• What is Vince Cable really saying about how to make science cutbacks?

Vince Cable's speech today requires close analysis to see how any science cuts might be administered

The blogosphere is abuzz with scientists complaining about the huge cuts that were said to be announced today. But the science community needs to look closely at what was actually said and urgently respond to ministers in those areas where the government appears to be getting it wrong.

Scale of spending cuts

Vince Cable's speech today said very little about the size of spending cuts but he did say:

"As a consequence [of the massive inherited budget deficit], we face the tightest spending round since post-War demobilisation. My department is the largest department in Whitehall without a protected budget and science, alongside further education and higher education, is one of its largest components. We know that the Labour government was planning deep cuts of 20-25% in the budget of that department. Economies on this scale are clearly a very major challenge."

My post this morning dealt with the possible scale of cuts in science spending that will emerge from the spending review. No figures have been announced but Cable said on the Today programme that talk of anything like 35% has been ruled out.

The economic case for science investment

The first three paragraphs of the speech stress the importance of science R&D for rebalancing the economy:

"Over the next few weeks and months, major decisions will be made on government spending priorities as part of a wider move to stabilise the country's finances and rebalance the economy. They will help to define what we value as a nation and the direction in which we want to head. Investing in science and research is a critical part of that. I cannot prejudge the outcome but I know that my colleagues, including at the Treasury, value the contribution of UK science.

"I have been arguing for years my concern over the way the British economy was distorted. Money borrowed for property speculation rather than productive investment and innovation. Too many top performing graduates heading straight for high finance rather than science and engineering.

"It was clear to me and my colleagues that the British economy was becoming increasingly unbalanced in the short term, as the mountain of household debt built up. We were also unprepared for a long-term future where we need to earn our living in the world through high-tech, high-skills and innovation."

He goes on to say:

"There is a lot of evidence of the connection between innovation and economic performance. The 2010 OECD innovation report ... concluded that "governments must continue to invest in future sources of growth, such as education, infrastructure and research. Cutting back public investment in support of innovation may provide short-term fiscal relief, but will damage the foundations of long-term growth.

"Some countries are acting on that advice. The US is doubling basic science spend between 2006 and 2016. China has seen a 25% increase in central government funds to the science and technology sector. In Sweden, central government funds for R&D will increase by over 10% between 2009 and 2012. And in 2009, Germany announced it was injecting ?18 billion into research and higher education during the coming decade."

This section of the speech endorses leading members of the science community who, having met with David Willetts and Cable, seem confident that the evidence of the economic benefit of science investment has been rammed down the throats of Treasury colleagues by ministers and officials at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). An assertive approach is necessary given the absence from the Treasury, alone of government departments, of a chief scientific adviser. It remains to be seen whether the Treasury accepts the corollary: that deep cuts to science spending are counterproductive, something it does accept when it comes to so-called "punitive" taxation, which serves only to lower tax receipts as a result of avoidance measures.

The Treasury may have retorted with the line in the speech, following those international comparisons, where Cable says:

"We in the UK are severely financially constrained."

But so are some of those countries he mentioned, and while we may be more constrained, that might be an argument for smaller increases in investment. It does not suggest that we must cut while some others are investing more.

"Outputs not inputs" ... "More from less"

"There is a school of thought which says that government commitment to science and technology is measured by how much money we spend. Money is important both for the quality and quantity. But it is an input, not an output, measure."

The "outputs not inputs" line is not new. Politicians tend to brag about inputs when increasing them (eg. NHS spending) and urge consideration of outputs when cutting inputs.

"The question I have to address is can we achieve more with less?"

To believe it is possible to get more good science from less funding is the political equivalent of a belief in cold fusion: an aspiration not supported by logic or reproducibility. Because of the way scientific funds are already allocated, as I set out below, there is very little room to identify wastage. It is far more likely that we would end up doing less for less. Even in an ideal world, if "useless" projects are identified, predicted and defunded, all you can get is the same from less, not more.

The real question is one for the government to address. Is there any evidence from anywhere that can be cited showing any changes to current funding allocations could reliably generate "more" from less? Even then it is not clear what the "more" is.

Is there likely to be undue interference from government in spending allocations?

"In deciding priorities, there is a limit to how much I can dictate the course of events. Nor do I wish to. Research priorities and technical priorities are set at arm's length from government, and through peer review. That is right. Yet the government spends £6bn a year supporting science and research and it is right that I should speak about strategic priorities."

