Environmentalists are praising the energy-efficiency law MA Gov. Patrick signed yesterday, according to this article in the Globe. The law requires, among other things, utilities to buy a certain amount of power from renewable energy companies, and allows the utilities to rent solar panels out to consumers.

Patrick wrote a short column about the legislation, which you can read here.

Momentum is building for Science Blogging 2008: London, taking place August 30 in London. We have more than 50 registrants already (we have room for about 100 or so, so register soon!). And the programme is up. Have a look. If you’d like to come, please register by emailing us at network at nature.com.

I can’t guarantee a great prize (other than an NPG mug, of course), but I couldn’t help but wonder what other nerdy but smart science mugs are out there, after I noticed this one in the kitchen of our office.

This belongs to an NPG editor and was done up for the grad students in the biology department at the State University of New York in Buffalo (this editor was a grad student there at the time). Coding the DNA strand are the names of the faculty in the department.

And the best part:

A little ribosome on the bottom, representing the grad students!

(Thanks Amy!)

Post a picture here of your nerdy but smart science mug!

The title may sound a little abstract and philosophical, but I mean it in the literal sense. How does the layout of buildings, labs, offices, benches, meeting rooms affect how science is done by the people occupying those spaces?

This was a topic that came up yesterday at our pub night in Cambridge. There’s been such a buzz about collaborative research lately and the need to build buildings in ways that encourage more interaction. But some people pointed out yesterday, experiments in science architecture can go awry.

Some are built to be so open that people never feel like they have any privacy and they can’t get any peace and quiet to, you know, get work done.

Some are built in such a siloed way that people from one lab never see those from the lab next door.

And others are somehow able to get the balance just right.

Examples mentioned last night of new buildings that try to achieve these aims are Stanford’s Clark Center, HHMI’s Janelia Farm, the Broad Institute here in Cambridge, the environmentally friendly Genzyme building near MIT. (I won’t say which ones were criticized and which were praised!)

What are some other research buildings that are not your typical rooms-coming-off-long-hallways? And do they work in getting people to interact more? How?

Did you know next year will be the Year of Science? Sounds very grand. Perhaps it will be the year that an important but nonsensational story about science makes the front page of USA Today or the year that scientists aren’t portrayed as evil-doers or crazy nerds in the movies…mmm, maybe not. Still, it’ll be a big year, 2009. The 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. It’ll also be the International Year of Astronomy, coinciding with the 400th anniversary of the first time Galileo looked to the skies using a telescope.

The organization behind Year of Science is the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science, a group of universities, science museums, societies and educators getting together to promote better, well, public understanding of science.

Members are organized around regional hubs too and yes, there is one for Cambridge. They are hosting an event next month at the WGBH studios in Somerville. For more info on this hub, email Natalie Kuldell, an MIT instructor in biological engineering, at nkuldell at mit dot edu (from the OpenWetWare blog)

Inspired by Maxine Clarke, on her blog Nautilus, we’ve started posting weekly roundups of the best conversations on Nature Network, the first one being here. Check it out every Monday. You’ll find it on the homepage and the network snapshot in the ‘what’s new’ box. If you’ve seen and/or participated in a good discussion, let us know (network at nature.com) and we’ll include it in the weekly summary.

I wanted to point out one item that’s stimulating quite a bit of talk. A commentary in last week’s Nature about academic misconduct calls on research institutions to develop a zero-tolerance policy and to provide better safeguards against whistleblowers. The authors, one of whom is the director of intramural research at the federal government’s Office of Research Integrity (ORI), discuss a survey they did which found 3 incidents of likely misconduct out of 100 researchers per year.

The discussion stemming from this commentary here on NN has been interesting. One comment was quite critical of the ORI, saying that it’s up to them to set the tone among academic leaders. Another puts the blame on journal editors. A third person says that accrediting bodies or other regulatory agencies have a role to play. Have your say and post a comment on the thread.

The days are long, summer nights warm, so why stay in lab? Come join us this Wednesday at 7pm for the next NNB-hosted pub night for local scientists.

It’s at the Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge, near Central Square on the Red Line. 315 Mass. Ave. Bring labmates/friends.

