SCIENCE sciencemag.orgsaid that, going forward, universities must
tell it when a grantee is placed on leave
during a harassment investigation or
found guilty of sexual harassment—with
the potential for “targeted and serious
consequences” from NSF as a result, said
Director France Córdova. Bemoaning the
community’s failure to protect harassment
victims, Córdova declared: “This neglect
must end.” That same month, AAAS,
which publishes Science, adopted a policy
under which AAAS fellows proved to besexual harassers can be stripped of this
lifetime honor. And the presidents of the
National Academies promised in May to
explore how proven harassers could be
ejected from their prestigious ranks.
The pace of change is not nearly fast
enough for critics. BethAnn McLaughlin,
a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University
in Nashville who this year founded the
advocacy group #metooSTEM, notes, for
example, that the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) does not require universi-
ties to report grantees
under investigation, or
even disciplined, for sexual
harassment. McLaughlin
opens her public talks
with 46 seconds of silence,
“ 1 second for every year
that NIH has given money
to scientists and doctors
and not asked if they have
violated Title IX,” a 1972
U.S. statute outlawing
sexual harassment of stu-
dents. She uses the silence,
she says, “to honor the
hundreds of women driven
from our fields.”
—Meredith WadmanSexual harassment in science has been
underreported and largely ignored until re-
cently. But this year brought signs of change.
In June, the U.S. National Academies
of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
released a landmark report on sexual harass-
ment of women in academic science, engi-
neering, and medicine that could prove to be
a watershed. It concluded, based on recent
data from two large university systems, that
more than 50 % of female faculty and staff
and 20 % to 50 % of students, depending on
stage and field, have endured sexual harass-
ment, including the most pervasive form—
sexist hostility both verbal and nonverbal:
putdowns, not come-ons. And this year,
several institutions took action.
Some, prodded by news exposés or by
formal complaints from harassed students
and staff, fired or forced out prominent
scientists after investigations upheld allega-
tions of wrongdoing. Others announced
policy changes.
In September, the U.S. National Science
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BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR | RUNNERS-UP 2018
New kinds of messengers from the distant
universe are joining the photons collected
by telescopes—and revealing what light can’t
show. So-called multimessenger astrophysics
got started with high-speed particles called
cosmic rays and gravitational waves, the
ripples in space-time first detected in 2015
that Science named Breakthrough of the
Year in 2016. This year, another messenger
has joined the party: neutrinos, tiny, almost
massless particles that are extraordinarily
hard to detect.
Snaring one of these extra-galactic will-o’-
the-wisps took a cubic kilometer of ice deep
below the South Pole, festooned with light
detectors to record the faint flash triggered—
very rarely—by a neutrino. Known as Ice-
Cube, the massive detector has logged many
neutrinos before, some from outside the
Milky Way, but none had been pinned
to a particular cosmic source. Then, on
22 September 2017 , a neutrino collided with
a nucleus in the ice, and the light sensors got
a good fix on the direction it had come from.
An alert sent out to other telescopes
produced, after a few days, a match. As theMessengers from a far-off galaxy
#MeToo makes
a difference
3 PEOPLE’S CHOICEresearchers reported in July, NASA’s Fermi
Gamma-ray Space Telescope found an in-
tensely bright source known as a blazar right
where the neutrino appeared to come from.
A blazar is the heart of a galaxy centered on
a supermassive black hole, whose gravity
heats up gas swirling around it, causing the
material to glow brightly and fire jets of
particles out of the maelstrom.
Researchers are pretty sure the blazar,
which was flaring up at the time of the
detection, is the source of the neutrino—
making it the first time a neutrino telescope
has identified an extra-galactic source. But
the discovery is more than just a proof of
principle. A blazar producing gamma rays
and neutrinos is likely producing other high-
energy particles, too, such as protons. These
ultra–high-energy cosmic rays bombard
Earth from time to time, but their source has
been a mystery. Now, blazars are a suspect.
The IceCube team awaits more fleeting
extra-galactic messengers. But having wel-
comed this first visitor, it is making its case
for an enlarged detector enclosing 1 0 times
the current volume of ice. —Daniel CleryPublished by AAASon December 24, 2018^http://science.sciencemag.org/Downloaded from