SCIENCE sciencemag.orgPHOTO: JURGEN FREUND/MINDEN PICTURES
as the new coronavirus, the U.S. government
last week gave the effort a 6-month stay of
execution. The PREDICT Project, an alliance
of research institutions led by the University
of California, Davis, will continue to help
labs in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East test
people for the COVID-19 virus and inves-
tigate what animal species it came from.
The Agency for International Development
had funded the program for 10 years before
deciding in 2019 to renew its contract only
through March, saying other programs
would effectively continue its work. But
some public health experts say the program
remains needed to confront a growing risk
of animal-to-human transmission of disease.U.N. postpones climate talks
POLICY |Citing the COVID-19 pandemic,
the United Nations last week delayed a
key annual climate summit, scheduled for
November in Glasgow, U.K., until next year.
The talks were to be the most high-profile
effort in climate diplomacy since 2015,
with countries expected to strengthen their
pledges to cut carbon emissions. The pan-
demic would have made it difficult to hold
the talks as planned, the United Nations
and the U.K. government said; the planned
conference venue, for example, is being
used as a field hospital. The delay will
allow countries to gauge the climate impli-
cations of economic stimulus measures
taken to counteract the pandemic’s effects.R
ecent surveys reveal the Great Barrier Reef has suffered the second
most severe coral bleaching ever recorded there, driven by record
ocean temperatures in February. It’s the third “mass bleaching
event” to hit the reef in just 5 years, say scientists at James Cook
University. The overall severity of bleaching in 2016 was worse, but
the damage done in recent summer months covered a wider area,
including relatively cooler areas to the south, they report this week in a
news release. Observers conducted aerial surveys of 1036 reef locations in
March. They found that 25% were severely affected, with more than 60%
of each location’s corals bleached; an additional third of sites had more
modest levels of bleaching. The scientists will next monitor how many
of the bleached corals die this year. In 2016, more than half the severely
bleached coral in the reef ’s northern section died.Science adviser adds NSF hat
LEADERSHIP |Kelvin Droegemeier
took on a second job last week, adding
acting director of the U.S. National
Science Foundation (NSF) to his duties
as head of the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy. The NSF
post is vacant because France Córdova
completed her 6-year term on 31 March
and the U.S. Senate has yet to con-
firm Sethuraman Panchanathan, who
in December 2019 was nominated to
become the agency’s 15th director.NIH dropping more reviewers
RESEARCH INTEGRITY |More than
120 scientists who have failed to
disclose foreign ties or breached confi-
dentiality have been removed as peer
reviewers by the U.S. National Institutes
of Health (NIH). A new report by the
Office of Inspector General at NIH’s par-
ent body, the Department of Health and
Human Services, notes that 77 reviewers
found to have breached confidentiality
have been put on a “Do Not Use” list
as of November 2019. NIH removed
another 47 after it found “potentially
substantiated” evidence that they
had failed to disclose affiliations withforeign institutions. And in December
2019, NIH said 55 scientists facing alle-
gations of sexual harassment had been
given the boot. The report notes that
two-thirds of the scientists who failed to
disclose foreign ties remain as reviewers
and says NIH “can do more” to guard
against “undue foreign influences.”
In all, the agency enlists about 27,
reviewers annually.Marine microbes given new DNA
MARINE BIOLOGY |Biologists took a
big step this week toward understand-
ing some of the ocean’s most important
ecosystem engineers and harnessing
them to benefit humans. An interna-
tional consortium has come up with
ways to genetically modify 13 marine
protists, some of which help produce the
oxygen we breathe and become the food
that fuels the ocean’s food web. The team
devised ways to grow these understudied
species of plankton in the lab and insert
foreign DNA, employing enzymes not
usually used in genetic engineering. The
new techniques, reported in this week’s
issue of Nature Methods, may enable
biotechnologists to track down genes
that can help make antibiotics or reveal
the evolutionary history of protists.SCIENCEMAG.ORG/TAGS/CORONAVIRUS
Read Science’s online coverage of the pandemic.FEATURED INTERVIEWWhat it takes to track cases
Many governments and news organizations
are closely following an online dashboard from
Johns Hopkins University that provides regular
updates on the coronavirus pandemic’s grimly
rising toll. The COVID-19 Coronavirus Global
Cases tracker was created by civil and systems
engineering professor Lauren Gardner and
her graduate student Ensheng Dong. Gardner
previously created spatial models of measles
and Zika virus epidemics.“We’ve been doing this full on since January.
We dropped everything else in the lab,”
Gardner says. “It’s probably going to be this
way for at least another couple months. And
we’ll track the outbreak for, I’m sure, a year. It’ll
keep going and bouncing around all over the
world. ... It’s exhausting. I think all public health
people working in this space feel the same.”A full interview is available at
https://scim.ag/LGardner.10 APRIL 2020 • VOL 368 ISSUE 6487 115GLOBAL WARMINGGreat Barrier Reef
bleached again
A 2017 image shows the impact of a bleaching event.