COMMENTARY

Neuroaesthetics Managing water integration

LETTERS I BOOKS I POLICY FORUM I EDUCATION FORUM I PERSPECTIVES

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LETTERS
edited by Jennifer Sills

Climates Role in Polar Bear Past

IN THEIR PROVOCATIVE ANALYSIS OF NORTHERN BEARS (NUCLEAR genomic sequences reveal that polar bears are an old and distinct bear lineage, Reports, 20 April, p. 344), F. Hailer et al. use independent nuclear loci to show that polar bears originated during the middle Pleistocene, rather than during the late Pleistocene as previously inferred from mitochondrial data. Although they discuss the possible role of climate warming in creating discord between nuclear and mitochondrial genetic signatures, the authors do not address climates critical role in driving the evolution of polar bears in the rst place. A reliance on perennial sea ice and a On ice. Polar bears diet of ice-dependent strongly pagophilic (i.e., prey provides clues to their past. ice-dependent) prey base,

KURT E. GALBREATH,1* JOSEPH A. COOK,2 ERIC P. HOBERG3

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Department of Biology, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI 49855, USA. Museum of Southwestern Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA. 3National Parasite Collection, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal Parasitic Diseases, Beltsville, MD 20705, USA. *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: kgalbrea@nmu.edu

References
1. S. A. Harris, Prog. Phys. Geogr. 29, 218 (2005). 2. Y. Herman, D. M. Hopkins, Science 209, 557 (1980).

Water Cycle Varies over Land and Sea

THE SALINITY AT THE OCEAN SURFACE HAS changed over the past 50 years; saline regions have become more saline, whereas regions of relatively fresh water have become even fresher. In their Report Ocean salinities reveal strong global water cycle intensication during 1950 to 2000 (27 April, p. 455), P. J. Durack et al. conclude that these changes indicate a change in the dif-

Letters to the Editor

Letters (~300 words) discuss material published in Science in the past 3 months or matters of general interest. Letters are not acknowledged upon receipt. Whether published in full or in part, Letters are subject to editing for clarity and space. Letters submitted, published, or posted elsewhere, in print or online, will be disqualied. To submit a Letter, go to www.submit2science.org.

ference between evaporation and precipitation. In his related News & Analysis story The greenhouse is making the water-poor even poorer (27 April, p. 405), R. A. Kerr applies this result to the land surface, based on the idea that the global water cycle is dominated by the oceanic component. Kerr asserts that wet land got wetter and dry land got drier with more oods and droughts. The measurement of ocean salinity and link to the oceanic component of the water cycle is a scientic advance. However, its interpretation requires proper context: One does not normally think of droughts and oods over the oceans. The assumption that the land must be behaving in the same way as the ocean is almost certainly wrong. In the global water cycle, evaporation generally exceeds precipitation over the ocean, balanced by precipitation exceeding evaporation over land. Over land, the excess water is the river runoff that closes the cycle. In the oceans, evaporation can

MICHAEL L. RODERICK, FUBAO SUN, GRAHAM D. FARQUHAR*

Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia.

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exceed precipitation because water is always available for evaporation. In contrast, the land is not always wet and thus evaporation cannot steadily exceed precipitation in the absence of irrigation or groundwater use. Over dry land, the difference between precipitation and evaporation is near zerothere is little runoff. Dening wetness as precipitation minus evaporation (1) means that over land, dry places tend to remain dry while wet places could become either wetter or drier (2). In a literal sense, the ocean surface is always wet, whereas much of the land surface is dry and therefore operates differently. In short, we need to stop the simple extrapolation of results from ocean studies to the land and vice versa.

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including seals, suggests that polar bears could not have evolved in a world in which the Arctic Ocean remained unfrozen for large portions of the year, as it did most recently during the warm period of the middle Pliocene. Cooling of the Arctic Ocean commenced during the late Pliocene, driving a transition from predominantly seasonal to perennial sea ice that was largely complete by the middle Pleistocene about 700,000 years ago (1, 2). Striking temporal concordance between the new date for divergence of polar bears and persistent freezing of the Arctic Ocean suggests that this may be one of relatively few instances in which a specic paleoclimatological episode can be convincingly linked to a specic evolutionary event, and it provides vivid demonstration of climatic forcing as a determinant of diversication in biological systems.