This is entirely reasonable - it is public money. Government and parliament have a right to decide where broadly it is spent. This is not a breach of the Haldane Principle, although it is essential that any government directions to research councils are explicit and public, which was not the case with the last government in the STFC affair as the Science and Technology Select Committee has commented.

What is the role of economic impact?

Cable describes this as:

" ... a central question for the future of science and research in this country."

He goes on to defend "blue skies research" and reject a policy divide between pure and applied research:

"I fully accept that scientific enquiry, like the arts, has its own intrinsic merit. It is a public good. It helps to define the quality of our civilisation, and embeds logical scientific thinking into the decision-making of government, businesses and households. Superstition and irrational prejudice about the natural world are rarely far from the surface and scientists help inoculate society against them.

"The big scientific ideas that changed the world were often far removed from practical, let alone commercial, applications. Lord Sainsbury in his 2007 report described a high correlation between successful commercial spin-offs and high-quality fundamental research.

"So I regard the old debate about common room versus board room as tiresome and unproductive. We need a wide spectrum of research activity."

Across-the-board cuts - salami-slicing?

Rightly, he rejects this:

"The lazy, traditional way to make spending cuts is to shave a bit off everything: salami slicing. This produces less for less: a shrinkage of quantity and quality ? I have no intention of going there."

Picking winners?

He is attracted by this but says that it should not be done by politicans (he might have added civil servants):

"Another approach superficially more attractive would be to specialise, to say there are certain branches of science and technology that we should do or not do. My response to this is two-fold.

"First, we should not politicise choices of this kind. Treasury and BIS ministers and officials, working under pressures of time as well as money, are not the people who should be making arbitrary, far-reaching decisions such as whether Britain should or should not 'do' nanotechnology or space research.

"Moreover, many of the suggested choices are not choices at all ... innovation depends on lateral thinking between apparently different disciplines."

But he goes on to say:

"There is however a strong case for identifying broad problems. For example, the challenges thrown up by an ageing population - the increased prevalence of Alzheimer's for example - need people working across biology, medicine, biochemistry and the social sciences in order to better address needs. So too for environmental challenges, such as providing clean water or alternative energy sources, pooling different disciplines to get a better understanding of low carbon."

And also:

"There is also a case for identifying and building up the areas where the UK truly is a world leader. This includes stem cells and regenerative medicine, plastic electronics, satellite communications, fuel cells, advanced manufacturing, composite materials and many more."

This approach is fraught with dangers ? not just picking badly, but being unwilling to disinvest in political winners which look like being losers.

And I will award a prize to the first minister who ? along with listing the winners ? lists the proposed losers in discussions about sharing out the cake.

In any event, without developing further the point about picking strong areas, he moves on to what appears to be the most controversial section of the speech.

Screening out mediocrity ... Only funding the commercially useful or theoretically outstanding

"My preference is to ration research funding by excellence and back research teams of international quality ? and screen out mediocrity ? regardless of where they are and what they do.

"It is worth noting in the last RAE [Research Assessment Exercise] 54 per cent of submitted work was defined as world class and that is the area where funding should be concentrated.

"There is a separate but critically important question of how we maximise the contribution of government-supported research to wealth creation. I support, of course, top class 'blue skies' research, but there is no justification for taxpayers' money being used to support research which is neither commercially useful nor theoretically outstanding."

Dr Cable at least recognises that "rationing of this kind presents problems".

He asks:

"How do we allow room for new, unknown but bright people? How do we reduce, not increase, the time spent on applying for funding in a more competitive market?"

Those are the least of it. It is simply not possible to apply a retrospective analysis of university activity, the RAE ? which is controversial enough in its metrics and allocation formula ? to response mode funding of research council allocations. In such applications, where low success rates mean that many excellent or outstanding proposals are rejected anyway, what is most important is the proposed research rather than a judgment about the historic departmental record.

So unhappy has been the experience of the RAE that it was switched to a new approach (the Research Excellence Framework, REF) which was in turn delayed by the coalition government as a result of concerns about how economic benefit is measured.

The sentence that there is "no justification for taxpayers' money being used to support research which is neither commercially useful nor theoretically outstanding" is highly controversial and, ironically, hard to justify.

This is because it is hard to measure the theoretical breakthroughs let alone the commercial utility at the outset, and secondly because ? as Cable says elsewhere in his speech ? there is a false dichotomy between the theoretical and the commercial. In any event, the peer review system for all its faults certainly already does "screen out mediocrity".

What now?

