metabolic needs and diet, gleaned from an analysis of trash heaps and human waste, the model suggests a sobering conclusion: As Anasazi society became more complex, it also became more fragile.

Corn was domesticated and then wild turkeys, an important protein source. With more to eat, the populations grew and aggregated into villages. Religious and political institutions sprung up.

When crops began dying and violence increased, the inhabitants clustered even closer. By the time the drought of 1275 hit, the Anasazi had become far more dependent on agriculture than during earlier droughts. And they had become more dependent on each other.

“You can’t easily peel off a lineage here and a lineage there and have them go their own way,” Dr. Kohler said. “These parts are no longer redundant. They’re part of an integrated whole.” Pull one thread and the whole culture unwinds.

Amid the swirl of competing explanations, one thing is clear: The pueblo people didn’t just dry up and blow away like so much parched corn. They restructured their societies, tried to adapt and when all else failed they moved on.

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