NEWS | IN BRIEF
sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: MATTHEW KAPUST/SANFORD UNDERGROUND RESEARCH FACILITYFoundation says teaching students and
faculty members about acceptable and
unacceptable behavior is a better approach.
Japan boosts neutrino efforts
PARTICLE PHYSICS | Japan is expanding
neutrino research to better understand
properties of the phantom particles and the
cosmic processes that produce them. This
spring, scientists will increase the sensitiv-
ity of the 22-year-old Super-Kamiokande
neutrino observatory by doping water in
its observation chamber with the rare-
earth metal gadolinium. The detector will
then watch for signals generated when
neutrinos from supernovae hit the water,
providing clues about the dynamics within
those exploding stars. Japan’s legislature
is expected to fund an even bigger step:
construction of the 72 billion Japanese yen
($660 million) Hyper-Kamiokande. Ten
times larger than its predecessor, it will
capture that much more data about neutri-
nos emanating from the Sun, distant stars,
and supernovae.
Dueling dark matter detectors
ASTROPHYSICS | The race to detect
hypothetical particles of dark matter—the
invisible stuff that binds together the galax-
ies with its gravity—enters a new phase this
year with the startup of two powerful new
underground detectors. Since the 1980s,
physicists have used ever bigger and more
sensitive ones to search for so-called weakly
interacting massive particles (WIMPs),
theorized to weigh 100 times as much as
protons and to interact with other matter
only through the feeble weak nuclear force.
This year, the XENON-NT detector, which
contains 8 tons of frigid liquid xenon, will
turn on in the subterranean Gran Sasso
National Laboratory in Italy. At the Sanford
Underground Research Facility in South
Dakota, the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) detector,
which contains 10 tons of liquid xenon,
will also power up. If XENON-NT and
the LZ see nothing in the next few years,
dark matter hunters could push for bigger
WIMP detectors or set their sights on other
hypothesized forms of dark matter. The
Italian lab’s future also remains uncertain,
as former lab officials face prosecution for
allegedly allowing contamination of local
drinking water.Making xenotransplants survive
BIOMEDICINE | The genome editor CRISPR
is reinvigorating the beleaguered field of
xenotransplantation, which aims to surgi-
cally replace human organs or tissues with
ones harvested from animals such as pigs.
Novel clinical trials of the strategy could
launch this year. Xenotransplantation
has long promised to alleviate a chronic
shortage of human livers, hearts, and other
organs. It could also provide corneas to cure
blindness and insulin-producing islet cells
to replace those destroyed by diabetes. But
time and time again in earlier tests, human
immune systems have quickly destroyed
the foreign transplants. Recent CRISPR
experiments have modified genes in pigs
to prevent or dampen human immune
responses to their tissue and have removed
DNA from the porcine genome that could
spawn potentially dangerous viruses in aALSO IN 2020ALZHEIMER’S DRUG The U.S. Food and
Drug Administration will decide whether
to approve aducanumab, an antibody
drug designed to bust the brain-clogging
amyloid plaques of Alzheimer’s disease.
The experimental treatment has shown
mixed success in clinical trials.OCEAN CONSERVATION The United
Nations intends to finish plans for a
Decade of Ocean Science to begin in- The goal is to coordinate work
by scientists around the world to help
improve ocean health. One expected
emphasis is mapping more of the world’s
vulnerable marine ecosystems and bio-
diversity hot spots and more of the
ocean’s bottom, only about 4% of which
has been charted in high resolution.
STEM CELL FUNDING California voters will
decide in November whether to allocate
$5.5 billion from bond sales to keep alive
the California Institute for Regenerative
Medicine. The funding agency was cre-
ated through a $3 billion ballot initiative
in 2004 to translate stem cell research
into new therapies.SCIENCEMAG.ORG/NEWS
Read more news from Science online.person. Transplants from these edited pigs
to monkeys, a key test of safety and efficacy
before human trials, have demonstrated
long-term viability in their new hosts.Exascale computer to debut
COMPUTER SCIENCE | This year, China is
expected to win the race to build the world’s
first exascale computer, capable of carrying
out 1 billion billion (10^18 ) calculations per
second, also known as an exaflop. Just which
supercomputer will be the first remains
uncertain, as China has set up a competi-
tion between three institutions: the National
Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, the
National Supercomputing Center in Jinan,
and Dawning Information Industry Co., a
manufacturer also known as Sugon. The
new Chinese supercomputers, and others to
follow in the European Union, Japan, and
the United States, will be used to analyze
vast data sets from astronomical and genetic
surveys, and will support the continued rise
of artificial intelligence. Some computer
scientists expected the exascale milestone
to have come sooner; delays resulted in part
from the need to develop energy efficient
computer chips.The LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter detector is readied to record data at an underground lab in South Dakota.
8 3 JANUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6473
Published by AAAS