Whatever the scale of the cuts is to be ? and scientists are very worried about this ? government policy on allocation needs to be more carefully thought out than currently appears to be the case. Otherwise salami-slicing will start to look relatively appealing.

The skills sector, further education and universities are all facing cuts in their BIS funding and they are doubtless at the door of the department on a daily basis. I have already urged the science community to fight for its funding, and that means engaging in debate with ministers on the key issues. We have a good argument to make.

  • Cable's science cuts under fire

Scientist line up to condemn government budgets cuts, thought to be as high as 25%

Scientists lined up today to criticise the coalition government's proposals to cut public funds for research, calling the ideas "sad" and "depressing".

In his first major speech on science and research, business secretary Vince Cable called for scientists to build links with industry, commercialise more research and abandon work that was "neither commercially useful nor theoretically outstanding" as part of the UK's austerity drive. The speech comes at a critical time in the decision-making process for the government's comprehensive spending review (CSR) and is being seen by many in the scientific community as foreshadowing major cuts of 25% or more in some research areas.

"Science, research and innovation are vital to this country's future economic growth," Cable said. "But we have to operate in a financially constrained environment."

He said the "lazy, traditional way to make spending cuts is to shave a bit of everything: salami slicing. This produces less for less: a shrinkage of quantity and quality ? I have no intention of going there".

Instead, he proposed identifying and building up areas where the UK was a world leader, including stem cells and regenerative medicine, plastic electronics, satellite communications, fuel cells, advanced manufacturing and composite materials. In the last Research Assessment Exercise, he said, 54% of work in UK universities was defined as world-class and this was the area where funding should be concentrated in future.

Cable also stressed the importance of international collaboration, though he recognised the potential conflict with the government's wider proposal to place a cap on immigration. "On the immigration cap, I've already expressed concerns for activities like big international companies and also the scientific community, where the movement of people is an essential part of the way they operate," he said. "I understand that universities do need people to come and go. This is an international community and the immigration system has got to reflect that, otherwise it'll cause a lot of damage."

Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, pointed out that science was an enterprise in which the UK was strong. "Other nations, including the US, are raising their expenditure at the same time as our government plans to cut ours. This will make the UK less attractive to mobile talent. And it risks sending a signal to young people that the UK is no longer a country that aspires to scientific leadership. A cut by x% would lead to a decline of much more than x% in top-grade scientific output. It is sad that this government appears willing to risk one of the few areas where the UK has a genuine competitive economic advantage ? one which, when lost, could not be readily recovered. The question should not be can we afford the investment ? it should be can we afford the cuts."

Imran Khan, the director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, said: "It's depressing that in one of the most exciting scientific eras humanity has ever seen, Vince Cable had nothing exciting or inspiring to say about government policy in this area. Direct investment in science and engineering pays huge dividends, and makes up less than 1% of total public spending. The government has yet to demonstrate that they have either a vision or a plan for how to make the most of the extraordinary scientific legacy they have inherited."

In his speech, Cable said he supported the idea of blue-skies research, but argued that was no justification for taxpayers' money being used to support work which was "neither commercially useful nor theoretically outstanding". Bob May, the former government chief scientific adviser and president of the Royal Society, dismissed the claim to ration funding in this way as "just plain stupid".

Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, said that the scale of the UK's public investment in science and its universities was what made Britain punch well above its technological, economic and political weight in global affairs. "Any contraction in the UK's science and higher education budgets will signal a narrowing of this country's vision for its role in the world, a withdrawal from its current international leadership role in science. Our universities are second only to the US in terms of their contribution to knowledge creation and innovation. A reduction in the government's investment in science will damage our ability to shape our national and international futures. It would be a cut too far."

Khan added: "At a time when politicians should be looking to science and engineering to help rebalance the economy, they are instead focusing on erecting barriers to scientific collaboration by capping immigration, and damaging our reputation as a global research hub by cutting investment ? just as our competitors are increasing theirs."

There were also some words of welcome. Richard Barker, director general of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said he welcomed some key aspects of the speech, particularly the focus on international collaborations and links with industry. "The life sciences represent one of Britain's best hopes for turning excellent research into economic growth."

  • Humpback dinosaur ? theropod of the north

Concavenator corcovatus found in Spain shows signs of flight feather appendages

Meet the humpback dinosaur. The previously unknown Concavenator corcovatus was a meat eater that lived in the Lower Cretaceous 130m years ago and died in what is now in Las Hoyas, Spain.

