NEWS | IN BRIEF
sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: RGB VENTURES/SUPERSTOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTOcelebrated the news, saying Zinke, who is
under investigation for allegedly violating
federal ethics rules, had failed to uphold his
department’s mission to protect wildlife and
public lands by pushing for greater mining,
drilling, and grazing on federal property. But
observers expect those policies to remain
largely in place under any new secretary
appointed by President Donald Trump.A ‘Farout’ planet
SPACE SCIENCE | Astronomers this week
announced the discovery of the solar
system’s most distant resident, a dwarf
planet 120 times farther from the sun than
Earth. The planet, nicknamed “Farout,” is
pinkish in hue, reflecting an icy composi-
tion. It is likely some 500 kilometers in
diameter, similar to Saturn’s icy moon
Enceladus. The astronomers—Scott
Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution forFACILITIESEuropean x-ray source shuts down for rebuild
E
urope’s premier x-ray source shut down last week for a 20-month upgrade that
will boost the brightness of its beams by a factor of 100. Since 1994, the European
Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, has generated x-rays
100 billion times brighter than medical x-ray machines by sending beams of elec-
trons around a circular accelerator. The ESRF has been a workhorse for materials
science, condensed matter physics, and biology. The €180 million upgrade will greatly
reduce the width of the electron beam, boosting the intensity of the x-rays. Meanwhile,
the U.S. Department of Energy approved a plan and cost estimate for an $815 million
rebuild of the ESRF’s longtime rival, the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne
National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois. If all goes as planned, the ESRF will turn back
on in 2020, and the APS upgrade will commence in 2022.THREE QSMonsoon memories
This year, India’s monsoon rains, critical
to the harvest and water supply, were
below average for the 13th time in just
18 years. Alarm spreads when the rains
don’t come, says Sunil Amrith, a historian
at Harvard University who has just released
a new book—Unruly Waters: How Rains,
Rivers, Coasts, And Seas Have Shaped
Asia’s History—which documents the long
scientif c quest to understand one of
Asia’s most important weather patterns.
Science spoke to Amrith about his work.
Q: Why write about the monsoon?
A: Like many scholars, I sort of took the
monsoon for granted. The cliché is that
India is always just one bad monsoon
away from disaster. But as I learned about
all the people who had tried to f gure
out what makes the monsoon tick and
why it varies from year to year, I realized
we hadn’t explored all of the implica-
tions. [The monsoon] is connected to so
many things—food, f oods, dams, climate
change, sustainability.
Q: How has water engineering
shaped the history of South Asia?
A: They often faced either too little or too
much water. Sometimes you have both at
the same time—f ooding in [wet regions],
drought in places that are among the
most arid in the world. ... Eventually, [in
India] you see the emergence of this
idea that the nation needs to be liberated
from climate.
Q: But now you’re worried about
how climate change—and new dam-
building projects in the Himalayas—
might affect water supplies. Why?
A: The historical record shows that relying
on large-scale projects ... is a mistake and
raises new risks. Dams in the Himalayas
are particularly worrying. Until the 1980s,
it was not viable to dam the rivers that
far upstream. That’s changed, and the risks
are enormous. This is a seismically active
zone, and the downstream consequences
of a dam collapse would be serious.
[As for climate change,] you have melting
glaciers, for instance. And there is an
increasing body of work on how
the monsoon is changing. Planetary
warming is interacting with aerosol
emissions and land use changes to make
the monsoon very unpredictable.
SCIENCEMAG.ORG/NEWS
Read more news from Science online.Science in Washington, D.C.; David Tholen
of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu;
and Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona
University in Flagstaff—spotted Farout
with the Japanese Subaru 8-meter tele-
scope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii on
10 November. It was confirmed this month
by the Giant Magellan Telescope at Las
Campanas Observatory in Chile. Farout’s
orbit is not yet known, so the team can’t say
whether its path hints at gravitational
tugs from a hypothesized ninth giant planet.CORRECTION
The 7 December item headlined “Sample
return probe arrives at asteroid” incorrectly
reported that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to
the asteroid Bennu would be the agency’s
first to return materials from space since
the Apollo moon landings. NASA’s Stardust
mission brought back comet dust in 2006.1336 21 DECEMBER 2018 • VOL 362 ISSUE 6421
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