The Rosalind Franklin rover can drill two metres below the Martian surface.Credit: Airbus/ESA

Europe’s first Mars rover delayed by two years

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian space agency Roscosmos have delayed the launch of a rover designed to search for signs of life on Mars.

The Rosalind Franklin probe will be Europe’s first Mars rover. It had been expected to lift off for the red planet in July, and was due to arrive in March 2021. But key tests have yet to be completed, and the mission will now depart in 2022 and arrive in 2023.

“Although we are really close to launch readiness we cannot cut corners,” ESA director-general Jan Wörner said at a press briefing on 12 March. “Launching this year would mean sacrificing essential remaining tests.”

Reasons for the delay include software problems with the spacecraft that will carry the rover, and issues with the main parachute due to be used during the landing. The space agencies also cited the coronavirus pandemic as a reason.

The rover is the second part of the two space agencies’ broader ExoMars mission. The mission’s overall goal is to ascertain whether Mars has ever hosted life, and the rover will look for chemicals that might be indicative of biological activity. The craft will be able to drill up to two metres below the planet’s surface to examine pristine subsurface material.

Coronavirus vaccine trials start in people

The first clinical trial for a potential COVID-19 vaccine has begun in Seattle, Washington.

On 16 March, 4 adults, the first of 45 eventual participants in the phase I trial, received their first doses of an experimental vaccine developed through a partnership between the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and biotechnology company Moderna, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Over the next 6 weeks, each participant will receive their first dose of the vaccine, followed by a second dose 28 days later. Follow-up visits will assess participants’ health over a 14-month period.

The experimental vaccine is based on messenger RNA, which directs the body to make a protein found on the coronavirus’s outer shell. The hope is that this will elicit an immune response that protects against infection. Researchers aim to have initial clinical-trial data within three months.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization has begun describing the coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic, after a rise in the number of cases outside China, where the virus emerged. The infection has now spread to more than 150 countries.

Hundreds of scientists review for predatory journals

Hundreds of scientists say they’ve reviewed papers for journals termed predatory — although they might not know it.

An analysis of the Publons platform, where researchers list manuscript reviews they have conducted, has found that it hosts at least 6,000 records of reviews for more than 1,000 journals deemed predatory by Cabells, a publishing-analytics company in Beaumont, Texas (A. Severin et al. Preprint at BioRxiv http://doi.org/dpxk; 2020).

The study is the largest yet to examine claims that scientists peer review for predatory journals. A popular conception is that these journals generally publish any manuscript they’re offered, for a fee, and don’t provide peer review. In fact, journals can be defined as predatory even though they offer peer review, if they are deceptive in other ways. But the peer review that these journals conduct might not be to the standard most researchers recognize, says Matt Hodgkinson, head of research integrity at the publisher Hindawi in London.

The reviews, if genuine, might be “a waste of valuable time and effort” by reviewers, say the study authors, a joint team from Publons in London, the Swiss National Science Foundation in Bern and the University of Bern. They suggest that funders and research institutions should warn against reviewing for predatory titles.

Coronavirus crisis imperils epic Arctic research expedition

The coronavirus outbreak has affected a massive international scientific project, after a team member tested positive for the virus.

The MOSAiC mission is operating from the German research vessel Polarstern, which has been intentionally frozen in Arctic sea ice since last October. A rotating cast of scientists and technicians are sampling the ice, atmosphere and ocean to understand the intricacies of the rapidly changing Arctic climate.

The team member who contracted the virus works on the airborne part of the expedition and had not yet travelled to the Arctic. The air mission — which has been delayed to protect those on the ship — will use scientific aircraft to take measurements around Polarstern.

The infected individual had attended a workshop in Bremerhaven, Germany, on 5 March with other aircraft team members. About 20 members of the aircraft team who had been in contact with the person are now quarantined in their homes, says MOSAiC chief scientist Markus Rex, an atmospheric scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany. The air mission will not resume until the quarantine is lifted.

The ship Polarstern is locked in Arctic ice for the MOSAiC mission.Credit: Sebastian Grote/Alfred-Wegener-Institut (CC-BY 4.0)

Surprise boon for scientists in UK budget

UK researchers have been buoyed by a pledge to give science and research spending a major boost, announced as part of the national budget on 11 March.

The government said that it would increase investment in science to £22 billion (US$27 billion) by 2024–25. The current public research budget is about £9 billion a year, and the Conservative government had previously promised to raise science spending to £18 billion by 2024–25.

“This is a special surprise gift for the science base,” says Jack Stilgoe, a researcher in science and technology studies at University College London.

“The £22-billion investment is a really significant push by the government on research and innovation,” says Sarah Main, executive director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, a research-advocacy group in London. “It delivers on their previous commitments further and faster than they’d previously promised.”

The pledges made in the budget, which was delivered by newly appointed chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak, help to put the government on track to meet its target of raising public and private research expenditure to 2.4% of gross domestic product by 2027, says Main.

But the 2.4% target also requires private industry to step up its investment, says James Wilsdon, who studies science and technology policy at the University of Sheffield, UK. “There’s still a question mark hanging over the capacity of the private sector to grow on anything like that scale in that time frame.”

Promising vaccine for killer pig virus

Researchers in China have developed an experimental vaccine that can protect pigs for life from a lethal virus that has decimated the country’s pig population — the world’s largest — over the past 18 months.

There is no available cure or vaccine for the highly contagious African swine fever, a haemorrhagic disease that leads to almost certain death in infected pigs, but does not harm humans.

To develop a vaccine, researchers in China made a weakened strain of the live virus. The hope was that pigs exposed to these live attenuated viruses would mount an immune response that would protect them from the wild, deadly strain.

Pigs vaccinated with a high dose of the weakened strain showed only mild symptoms, or none at all, when exposed to the wild virus. The result “is what you would hope to get”, says Linda Dixon, a virologist at the Pirbright Institute, Woking, UK.

In further studies on commercial pigs, the team found that two rounds of the high dose could protect the pigs for their entire lives, which is typically only five months.

Virologists say that the Chinese team has gone further than any other group in testing the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, but it still needs to carry out clinical trials and enable large-scale vaccine production.