PHOTO: NASA/EUGENE CERNAN
June 2019 has been freed in exchange
for an Iranian engineer held in France.
Roland Marchal of the Paris Institute of
Political Studies (Sciences Po) is known
for his analyses of civil war in sub-Saha-
ran Africa, particularly Somalia. Marchal
had traveled to Iran to visit his friend
Fariba Adelkhah, a social anthropo-
logist at Sciences Po. The two were
charged with “collusion against national
security,” a charge that was never substan-
tiated, says Sciences Po political scientist
Sandrine Perrot. Adelkhah was also
charged with “propaganda against the
political system of the Islamic Republic.”
Adelkhah remains imprisoned and
reportedly suffered kidney damage dur-
ing a hunger strike. France released Jalal
Rohollahnejad, who faces U.S. charges
“related to the illegal export of equipment
with military applications in violation
of U.S. sanctions,” according to the U.S.
Department of State, which had sought
his extradition.Deep-sea fish may migrate
MARINE ECOLOGY | Every year, great herds
of land animals migrate across the African
continent. Now, marine biologists report
hints of another seasonal movement of
animals, this one off Africa: deep-sea fish
traveling in search of food. A research
team counted fish by analyzing 7 years
of photos taken by observing systems at
two sites 1400 meters deep off the coast
of Angola. The numbers showed fluctua-
tions that correlate with seasonal changes
in abundance of plankton at the ocean
surface, which drives food availability
in the depths. Births and deaths alone
couldn’t explain the changing numbers
of fish, so the researchers conclude that
these species, from 10 different families,
regularly migrate in search of food. If
confirmed, the migration would be one of
the first documented in the deep sea. As
the oil and gas industry increasingly drills
there, understanding its ecological patterns
becomes more important, says the team,
which published its findings last week in
the Journal of Animal Ecology.SETI@home shutters computing
ASTRONOMY | Almost 21 years after
its debut, SETI@home—a pioneering
citizen science effort to employ idle home
computers to sift radio signals for alien
messages—will end this month. Scanning
the radio sky has been a mainstay of the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence
since the 1980s, but processing the data
was a challenge. In 1999, researchersSCIENCEat the University of California (UC),
Berkeley, asked the public to download a
screensaver program that would crunch
data during computer downtime. More
than 1.8 million people joined in, and the
project identified several patches of sky
worth further study because signals there
rise above random noise. The project
announced earlier this month that it was
“at the point of diminishing returns” and
would write up the results for publication.
This week SETI@home urged participants
to donate time instead to a UC Berkeley
project on the coronavirus pandemic.Irreverent science reporter dies
POLICY | Daniel Greenberg, a journalist
who pioneered coverage of the inter-
section of science and politics and was
an influential early leader of Science’s
News section, died on 9 March in
Washington, D.C., at the age of 88. From
1961 to 1970, he reported for Science on
research funding and the regulation of
new technologies, applying a somewhat
skeptical view of the research commu-
nity’s pleadings for money and promises
of breakthroughs. Many scientific leaders
winced when he wrote about them, but
also consumed his work with gusto.
Greenberg next founded the Science
& Government Report, an influential
newsletter. For decades, he delighted many
readers with his satirical interviews
of a fictional character he created when
at Science—Dr. Grant Swinger, who
later became head of the Center for the
Absorption of Federal Funds. Greenberg
also wrote more serious tomes, including
Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards,
and Delusions of Campus Capitalism,
published in 2007.PLANETARY SCIENCELost on the Moon? Check GPS
T
o find your way on Earth, GPS is a lifeline; now, it could be on the Moon, too.
To examine whether the U.S. system of global positioning satellites and similar
spacecraft from Europe and Russia could guide a new generation of astronauts
exploring the Moon, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made
calculations about radio signals from 81 of the satellites. They found that signals
from five to 13 of them would reach the Moon at any one time—enough for astronauts
to locate their position to within 300 meters or so, they reported at the IEEE
Aerospace Conference this month. Crater rims might block the signals at the lunar
surface, especially at the poles—but a small relay satellite could bridge that gap.
GPS would provide a marked improvement from the Apollo era, when astronauts
relied on directional gyros and odometers to navigate the lunar buggy.15,
Instances of social scientists
testifying in Congress, 1946–2016.
About two-thirds of the testimonies
came from economists; social
scientists made up about 2% of all
testimonies in that period.
(PLOS ONE)BY THE NUMBERS27 MARCH 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6485 1409