The details of the fossil, reported today in Nature, paint a picture of a six-metre-long theropod, a family of dinosaurs previously thought to be confined to southern continents.

Most interesting for the scientists who found the fossil, Francisco Ortega and Jose Sanz of the Universidad Nacional de Educacíon a Distancia in Madrid, is a hump-like structure on the dinosaur's back and a series of small knobs on the forearm. The bumps could be analagous to the parts of modern birds' skeletons that anchor the flight feathers. Since the knobs are unlikely to be representative of feathers on Concavenator, the researchers propose instead that they are "non-scale skin appendages", such as tubular filaments, present in modern-day poultry.

  • Podcast: Scientists slug it out

What happens when fierce scientific rivals go head to head? Joel Levy discusses some of history's most epic battles to discredit the work of colleagues. Do these often petty quarrels help or hinder the progress of science?

Joel's book Scientific Feuds: From Galileo to the Human Genome Project is out now.

Museum director Tony Hill takes us on a tour as Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) undergoes an £8m redevelopment. Peek behind the scaffolding on our video tour.

The Science Weekly team question why Stephen Hawking's views on the existence or otherwise of God are making headlines, again; they discuss the Guardian's Bjørn Lomborg climate change exclusive; a stay of execution for Fermilab's Tevatron atom smasher; why the Higgs boson is causing a headache for the Nobel prize committee; and the problems of carbon emissions "embedded" in imported goods.

Check out our shiny new science front page and meet our crack team of science bloggers:

The Lay Scientist by Martin Robbins
Life and Physics by Jon Butterworth
Punctuated Equilibrium by GrrlScientist
Political Science by Evan Harris

Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science.

Email scienceweeklypodcast@gmail.com.

Join our Facebook group.

Listen back through our archive.

Subscribe free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed).

  • Vitamin B supplements could delay onset of Alzheimer's, says study

Some participants in Oxford University trial see their neurological decline reduce by as much as 50% after using vitamin B tablets

Taking daily supplements of B vitamins may delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease, scientists have claimed.

The discovery that people in the early stages of failing memory can retain more of their mental faculties for longer if they take the tablets regularly could lead to treatments for the condition. Some participants in the Oxford University trial saw their neurological decline reduced by as much as half after using B vitamins.

That breakthrough has raised hopes that the vitamins, which are sold in chemists and health food stores, could at least slow down, if not prevent, the shrinkage that affects many older people's brains.

Vitamin B tablets are popular among vegans, who do not receive it because they shun the foods in which it is found ? fish, meat and milk ? and among sufferers of pernicious anaemia.

"It is our hope that this simple and safe treatment will delay the development of Alzheimer's in many people who suffer from mild memory problems," said David Smith, a professor emeritus in Oxford University's pharmacology department and co-leader of the study. About 1.5m people over 70 in the UK who suffer from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) ? who have a 50/50 chance of going on to develop full-blown dementia within five years ? could benefit from the discovery, Smith added. But while the results were "immensely promising", it was not yet certain, he stressed, if B vitamins could slow or prevent the development of Alzheimer's.

Healthy middle-aged people hoping to avoid dementia and older people exhibiting early signs of memory loss might now be tempted to start routinely taking the vitamins, he said. But they should not do without first talking to their doctor, as the tablets could help stimulate the growth of early-stage cancer, he warned.

Chris Kennard, chair of the neurosciences and mental health board at the Medical Research Council, said the findings "bring us a step closer to unravelling the complex neurobiology of ageing and cognitive decline and hold the key to the development of future treatments for conditions like Alzheimer's disease."

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, said: "These are very important results, with B vitamins now showing a prospect of protecting some people from Alzheimer's in old age. The strong findings must inspire an expanded trial to follow people expected to develop Alzheimer's, and we must hope for further success."

Some 820,000 people in the UK have dementia, predominantly Alzheimer's, and their numbers are expected to soar as the population ages.

Smith and his colleagues at the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing gave one group of people with MCI daily tablets comprising folic acid, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12, and another group a placebo. The vitamins were chosen because they control the amounts of an amino acid called homocysteine in the blood. High levels of homocysteine have been linked to a greater risk of Alzheimer's.

After two years participants' brains were examined using MRI scanners and their mental faculties assessed using tests of cognition. They found that those who had been receiving the supplements had experienced on average 30% less brain atrophy than those receiving the dummy pills. The former saw their brains shrink by 0.76% a year, while the placebo group saw theirs reduce by 1.08%. Those who started the trial with the highest levels of homocysteine experienced the greatest benefit ? 50% less brain shrinkage.

