A weekly roundup of information on newly offered instrumentation, apparatus, and laboratory materials of potential interest to researchers.

This webinar is the second in a series focusing on the cancer pathways that support tumor development, the emerging research in identifying and targeting these pathways, and innovations in the development of increasingly effective cancer therapy options. Recent advances in our understanding of cancer have revealed that the disease cannot be understood through simple analysis of genetic mutations within cancerous cells. Instead, tumors should be considered complex tissues in which the cancer cells communicate with the surrounding cellular microenvironment and evolve traits that promote their own survival. Here, we will explore how the tumor microenvironment promotes oncogenic progression, while protecting the tumor from therapeutic intervention. By better understanding the tumor microenvironment we can develop strategies and treatment options to neutralize its oncogenic influence and more effectively attack the tumor itself.View the Webinar Authors: Rakesh K. Jain, Padmanee Sharma

There is a wide opinion gap between scientists and the general public in the United States when it comes to their attitudes about the state of science and science-related policy. According to survey results released this week by the Pew Research Center, in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),* when asked whether U.S. scientific achievements are either the best or among the world's best, only 54% of the public said “yes,” compared to 92% of the scientists. Such disparity is alarming because it ultimately affects both science policy and scientific progress. How can we bridge this gap? Forget the staged “town hall” meetings—studies show that they are not very effective. What does work is respectful bidirectional communication, where scientists truly listen, as well as speak, to the public. Author: Alan I. Leshner

In science news around the world, the Obama administration announces several big moves on Arctic oil, India rejects a patent on a hepatitis C drug, the World Health Organization embarks on reforms to make it better able to deal with events such as the Ebola epidemic, an Italian court finds three employees of research dog–breeding facility Green Hill guilty of unjustified killing and mistreatment of dogs, a corruption case in New York state ensnares a high-profile cancer researcher, and more. Also, scientists spot the first baby tortoises hatched on the Galápagos island of Pinzón in more than a century. And attorney Craig McLean has been tapped to be the new research chief at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

For years, U.S. marine scientists have fretted about the future of their field, watching as federal funding stagnated and the cost of seafloor observatories and other infrastructure steadily eroded the money available for research. But there's been little agreement on how to respond. That changed last week, as an unprecedented, 2-year effort to set priorities for the beleaguered field unveiled some hard-edged recommendations. The National Science Foundation should immediately cut funding for several major hardware programs in order to divert some $40 million a year back to science, concluded a 20-member panel organized by the National Research Council. The cuts are "the only way to recover funding for core science," concluded the panel. If adopted, however, the reductions could cause painful restrictions in some programs. Author: Eli Kintisch

India's central government this month approved plans to build the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), a $244 million facility 1200 meters under a mountain in southern India. Its goal, to determine which of the three types of neutrinos is heaviest and which is lightest, may seem esoteric. But it could help answer other fundamental questions in physics, including how neutrinos acquire mass, whether they are their own antiparticles, and why the universe has so much more matter than antimatter. As India's most expensive basic science facility ever, INO will have a profound impact on the nation's science. Its opening in 2020 would mark a homecoming for India's particle physicists, who over the last quarter-century dispersed overseas as they waited for India to build a premier laboratory. And the INO team is laying plans to propel the facility beyond neutrinos into other areas, such as the hunt for dark matter, in which a subterranean setting is critical. Authors: Richard Stone, Pallava Bagla

The physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek has famously predicted that in 100 years, the best physicist will be a machine. Now the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working toward that vision in a different arena: cancer research. Last summer, the agency launched a $45 million program called Big Mechanism, aimed at developing computer systems that will read research papers on cancer driven by mutations in the Ras gene family, integrate the information into a computer model of the cancer pathways, and frame new hypotheses for scientists to test—all by the end of 2017. The 12 participating teams met in Washington, D.C., last week to take stock of progress on the challenge. If it succeeds, the technology could aid researchers studying complicated systems from climate science to military operations and poverty. Author: Jia You

