Science Magazine

A vast undersea wedge of gravel and grit holds the ice streams of West Antarctica in place like a doorstop, even as rising seas caused by global warming threaten to undermine them, researchers at Pennsylvania State University said Thursday. The discovery may give the world a bit of breathing room. West Antarctica encompasses enough frozen fresh water -- 7 million cubic miles -- to raise sea levels worldwide 16 feet if its ice sheet disintegrates.

The ice at Mars' south pole contains enough water to cover the planet in an ocean 36 feet deep, scientists said today. Observations by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter determined the ice -- largely covered by dust and rock -- is more than two miles thick in places and is nearly pure water, according to research being published in the journal Science.

Science, the journal that published two now-discredited studies about embryonic stem cells by South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk, formally retracted them Thursday. Hwang won global acclaim in 2004 when he reported he had used cloning technology to create human embryos, and then mined them for valuable embryonic stem cells. He reported last year that he had taken this a step further, creating several tailored batches, or lines, of stem cells from diseased and injured volunteers.

The journal Science must intensify its screening process to weed out fraudulent studies, an independent panel said Tuesday after investigating how the prestigious journal published two high-profile stem cell studies that turned out to be bogus. The report recommended that Science establish a system to red-flag studies that claim major breakthroughs in high-visibility fields -- such as climate change and human health -- that could influence public policy.

When humans first left Africa, which way did they go? For many years, experts assumed these early migrants headed through what is now Egypt, across the Sinai and into the Middle East. But new evidence suggests they may have taken a more southerly route, along the coasts of the Arabian peninsula into India, Indonesia and Australia. Two reports in today's issue of the journal Science raise the possibility of the coastal route.

The journal that published a landmark paper on tailor-made embryonic stem cells -- a study since debunked as a fabrication -- said this week it would retract the article. An expert panel in South Korea said Thursday that Hwang Woo Suk and his team provided no data to prove that they had made the stem cells, as they claimed in an article published in Science.

At the end of 2000, science was swollen with the self-importance of a century that ended with the remarkable mapping of the chemical codes that make up human DNA. Old scourges such as cancer suddenly seemed conquerable. By contrast, 2003 is likely to be remembered as the year when science came back to earth. To be sure, last year saw plenty of good research and discovery. Look no further than a paper published today in the British journal Nature.

The conclusive discovery by a pair of wheeled robots that Mars once had vast pools of water and possibly could have harbored life was chosen by the editors of the journal Science as the most important scientific achievement of 2004. "Inanimate, wheeled, one-armed boxes roaming another planet have done something no human has ever managed," Science reported in this week's edition. "They have discovered another place in the universe where life could once have existed."

America is not producing enough scientists and engineers. Not nearly enough. So concluded participants in a wide ranging summit on our science and engineering workforce held in late November at the National Academies in Washington. More than 50% of our doctoral engineering students are foreign nationals -- fully 43% come from Asia -- and increasingly these students are choosing to return to their home countries after graduation.