  • Why does Stephen Hawking think science has overtaken philosophy? | Nicholas Blincoe

Philosophy offers more than Hawking's restless 'progress'

Stephen Hawking uses his new book, The Grand Design, to admonish philosophers for failing to keep up. My question is: is this really about keeping up? Hawking believes that since science has so far outstripped philosophy it is time for the thinkers to leave the field to the guys with the protractors and pocket calculators, but ? another question ? who let Stephen Hawking choose the rules of the game?

A quote from The West Wing comes to mind. Speechwriter Sam Seaborn argues that mankind should go to Mars because "it's next": "we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next."

What is so disturbing about Sam's vision is his effortless linkage of the opening of the west (the "manifest destiny" of the pioneers, an adventure fuelled by the religious rhetoric of the Methodist "Great Awakening") to human spirit and on to space travel.

Here, on a single flight-path, Sam connects religion, human nature and science. Life is a soaring vector, and that vector is "progress". This is the exact same notion of progress offered by Hawking. Of course, Hawking has no use for religion, but so evangelical about the notion of "progress" is he that it might as well be a religion.

How does Hawking define progress? Pretty much the same way it is defined in a quote attributed to Carlos "The Jackal": "You know you're getting somewhere when you're stepping over bodies." In Hawking's case, the bodies are those of philosophers, cast aside by science's relentless march.

To Hawking, vector is everything. Cosmology is about energy, as biology is about evolution, and Hawking demands that philosophy reflect this crazed restlessness. He criticises philosophers for failing to understand the maths that underpins his sciences, forgetting that it was a stream of philosophers who defined mathematics and, whether Zeno (in the fifth century BC) or Tarski (in the 20th century), also saw the multiple paradoxes that a reliance on numbers can lead to, as well as noting the theoretical impossibility of ever defining "number" from inside a mathematical framework. Why does Hawking love energy so much? Because, like Sam Seaborn and S Club 7, his idea of energy reflects a deeper wish to get moving and reach the stars. But he is also devoted to energy because this is simply how modern scientists look at things. Since Einstein, "energy equals matter" and Hawking lacks the imagination to think outside this box.

What does the universe look like to these men? A recent suggestion, emerging from work done on the Poincare Conjecture, is that the universe is an endlessly moving conveyor belt whose path might be modelled as a three dimensional coating on a four dimensional sphere. That's it. The universe is a slightly funky Möbius strip. All that time with their calculators and the best these guys come up with is something they first heard about in kindergarten!

If the universe is a four dimensional sphere, is this a metaphor? If so, is it possible that we need a new theory of metaphor? Hawking criticises philosophy for playing trivial word games and one sympathises: it must seem awfully trivial to a guy with no theoretical imagination. Or perhaps we should we go another way and allow that a four dimensional object is real. The question, then, is why should we prefer this object over, say, Leibniz's Monads? For Leibniz, a Monad is part of a fundamental multiplicity and each one, within its heart, carries all the information of the universe in a single, stable form.

There it is: an alternative view of matter that does not hinge on an undefined notion of "progress", from a man who could out-fox Isaac Newton on a good day and died three hundred years ago. Leibniz shows us why philosophy survives: because it is not stupid, though it may seem that way if one only glances at it, as one speeds past on a road to nowhere.

? This article was amended at 18:27 on 8 September 2010

  • Oxburgh: UEA vice-chancellor was wrong to tell MPs he would investigate climate research

Edward Acton gave 'inaccurate' information to MPs by telling them the university would reassess key scientific papers following the UEA climate emails controversy

The vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia gave "inaccurate" information to MPs when he told them that the university was setting up an inquiry into the reliability of key scientific climate change papers produced by his researchers, according to the man who led the inquiry.

Lord Oxburgh told MPs on the science and technology select committee today that Edward Acton had been wrong to tell the same committee in March that his inquiry would look into the science itself.

"I think that was inaccurate," he told the MPs. "This had to be done rapidly. This was their concern. They really wanted something within a month. There was no way our panel could evaluate the science."

Committee member Graham Stringer MP said this went against what the university had said at the time.

"We were told very clearly both by press releases and by Acton when he came [before the committee] that this was going to be an investigation into the science. Oxburgh made it very clear that it was an investigation into the integrity of the scientists," he said.