The November elections have meant new federal lawmakers will be overseeing spending for important slices of the U.S. research pie. That includes two key changes in the House of Representatives: Representative Tom Cole (R–OK) will lead the subcommittee that oversees the budget of the National Institutes of Health, and Representative John Culberson (R–TX) will head the panel responsible for NASA and the National Science Foundation. Cole, who holds a Ph.D. in history, has a reputation as a thoughtful legislator who prefers compromise to ideological purity on contentious issues. Culberson, a lawyer, is simultaneously a staunch advocate for a smaller government and a huge fan of space exploration to distant bodies in search of extraterrestrial life. Science met recently with the two appropriations "cardinals" to discuss their new roles in crafting a budget for the 2016 fiscal year that starts in October. Author: Jeffrey Mervis

For social scientists, the age of big data carries big promises: a chance to mine anonymized demographic, financial, medical, and other vast data sets in fine detail to learn how we lead our lives. For privacy advocates, however, the prospect is alarming. They worry that the people represented in such data may not stay anonymous for long. A study of credit card data in this week's issue of Science bears out those fears, showing that it takes only a tiny amount of personal information to de-anonymize people. The result, coming on top of earlier demonstrations that personal identities are easy to pry from "anonymized" data sets, indicates that such troves need new safeguards. Hope for big data social science may be on the way with a new technique for data protection, called differential privacy, which protects the identity of people in data while still allowing scientists to use the data for research. Author: John Bohannon

Roughly 2 years ago, recovering cocaine addict Tessa Shlaer went with a friend to the back aisles of an adult superstore in Georgia and bought three clear jars, each containing an ounce of a cloudy white substance. The jars bore different brand names—"Meow Meow," "Bolivian MDPV," and "Miami Ice"—and over the next several days, Shlaer and her friend smoked, injected, and snorted nearly all the jars' contents in a binge that ultimately landed Tessa in the hospital and rehabilitation programs after a severe psychotic break. Blood tests later revealed that Shlaer had taken a mix of stimulants called synthetic cathinones, often referred to as "bath salts," which can be up to 10 times as potent as cocaine. The chemicals belong to a class of compounds called designer drugs, which mimic or increase the effects of an illegal drug, yet mostly slip past law enforcement because their formulas have been tweaked just enough to skirt existing regulations. Since 2009, more than 300 such drugs have surfaced in the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Neuroscientist Michael Baumann at the National Institute on Drug Abuse is part of a growing fraternity of researchers working to evaluate the addictiveness of those drugs, decipher how they work in the brain, and predict which are likely to become a major threat. For Shlaer, who still experiences symptoms of withdrawal and hallucinations, the answers to such questions can't come soon enough. Author: Emily Underwood

Grisly media reports of cannibalism and shooting sprees prompted by synthetic cathinones have given them an especially bad reputation, but there's another class of designer drugs worrying drug enforcement and public health officials: synthetic cannabinoids, humanmade chemicals designed to mimic THC, the key psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Sold since the early 2000s under brand names such as K2 and Spice, synthetic cannabinoids act on the same brain receptors as THC but are up to 100 times more potent, leading to dangerous side effects such as heart attack, kidney failure, psychosis, and sometimes death. Since the Drug Enforcement Administration banned the first synthetic cannabinoids in 2011, more than 250 new compounds have arisen to take their place. Author: Emily Underwood

In the past decade, important advances have been made to increase the resolution of the light microscope, as acknowledged by last year's Nobel Prize for superresolved fluorescence microscopy (1, 2). This progress is fascinating but comes at the price of high illumination intensities or long recording times, and expensive instruments. As reported on page 543 of this issue, Chen et al. (3) have cleverly turned the problem around by asking: What if we leave the microscope as it is, and increase the object instead? Author: Hans-Ulrich Dodt