Please RSVP by posting a reply here.

This week was the first week for our new intern, Anna Kushnir. You may know her as one of Nature Network’s more active bloggers. She’s just graduated with her PhD from Harvard Medical School and will be spending six months helping us grow the community on Nature Network. Welcome Anna to the NN family!

She will also help me cover the Boston beat so starting today you’ll see posts here from both me and her. Over time, this blog will evolve to be less like “Corie’s” blog and more the “Boston blog” with multiple people contributing.

So to kick off, today, here is Anna’s entry about a talk she attended on Wednesday.

Genetics and the future of food and farming
Anna Kushnir

A talk that combines science and food? This was a talk I could not afford to miss. This week, I had the distinct pleasure of attending Pamela Ronald’s lecture at MGH discussing her new book, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food.

Dr. Ronald is a geneticist and runs a large lab in the Department of Plant Pathology at University of California, Davis. She has just written the aforementioned book with her husband Raoul, who is, conveniently enough, an organic farmer. (She is also a blogger on Nature Network.)

In her talk, Dr. Ronald listed multiple (and ominous) drawbacks of the current model of agriculture including soil erosion, farmers poisoned by rampant use of pesticides, ecosystems damaged by fertilizer run-off, among others. A possible solution to the problems caused by current agriculture practices and the increasing food demands of the world’s growing population, she suggests, is a combination of sustainable organic farming practices with genetically engineered (GE) plants.

One of the most interesting and dramatic examples that Dr. Ronald gave of the benefits of GE plants was the generation of submergence tolerant strain of rice. Rice normally grows and thrives in areas with high average rainfall. However, some of those areas are prone to flooding. Rice seedlings submerged for 2 to 3 days die, leading to poor rice yields and starvation in the affected communities.

However, one strain of rice that could survive for 2 weeks while submerged was found in India. Dr. Ronald’s laboratory identified a set of submergence resistance genes that conferred survival. Transfer of one of those genes to a susceptible rice strain yielded a strain of rice that yielded 5 to 6 times more rice in flooded conditions, as compared to the parental strain.

The list of such examples is long, including a researcher who saved the Hawaiian papaya industry by engineering generated a virus-resistant strain of papaya using a version of RNA interference, as well as golden, beta-carotene enhanced rice that can save populations vitamin A deficiency and subsequent blindness and/or death.

There is, unfortunately, a lot of public resistance and fear surrounding GE crops, perhaps due in part to a lack of understanding and a general distrust of all things too sciencey. GE crops are not considered organic, which I find terribly confusing since they can be farmed using organic practices. They are labeled with scary and misleading labels and banned in whole countries in Europe and parts of California. Do GE crops deserve such harsh handling? Likely not. Do they serve as very cool examples of science translating into real life and making a difference? Definitely. Is there a need for them in the world? Absolutely.

Whatever the cause of the distrust and distaste for GE crops, I hope that opinion changes soon allowing golden rice and other GE crops to be planted. I also hope this happens before the planet is no longer able to sustain the levels of food production necessary to feed everyone.

P.S. I recorded the talk, so please let me know if you would like an audio of the lecture.

Governors really like biotechnology and life sciences, it seems. Politically, it’s not hard to put a positive spin on life-saving drugs. And it’s an industry that generates high-paying jobs.

So the biotech industry has learned to work well with politicians and to reward them when they do good things for them. Yesterday, at the annual BIO conference in San Diego, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick was named BIO Governor of the Year.

Just the day before, Patrick signed into law the $1 billion biotech bill, which he first unveiled at last year’s conference in Boston. It includes $250 million in tax breaks for companies and $250 million for research grants and fellowships.

But hold on. I think we might have a candidate for next year’s governor of the year award. Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley recently announced a $1.1 billion plan for the life sciences in his state. Take that, Patrick!

Ta, da! The Nature Network science blogging conference, happening Aug 30 in London, now has its own logo.

If you’re coming to our conference, please post the logo to your blog and link to our conference group page on NN. Even if you can’t make it, help us spread the word!

We ran a small logo competition for the conference and got several entries. The one submitted by Euan Adie won and served as the basis for the logo you see here. Congrats Euan!