Oxburgh was appointed in March to head the second of two inquiries initiated by the university to look into the fallout from the online release of emails and documents from its Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

When announcing that inquiry during a grilling by MPs on 1 March, Acton said "[The main inquiry led by Sir Muir Russell] is not looking at the science. It is looking at allegations about malpractice. I am hoping later this week to announce the chair of a panel to reassess the science and make sure there's nothing wrong."

When it was formally announced, Professor Trevor Davies, the university's pro-vice-chancellor for research, described the Oxburgh inquiry as an "independent assessment of CRU's key publications in the areas which have been most subject to comment".

Dr Evan Harris, who was on the science and technology select committee before losing his seat as a Lib Dem MP in May, said that a full evaluation of the science produced by the CRU was impractical.

"I don't think it's reasonable to expect that inquiry to repeat a peer review analysis of the papers themselves," he said.

"That is the responsibility of the journals that published them. I think the science community is satisfied and therefore parliament should be as well that the scientific reputations of the individuals and the unit remain intact."

Oxburgh defended the inquiry from MPs' suggestions that the nine-page report which took less than a month to complete was superficial or rushed.

"I don't think we could have done usefully any more than we did to answer the question that we were set," he said.

"We worked very hard and I'm afraid I worked the panel very hard. They were very experienced people. Given our limited remit I don't think we in fact needed any more time."

He also denied that the panel was biased in favour of the scientists and said that complaints about lack of openness were wide of the mark. He said that contrary to speculation, one of the panel members was sceptical about climate change ? but he refused to say who.

"I think the views of individuals are their own," he said.

MPs also asked whether the expert panel had looked specifically at a paper on Chinese weather stations published by Prof Phil Jones the head of the unit that has been the subject of an allegation of fraud by the amateur climate analyst and former City banker Dough Keenan. Oxburgh said it had not.

Stringer asked why Oxburgh had decided not to publish the notes made by committee members during their deliberations.

Oxburgh, who has been unwell and sometimes erupted into violent bouts of coughing during the evidence session, said that he did not think that the notes would have added to the report.

Stringer disagreed. "If you put [comments from panel-member Professor Michael Kelly] next to the conclusions in the Oxburgh report then they look strange," he said.

"I think people would read the Oxburgh report differently if the minutes of the meetings that had taken place and the comments of the professorial investigators were also there."

  • Conducting Cable | Jon Butterworth

It is depressing is how soon after arriving in Whitehall ministers seem to pick up the traditional line on science funding

Minister: Ok, so I'm a bit new to this stuff. Why do we fund science?

Usual suspect 1: Erm ... I always forget this bit.

Usual suspect 2: It's an investment. It makes more money for the economy than it costs, by a huge factor. Plus the kids love it.

Minister: Oh, right. Well, we need to make more money, don't we? Maybe we shouldn't cut it? In fact maybe we'll get out of this mess quicker if we spend a bit more money here?

All: Fall about laughing.

US1: Very droll minister. It is traditional to criticise scientists for not being entrepreneurs, then redirect research money into some innovation centres or something to subsidise industry. We could call them "campuses" or something.

US2: I believe we used that already?

US1: Ah. Well, then. We often point out that some of the science we fund is below the national average excellence.

Minister: Oh well, we clearly should only fund excellence. It is inexcusable surely that we are funding anything that is below average?

US2: Quite right minister. We should only fund the top half I would say. We should monitor it annually and if any of it is below the top half we should cut it.

US1: Also, some research comes up with negative results. We shouldn't fund that stuff.

Minister: Excellent, excellent. Well, that's a start. But I don't want to salami slice.

US2: Indeed minister. We prefer to use this axe ...

(To be repeated once every five years or so until the lights go out.)

  • Life as a climate-mum isn't straightforward ? but it is interesting | Gail Whiteman

Like many working mums, I am torn between work and spending more time with my kids. But it is more complicated than that

I'm torn. Between work and family, between trying to make a difference in the world and at the same time do the dishes.

Right now, for instance, I've spent far too much time trying to find a clean table to write on, one without breakfast dishes, unfinished pizza or lego, and at the same time figure out how to talk about melting sea ice, all the while thinking about where to buy organic back-to-school clothes. And dinner isn't on yet.

Life as a climate-mum isn't straightforward; but it is interesting. Take for example, this past summer: I was invited aboard the CCGS Louis S St-Laurent travelling through the Northwest Passage, the Arctic sea route in Canada's great white north. The purpose of the trip was to get a first-hand appreciation of the effects of climate change.