It has been widely accepted since Carnot's seminal work (1) that the atmosphere acts as a thermodynamic heat engine: Air motions redistribute the energy gained from the Sun in the warm part of the globe to colder regions where it is lost through the emission of infrared radiation to space. Through this process, some internal energy is converted into the kinetic energy needed to maintain the atmospheric circulation against dissipation. The analogy to a heat engine has been applied to explain various atmospheric phenomena, such as the global circulation (2), hurricanes (3), and dust devils (4). On page 540 of this issue, Laliberté et al. (5) show that the hydrological cycle reduces the efficiency of the global atmospheric heat engine. Author: Olivier M. Pauluis

Your alarm clock rings in the morning—it's time to get up, but you feel like it's the middle of the night. If this is happening regularly, your circadian clock may not be adjusted to your social life. Circadian clocks are endogenous oscillators that coordinate not only our sleep-wake behavior with the environmental 24-hour light-dark cycle but also a myriad of rhythmic physiological and metabolic processes. A set of so-called clock genes comprises a regulatory network that generates self-sustained molecular ~24-hour rhythms of gene expression. For eukaryotic clocks, the prevailing conceptual model proposes a negative transcriptional-translational feedback loop (1). On page 518 of this issue, Larrondo et al. (2) challenge the molecular basis of this view. Author: Achim Kramer

Regardless of cultural background and mathematical training, all humans have an intuitive sense of numerical magnitude (numerosity). We share with various nonhuman animals the ability to discriminate among different sets of quantities (1), but one aspect of number processing is commonly assumed to be uniquely human (2): the consistent mapping of increasing quantities along the horizontal extension of space—that is, the construction of a mental number line. On page 534 of this issue, Rugani et al. (3) show that 3-day-old domestic chicks (see the photo) associate small numerosities with the left side, and large ones with the right side, of a given space (see the figure, panel A). The results show that newborn chicks can understand both relative and absolute quantities. They also suggest that the brain may be prewired in how it relates numbers to space. Author: Peter Brugger

Designing protocols for research using personal data entails trade-offs between accuracy and privacy. Any suggestion that would make empirical work less precise, open, representative, or replicable seems contrary to the needs and values of science. A careful reexamination has begun of what “accuracy” or “privacy” should mean and how research plans can balance these objectives. Author: Daniel L. Goroff

Troves of our personal data are being collected and analyzed every day by players who have the power to influence what we see online and how we are seen in real life. The methods by which this information is collected and analyzed are shockingly opaque, and attempts to protect our privacy are no longer effective (if they ever were). Viktor Mayer-Schönberger advances the ongoing debate over Internet privacy in a review of The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information. Author: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

When it comes to political preferences, do we really just vote in our own self-interest? John R. Hibbing considers and ultimately rejects this idea in a review of The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit It, calling the book's thesis "boldly stated, entertainingly developed, and ultimately flawed." Author: John R. Hibbing

Authors: Joseph W. Veldman, Gerhard E. Overbeck, Daniel Negreiros, Gregory Mahy, Soizig Le Stradic, G. Wilson Fernandes, Giselda Durigan, Elise Buisson, Francis E. Putz, William J. Bond

A monthly roundup of recent news and projects of Science's publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

From big data to ubiquitous Internet connections, technology empowers researchers and the public—but makes traditional notions of privacy obsolete Authors: Martin Enserink, Gilbert Chin

It's hard for a machine to pluck your face out of a crowd. If you appear in a photo taken at a protest march, an abortion clinic, or a gay bar, for example, your anonymity is safe—for the time being. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you and it has already trained on dozens of photos of your face—and the quality of the images you appear in is excellent—there is little chance that it will spot you. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to search the Internet for all photos in which your face appears, unless you are named in captions. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the largest collection of personal photographs in the world, the technology for universal facial recognition is beginning to blossom. Author: John Bohannon

