science.org SCIENCEPHOTO: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/ASUBiden resets environmental rules
POLICY |Reversing decisions made by
former President Donald Trump, the
administration of President Joe Biden last
week released new guidelines expanding
the technical issues that must be assessed
in environmental reviews of a wide range
of federally funded activities, includ-
ing major construction projects. Trump
had narrowed the scope of the reviews
required by the National Environmental
Policy Act (NEPA). For example, federal
agencies were directed to consider only
the direct, near-term effects of an activity,
meaning they could ignore longer term
issues, such as a project’s impact on future
climate change. The Biden administration
says it plans to release a second set of
NEPA guideline revisions that will
address other controversial alterations
made by Trump, including tight time
limits on reviews.Restore degraded land, U.N. urges
SUSTAINABILITY |Reversing global land
degradation can help alleviate three big
problems—the effects of climate change,
biodiversity loss, and food insecurity,
a U.N. report says. The Global Land
Outlook 2, released on 27 April by the
United Nations Convention to Combat
Desertification, quantifies the toll taken
by development, deforestation, agricul-
ture, and other human activities on soil
health. If current trends continue, the
area of degraded land will equal the size
of South America and global crop and
ecosystem productivity will drop as much
as 14% by 2050. Sub-Saharan Africa will
fare the worst. But through steps such
as planting trees and stabilizing ero-
sion on 5 billion hectares, countries can
slow this decline, increase crop yields,
and lock up more atmospheric carbon in
soils. Already more than 100 nations have
pledged to restore 1 billion hectares by- Redirecting money spent on fossil
fuel and farming subsidies can help pay
for restoration, the report says. It says res-
toration means not just creating protected
wildlands, but also taking active steps
to enable land to support farming, tree
plantations, and grazing.
NEWS
“
The reality is that there is a loss of momentum.
”
Isaac Adewole, a physician and consultant for the Africa Centres for Disease Control and
Prevention, in The New York Times, on data showing the world is falling far short of a goal of vaccinating
70% of adults against COVID-19. Developing countries are more likely to have low rates.N
ASA’s Perseverance rover last week reached the primary target
of its mission, an ancient river delta, a fan-shaped collection of
rocks and sediments, frozen in time billions of years ago, that
spills from the rim of Jezero crater to its floor. Operators plan to
comb the fossilized delta sediments for rocks that could contain
organic molecules indicative of past martian life. The $2.7 billion
rover landed on Mars in February 2021, studying volcanic rocks on the
crater floor for a year before trundling to the delta, which ends in a
cliff face at the crater’s rim. The rover’s team plans to drill and collect
approximately 30 rock samples, which are expected to be returned to
Earth in future missions that NASA and the European Space Agency
plan to launch in 2028.A cliff marks the edge of an ancient delta, where the Perseverance rover will collect rocks for testing.IN BRIEF
Edited byJeffrey BrainardPLANETARY SCIENCERover reaches Mars river delta
Atom smasher powers up again
PARTICLE PHYSICS |The world’s larg-
est atom smasher, the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European
particle physics laboratory, started up
last week after more than 3 years of
upgrades. The 27-kilometer-long accelera-
tor famously blasted out the long-sought
Higgs boson in 2012, and it last took data
in December 2018. Since then, technicians
have improved the accelerators that feedprotons into countercirculating beams
and the four large detectors that study the
resulting proton collisions. For the next
few months, researchers will work out
the bugs and slowly increase the beams’
energy. Data recording—and the search
for new and unexpected particles—should
begin this summer. In 2025, the LHC will
shut down for an even more extensive
upgrade to greatly increase the intensity of
its beams, which would increase the rate
of proton collisions.438 29 APRIL 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6592