NEWS | IN BRIEF
sciencemag.org SCIENCECREDITS: (GRAPHIC) J. BRAINARD/SCIENCE; (DATA) R. J. ABDILL AND R. BLEKHMAN, BIORXIV, 10.1101/515643 (2019); (PHOTO) TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/POOL/GETTY IMAGESin bipartisanship. She teamed up with
Representative Frank Lucas (OK), the
panel’s top Republican, on a bill that would
make agencies adopt common policies
for handling allegations of sexual harass-
ment and encourage the National Science
Foundation (NSF) to do research on the
topic. The panel’s top lawmakers are also
jointly sponsoring legislation to strengthen
clean water programs at the Department
of Energy. A third bill—likely much more
controversial and lacking bipartisan
support—would authorize NSF and three
other agencies to fund research on the
causes and consequences of gun violence.
Biologists flock to preprints
PUBLISHING | Last year saw rapid growth
in the number of biologists posting papers
to the preprint server bioRxiv and in the
total number of papers. The server still
hosts only a small fraction of all new bio-
logy papers, but it has provided an out-
let to authors looking to quickly share
research findings. More preprints were
posted in the first 11 months of 2018—
18,825—than in the years since the server
launched in 2013. Nearly two-thirds of
preprints posted in 2017 or earlier were
later published in journals, report Richard
Abdill and Ran Blekhman of the University
of Minnesota in Minneapolis this week in
a bioRxiv preprint. The researchers also
unveiled Rxivist.org, a website that allows
users to sort bioRxiv preprints by number
of downloads or Twitter mentions.World Bank head resigns early
PEOPLE | Jim Yong Kim, president of
the World Bank in Washington, D.C.,
announced last week that he would stepdown on 1 February, 3 years before the end
of his term. Kim, a physician and anthropo-
logist, was nominated by then-President
Barack Obama in 2012 and in 2016 was
appointed to a new term that runs through- His departure has raised questions
about whether the bank’s board will fol-
low a long-standing tradition and accept
whomever the U.S. president nominates.
In a statement, the World Bank said Kim
plans to join a firm that will “focus on
increasing infrastructure investments in
developing countries” and rejoin the board
of Partners in Health, a Boston-based
nonprofit organization that provides health
care in developing countries.
Germany inks open-access deal
PUBLISHING | This week, a consortium of
German libraries, universities, and research
institutes signed a first-of-its-kind open-
access deal with the publisher Wiley. In
exchange for an annual lump sum, Wiley
will make papers from authors at more
than 700 institutions freely available online.
Researchers at the German institutions will
also gain access to all Wiley journal papers
published since 1997. At Wiley’s request,
the details of the payment plan won’t be
disclosed for 30 days. Negotiators for the
consortium, called Project DEAL, hope the
step will push Elsevier and Springer toward
similar deals. Hundreds of institutes in
Germany, including the Max Planck Society,
lost access to Elsevier journals after con-
tracts ran out.Europe plans newest collider
PARTICLE PHYSICS | This week, European
scientists released a conceptual design for
a successor to the world’s biggest atom
smasher, the 27-kilometer-long Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the
European particle physics laboratory near
Geneva, Switzerland. The plan envisions a
ring 100 kilometers in circumference that
would collide electrons and positrons and
study in detail the Higgs boson, the weird
new particle the LHC discovered in 2012.
The €9 billion accelerator would begin to
operate around 2040, after the LHC shuts
down. After the electron-positron collider
has done its work, its tunnel might house
an even more ambitious €15 billion collider
that, like the LHC, would bash protons
together, but would reach far higher ener-
gies than any previous machine. CERN has
competition from physicists in China with
similar plans.CLIMATEEast Antarctica’s ice is melting rapidly
T
he vast majority of Antarctica’s ice melt, which is responsible for at least
13.8 millimeters of sea level rise over the past 40 years, was long thought to come
from the unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Now, a study using 40 years of satel-
lite imagery finds that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing a substantial quantity
of ice as well. Over the past 4 decades, that loss accounted for more than 30%
of the sea level rise attributed to the continent, researchers report this week in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. East Antarctica, which has 10 times
as much ice as the continent’s western half, was long thought to be insulated from cli-
mate change because it rests on land, largely protected from warming ocean waters. A
2018 Nature paper estimated the region was actually gaining ice. If confirmed, the new
results could dramatically reshape projections of sea level rise for the next century. SCIENCEMAG.ORG/NEWS
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