Like a fingerprint or an iris scan, every voice is unique. Security companies have embraced voice recognition—in which a segment of speech is recorded and the frequencies at which the sound is concentrated are analyzed—as a convenient new layer of authentication. Physical and behavioral traits of the speaker create a unique spectral signature, and demand for the technology is now skyrocketing. But experts worry that voiceprints could be used to identify speakers without their consent and compromise their anonymity, infringing on their privacy and freedom of speech. How and when voiceprints can be captured legally is still murky at best. Author: David Shultz

Each year, recruiters from the National Security Agency (NSA), said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States, visit a few dozen universities across the country in search of new talent. It used to be an easy sell. The agency has long supported U.S. mathematics with education programs and research grants. But the recruiters' task has become more complicated since 2013 after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began releasing documents revealing, among other things, that the agency has been harvesting e-mail and phone records from ordinary American citizens on a massive scale. NSA may also have purposefully compromised a mathematical standard used widely for securing personal computers the world over. U.S. mathematicians are conflicted over whether to cut ties with their secretive supporter. Author: John Bohannon

Drones are becoming more widespread, monitoring endangered wildlife, mapping rainforests, and filming athletes. And although there is little doubt that they can be very useful, they also pose new threats to privacy; the robotic fliers could film you in your own house or garden, for instance. Many countries are still debating how to balance privacy and freedom as drones proliferate, but current laws may offer some protection. In the United States, for instance, the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens inside their homes from unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant, may shield Americans from miniature government drones searching for illicit substances. Author: David Shultz

Protecting medical information is difficult enough, but when you fall ill during an outbreak of a new or particularly scary disease, everything appears to become fair game. It's not just reporters who pore over your life. Doctors and public health officials, too, want to know where you have been, what you have done, and with whom. The more widely they share any of that information, the greater the risk to your privacy. A rise in the number of new and re-emerging diseases in the past 2 decades—including SARS, MERS, and several influenza subtypes—has brought such problems painfully into focus, and the advent of social media and cell phone cameras has increased the pressure. Author: Martin Enserink

In a 2012 episode of the TV series Homeland, Vice President William Walden is assassinated by a terrorist who hacks into his Internet-enabled heart pacemaker and accelerates his heartbeat until he has a heart attack. This scenario is more than just a flight of fancy. Internet security experts have been warning for years that devices such as insulin pumps, glucose monitors, and pacemakers or defibrillators, when connected to the Internet, may be vulnerable to hackers who can take control of a device and change its settings. Manufacturers are starting to wake up to the issue and are employing security experts to tighten up their systems. Author: Daniel Clery

Most people allow their smart phones to send their GPS locations to apps and websites like Yelp, AccuWeather, or Google Maps without a second thought. But these data might be shared with advertisers and other third parties that profile users' movement patterns, often without their knowledge. Computer scientists have developed clever countermeasures that let users extract information from such apps without revealing exactly where they are, camouflaging their whereabouts. For instance, a smart phone can send along a series of dummy locations along with the user's real coordinates and from the app's response use only the information the person needs. Author: Jia You

It's becoming more and more difficult to safeguard the privacy of patients who participate in scientific studies. Many patient samples today are banked, sequenced, and shared with potentially thousands of researchers, and it's widely accepted that if you can read someone's DNA, you may be able to figure out who they are. That's why researchers are seeking new ways of gaining patients' trust and keeping them involved—for instance by giving them more control over how their samples are used or being more transparent about the studies that their data are used in. Some are looking at popular websites like Uber and Airbnb as they develop new ways of building trust between patients and researchers. Author: Jennifer Couzin-Frankel

From health questions to shopping habits, your Web search history contains some of the most personal information that you reveal online, and search engine giants like Google and Bing save these data. Privacy-conscious users can switch to anonymous search engines, but these don't match the speed and convenience that Google offers. For consumers who want to continue using their favorite search services but with added protection, researchers at New York University in New York City have developed a browser extension called TrackMeNot that produces dummy search requests that drown out a user's real queries, thwarting any attempt to profile them. Author: Jia You