Science 14Feb2020

SCIENCE sciencemag.org

PHOTO: SOUTH AFRICAN RADIO ASTRONOMY OBSERVATORY

largest outbreak of locusts in decades, and

the Food and Agriculture Organization of

the United Nations (FAO) warned again

this week that the insects pose a severe

risk to crops if not controlled. Ethiopia and

Kenya must spray chemical pesticides to

kill the swarms flying there now. FAO is

helping Somalia plan to kill the next gen-

eration before it takes wing by spraying the

spores of a fungus, Metarhizium acridum.

It produces a toxin that kills locusts and

other grasshoppers but not other insects.

FAO is recruiting technical advisers and

spray equipment from West Africa and says

funding is also urgently needed.

Company pulls insecticide

AGRICULTURE | One of the largest global

producers of chlorpyrifos, a widely used

pesticide ingredient linked to neuro-

logical problems, announced last week it

will stop making the chemical by the end

of this year. Corteva Agriscience said the

decision was based on a projected decline

in demand, not safety concerns. Under

former President Barack Obama, the

Environmental Protection Agency planned

to ban chlorpyrifos because of scientists’

concerns about its effects on brain develop-

ment and other potential hazards. The

Trump administration tossed out those

plans, but California in May 2019 started to

ban the many chlorpyrifos-based pesticides.

Hawaii and New York have also begun

to restrict uses with the aim of total bans.

Corteva’s decision will complicate farm-

ing in places where pests, such as soybean

aphids and alfalfa weevils, have evolved

resistance to other popular insecticides.

Journal drops ‘coercive’ editor

PUBLISHING | A journal has barred a

biophysicist from reviewing its papers

after concluding that he regularly directed

scientists to cite his own work and in

some cases demanded they add him as

an author, strategies that helped make

him one of the world’s most highly cited

researchers. The Journal of Theoretical

Biology (JTB) announced the action

against one of its handling editors—

identified by the journal’s publisher,

Elsevier, as Kuo-Chen Chou of the Gordon

Life Science Institute—in a 29 January

editorial, first reported last week by

Nature. Chou has co-authored more than

600 papers and accumulated more than

58,000 citations, according to Elsevier’s

Scopus database. JTB said he violated

policy by repeatedly writing reviews under

a pseudonym and recruiting colleagues

as reviewers; the reviews routinely asked

authors to add as many as 50 citations to

his papers. Elsevier said it is working to

develop systems to detect such manipula-

tion by reviewers and alert journal editors

before publication. In a statement to

Science, Chou denied the allegations and

said his papers were cited because their

contents were widely recognized.

S

outh Africa’s 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope (above) is

set to expand by almost one-third, significantly increasing

its sensitivity and ability to image the far reaches of the

universe. MeerKAT, a midfrequency dish array, is already the

most sensitive telescope of its kind in the world. Since its

inauguration in 2018, it has captured the most detailed radio

image of the center of the Milky Way and discovered giant radiation

bubbles within it. The 20 new dishes come with a $54 million price

tag, to be split evenly between the South African government and

Germany’s Max Planck Society. Scheduled to come online in 2022,

they will eventually be folded into the planned Square Kilometre

Array, which will be the largest radio telescope in the world.

ASTRONOMY

African radio scope expands to study galaxy formation

14 FEBRUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6479 721

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