Voyaging on a polar-class icebreaker is not what mums usually do (at least it's not what my mum did). But this wasn't a holiday or an adventure to write home about ? visiting the Arctic archipelago was part of my job at the university, and also integral to my work at home as a mum.

Scientists study the Arctic closely because it's where the effects of climate change are being seen (particularly The Canada Basin). Far from my kitchen table, there is no doubt that the earth's climate clock is ticking fast in the land of the midnight sun.

All indicators show that trouble is coming, and in some cases it has already arrived. Arctic waters are warming from the surface to depths of 2,000 metres. And, it's getting fresher and more acidic. The sea ice is retreating faster than all predictions. Satellites show that the ice is only half as thick as it was two or three decades ago. Permafrost is thawing and collapsing, and along with this comes rapid coastal erosion.

From the middle of the Arctic ocean, it was easy to see a huge open expanse of water, but not much multi-year ice (it's turquoise, so would have been easy to pick out).

There are plenty of reasons for mothers to take note of these shifts. Significant loss of sea ice will affect where and how we live, our water supplies, food, health, finances, and even the future of human life itself. And although our children didn't create the problem, they're the most vulnerable to its effects.

I admit that right now when I look at my kids, doom and gloom seem hard to imagine. My son, Max, is an 8-year-old with an attitude. He wave-boards and plays football with a vengeance. When I got back from the Arctic, he was excited to see me for five minutes, and then scowled. He was suddenly furious. When asked why, he said: "Well, Mum, you went away and it is just not fair that you get to do these fun things without us!"

Like many working mums, I am torn between work and spending more time with my kids. But it is more complicated than that.

Max and his brother are part of what we are calling Generation CO2 ? kids born in the last five or 10 years, and those to be born in the next fifteen or so. For Gen CO2, climate will be the overwhelming issue of their time.

I know, as a mum and as a scientist, that we really have to do something about this. Yet even as I type this, my husband arrives home with the kids and calls from the front door to see if I put the chicken on for dinner (free-range/organic, and yes, we had vegetarian last night) and so I have less time than planned.

It's a cliche to say every generation needs their mothers. But after being an official observer of the UNFCCC Climate Conference in Copenhagen last year, it's obvious that Generation CO2 really, really needs us. The policy-makers in Copenhagen or Bonn, or those who will go to Cancún in December just don't seem to get it like we would, if mothers were negotiating.

In the UK, mothers are taking action and organised Low Carbon Day on 24 June 2010 with 1,600 UK schools registered and over 600,000 children taking part. This kind of "cool the world" action puts pressure where it's needed.

But we need to keep the heat on. Gen CO2 needs more of us mums to step into the climate debate in a bigger way. They need mothers, godmothers, grandmothers, stepmothers, soon-to-be mothers, one-day-in-the-future mothers, all of us working together to get the world's elite to wake up and smell the carbon.

The force of a mother's love can move mountains. Let's use that to move the world to a better and more carbon-neutral place.

? Gail Whiteman is the mother of Max and Brix, professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, The Netherlands and director of the Sustainability & Climate Research Centre. She is co-writing Generation CO2: A Mother's Guide to Climate Change.

  • Let slime moulds do the thinking! | Ed Yong

Slime moulds may be rather unprepossessing but they can solve some complex problems in some surprising ways

Ed Yong blogs at Not Exactly Rocket Science

In 2009, scientists unleashed an amoeba-like blob on to Tokyo, and watched as it consumed everything in sight. In less than a day, the blob had spread throughout the entire city, concentrating itself along major transport routes.

Fortunately for the citizens of the great Japanese metropolis, the blob did its work on a model. Flakes of oats stood in for the major urban zones and the scientists involved were no B-movie villains. Rather, they were biologists studying the sophisticated behaviour of a slime mould, an oozing blob of goo that performs feats of apparent intelligence despite being completely brainless.

The slime mould Physarum polycephalum spends most of its life as a yellow mat, sliding among the leaf litter in its search for food, such as bacteria and fungal spores. This mat is a gigantic single cell, called a plasmodium, which forages by sending out dozens of tendrils from a central mass. The branches of this living network grow and shrink, emerge and vanish, according to what they encounter.

Without a brain, Physarum makes decisions by committee. The plasmodium is a single sac but it behaves like a colony. Every part rhythmically expands and contracts, pushing around the fluid inside. If one part of the plasmodium touches something attractive, like food, it pulses more quickly and widens. If another part meets something repulsive, like light, it pulses more slowly and shrinks. By adding up all of these effects, the plasmodium flows in the best possible direction without a single conscious thought. It is the ultimate in crowdsourcing.