Naturally tough

Longer-lasting quantum memories

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*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: graham.farquhar@anu.edu.au

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misuses in a dual-use context; if appropriate, safeguards to mitigate such risks have been introduced. The guidance document on minimizing the risks of misuse of research (3) provides a list of potential safeguards to reviewers and addresses the potential need to obtain export licenses in certain circumstancesa precaution that would have mitigated the problems related to the National Institutes of Health nanced Dutch H5N1 study (4). The two concepts differ substantially in scope. The U.S. plan is solely focused on a selected list of biological agents. The European Commissions Ethics Review includes dual-use research in other areas, such as chemical, radiological, nuclear, and explosive research. The wider denition, based on lessons learned from past occurrences of dual-use issues in reviews, aims to be consistent with relevant international and national arrangements address-

ing dual-use risks of research [e.g., (57)]. As the United States assesses its current strategies in dual-use oversight, it may be worthwhile to consider a more comprehensive approach in order to be in line with the international and national legal framework and the complexity of dual-use in research.
JOHANNES RATH
Department of Evolutionary Biology, University of Vienna, Althanstrasse 14, 1090 Vienna, Austria. E-mail: johannes. rath@univie.ac.at

References
1. I. M. Held, B. J. Soden, J. Clim. 19, 5686 (2006). 2. M. L. Roderick, G. D. Farquhar, Water Resour. Res. 47, W00G07 (2011).

References
1. United States Government Policy for Oversight of Life Sciences Dual Use Research of Concern (http://oba.od.nih.gov/ oba/biosecurity/PDF/United_States_Government_Policy_ for_Oversight_of_DURC_FINAL_version_032812.pdf). 2. European Commission, Research and Innovation Science in Society, Ethics Review (http://ec.europa.eu/ research/science-society/index.cfm?fuseaction=public. topic&id=1289). 3. Research Ethics: A Comprehensive Strategy on How to Minimize Research Misconduct and the Potential Misuse of Research in EU Funded Research (ftp://ftp.cordis. europa.eu/pub/fp7/docs/guidelines-on-misconductmisuse-of-research_en.pdf). 4. M. Enserink, Science 336, 285 (2012). 5. The Australia Group, Relationship with the Biological Weapons Convention (www.australiagroup.net/en/bwc. html). 6. Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling, and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction (Chemical Weapons Convention) (www.opcw.org/chemical-weapons-convention). 7. Export Control: A Resource Nonproliferation Export Controls (www.exportcontrol.org).

THE PROPOSED SHIFT IN DUAL-USE RESEARCH oversight in the United States [(1); U.S. agencies to start screening biomedical proposals for dual use, D. Malakoff, News & Analysis, 6 April, p. 21] resembles the procedural concept applied by the European Commission Ethics Review and Audit system (2). For more than 10 years, research proposals funded by the European Commission (the largest research funding institution in Europe) have been systematically reviewed and audited for potential

theBUZZ
The Cost of Open Access
In her Editorial, Open accessPass the buck (16 March, p. 1279), M. Leptin discussed the economic trade-offs that publishers face when deciding whether to make their journals open access. She worries that an open access journal has to be either selective and expensive, or inexpensive but less selective. In the online comments section, readers shared their opinions about the open access model. Excerpts from some of the comments are below. You can read all the comments at http://comments. sciencemag.org/content/10.1126/science.1220395. A selection of your thoughts: Traditional publishers validated scholarship, a function that is being lost in the gold open access model. Predatory open access publishers are a signicant threat to the entire open access movement. Jeffrey Beall Economists, I suspect, would reject the idea of xed publishing costs. Markets should determine costif I as an author feel that the price a publisher is asking for publication is worth the added value, I will pay it; if not, Ill publish somewhere else. In such a system, the market could eliminate inefcient publishers whose publication costs exceed the added value perceived by the authors. In the reader-pays system, the market

cannot bring added value in line with costs. It seems this is proven by the journals own claim that they cannot switch to open access because it would cost the authors too much. By their own admission, their costs exceed their added value. Carl Boettiger Once articles are freely available online for re-use, overlay journals and social networking tools can assume the role of providing community judgment on the importance of any particular piece of work. It seems reasonable to hope that the network will exercise better overall judgment in this matter than a centralized politburo of science graduates in a publishing ofce. Douglas Carnall There is an argument for maintaining both open access journals and the traditional journals that require a subscription. When authors pay the publication costs of open access journals, the publication is available to everybody, including researchers with limited means. However, these same researchers may also have difculties in covering the costs of publishing in open access journals. They can publish in traditional journals as long as these do not require high contributions from the authors. Unless open access journals cover reduced prices for researchers with limited resources or traditional journals offer reduced subscription rates, we may face a dichotomy: Researchers with or without nancial means will read and publish in different sets of journals Arne Janssen I do not believe that the economics are so different for high- and lowacceptance rate journals if it concerns journals with a sufciently good reputation to attract reviewers and associate editors willing to do their work for free. F. Tilmann

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European Dual-Use Procedures