SCIENCE sciencemag.orgPHOTO: DANIEL HEUCLIN/NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES
new system, to be launched this year, will
be open to researchers of all career stages
and will allow scientists’ family members
to work in the United Kingdom. Scientific
societies have urged the government to
make the new system simple, cheap, and
flexible, but have also warned that the eco-
nomic disruption of a chaotic Brexit could
still set back research. If an exit deal is not
approved, the United Kingdom will crash
out of the European Union on 31 October.‘Aggressive’ surveillance decried
ACADEMIC ESPIONAGE | The United
States should not emulate China in tracking
ethnic minorities in order to thwart
academic espionage, writes a coalition of
19 Asian and higher education organiza-
tions in an open letter released this week.
The groups, which range from the American
Association of University Professors to the
Chinese American Citizens Alliance, chided
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for
an initiative, first reported by NPR, to urge
university officials to monitor the activi-
ties of Chinese students and Chinese-bornSeverodvinsk, according to the TASS news
agency. According to Rosatom, the missile
was a conventional liquid-fueled rocket
that used batteries that derive energy from
radioactive materials. However, U.S. intel-
ligence officials—and some Russian media
outlets—speculate that the researchers were
testing a nuclear-powered cruise missile.Drone ship circles Antarctica
OCEANOGRAPHY | Earlier this month, a
robotic ship became the first to circum-
navigate Antarctica, Saildrone in Alameda,
California, reported. The company, which
is seeking to revolutionize oceanography
with its sensor-laden marine drones
(Science, 9 March 2018, p. 1082), had
previously attempted such a feat twice,
only to have its robots’ high sails damaged
by the freezing, 15-meter-high waves and
strong winds of the Southern Ocean. The
successful drone, which took 196 days to
complete its 22,000-kilometer voyage on 3
August, was outfitted with a stout, square
sail that, although unwieldy, was broad
enough to navigate downwind. Some ofBIODIVERSITYWorld’s biggest frogs build their own ponds
T
he world’s biggest frogs, as long as a human foot, may have
become so brawny in order to dig swimming pools for their
young. That’s what Mark-Oliver Rödel, a herpetologist at the
Berlin Museum of Natural History, and colleagues concluded
after discovering tadpoles of the Goliath frog (Conraua
goliath) swimming in pools that the animals, which can weigh up
to 3.3 kilograms, had apparently dug themselves along the banks
of the Mpoula River in western Cameroon. The researchers neversaw the frogs at work, but they saw signs of excavation: Day by
day, gravel and stones weighing up to 2 kilograms were gradually
moved to create meter-wide pools—some of which contained up
to 3000 eggs or tadpoles of different ages, Rödel’s team reported
last week in the Journal of Natural History. A camera recorded
a single frog parent guarding each pool at night. The bigger the
frog, the researchers say, the bigger the pools they can build for
their vulnerable youngsters.16 AUGUST 2019 • VOL 365 ISSUE 6454 625researchers on their campuses. Despite “the
mounting global reach of Beijing’s tech-
enabled authoritarianism” and the Chinese
government’s “aggressive use of surveil-
lance,” the groups write, U.S. authorities
“must not mimic the very tactics it professes
to reject.” Senator Mark Warner (D–VA), who
has organized several meetings between
FBI and university officials, says the United
States should not “engage in racial profiling”
as it combats the “creative ways [used by]
the Chinese Communist Party to access and
steal our technologies.”Blast in Russia kills five
WEAPONS | An 8 August blast at a Russian
naval range in the White Sea killed five
scientists and injured three others as they
were working on a missile engine, accord-
ing to the Russian State Atomic Energy
Corporation (Rosatom). The explosion also
appears to have released radiation into
the environment—Russia’s Federal Service
for Hydrometeorology and Environmental
Monitoring reported a brief spike in
gamma radiation in the nearby port city of