Despite its lack of a nervous system, Physarum can still solve problems such as mazes, finding the shortest path between two exits baited with food. At first, it extends its tendril network throughout the entire labyrinth before trimming away the dead-end branches, leaving behind a single thick tube that covers the most direct path. If parts of the maze are bathed in unpleasant bursts of light, Physarum will find an alternative route that sticks to the shadows.

Here's where miniature Tokyo comes in. Physarum is so good at finding quick routes between different places that Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University wanted to see if it could match human town planners. He placed the mould in his food-based model of Tokyo, with patches of light representing impassable terrain. Sure enough, the mould filled the entire area before thinning out into selective connections between the food sources. These final networks were strikingly similar to Tokyo's actual railway system, and comparable in terms of efficiency and resistance to problems.

Physarum accomplishes all of this without any forethought. It behaves like a town planner who cakes a city in rails before strengthening what works and demolishing what does not. It seems haphazard but this technique, honed by millennia of evolution, allows the giant cell to efficiently shunt nutrients from one end to another. The result is a biological network that matches the best man-made efforts.

Physarum is also a skilled decision-maker. At the University of Sydney, Tanya Latty and Madeleine Beekman found that it can weigh up different options to make the best possible choice. If it encounters several food morsels of varying nutritional quality, it devours them in the right proportions to get a balanced diet.

The slime mould is also vulnerable to problems that plague human decisions. Latty's latest studyin the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, shows that when choosing between foods, the moulds that make the quickest choices also make more bad decisions, while those that take their time are more accurate.

Its preferences can also be swayed through simple marketing tactics. Physarum has no inclination towards either a hefty food chunk bathed in light or a medium-sized piece in shadow; both options have pros and cons. But Latty and Beekman changed the slime mould's behaviour by giving it a third option that makes one of the originals seem more attractive ? a small morsel in shadow, say. Human businesses use the same tactics to influence their customers too ? unattractively basic products can make expensive ones seem more desirable, while even expensive products look like a steal if they're placed next to even more costly alternatives (think vintage wine). Despite the gulf of intelligence that separates us, both humans and slime moulds like to compare our options, rather than paying attention to their absolute values.

Whether any of this actually counts as intelligence, though, is debatable. Physarum will not be challenging chess grandmasters any time soon but in a 2001 paper, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, who worked on the Tokyo and maze-solving studies wrote: "I consider that the Physarum's maze-solving is smart or something like primitive intelligence." But he added that, by these standards, "all biological systems must be rather smart".

Andy Adamatzky from the University of West England agrees. "Physarum's intelligence is not higher than intelligence of a stone rolling down a hill (the stone "chooses" a shortest path downhill) or a plant orienting itself towards the sun," he says. "Physarum just obeys physical, chemical and biological laws."

Studying the slime mould may seem like a spot of trivial fun. Indeed, for his maze study, Nakagaki even won an Ignobel prize, an award given to research that makes you laugh, then think. But there is no denying that its simple behaviour can lead to complex feats.

Some scientists are trying to tap into this ability for a variety of practical uses. Take the Tokyo experiment. Tero thinks that the slime mould's abilities could help planners to design better networks by using biological principles, and he has created a computer model to simulate the mould's style of decision-making.

Adamtzky describes Physarum as a living computer, which is driven by a massively parallel core processor and can be controlled by food or light. These properties can be used to integrate the slime mould into machines. Klaus-Peter Zauner from the University of Southampton managed to control a six-legged robot using a slime mould grown in the shape of a six-pointed star. He used beams of light to move each of the mould's branches, and a computer translated these movements to the robot's own legs. It was the first time that a robot had been driven by living cells. Other groups have used moulds as sensors to sniff out chemicals, engines to drive miniature boats with rhythmic pulses, or conveyor belts to transport liquids and small particles.

Adamtzky also sees Physarum as an inspiration for artificial robots, which would be very different from conventional designs with electronic hardware driven by central programmes. These new robots would be able to change their shape and run off the collective actions of their various parts, just like a living slime mould. Adamatzky calls them "biological amorphous robots" or, more affectionately, "bloboids" or "plasmobots". They are like a team of employees who work together for the common good without the direction of a manager. Despite any central intelligence, they would still produce efficient behaviour, which would give them one up over many governments.

Ed Yong blogs at Not Exactly Rocket Science