Science published a retraction yesterday of two papers by Hwang and his team in a special online collection: the June 2005 paper, which was withdrawn by the authors, and the March 2004 article, which was retracted by the Science editors. Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy released a videotaped statement regarding the case and the retraction of the papers.

The assistant researcher, Park Eul-soon, who admitted to donating her eggs for Dr. Hwank Woo-Suk's cloning research, but did not say she was coerced, now says that "she was forced to contribute her eggs after mistakenly spilling ova used for experiments in 2003," according to The Korea Herald. "'I regret that I did not stand up to Dr. Hwang,' MBC television station quoted her as saying in the e-mail." Park mysteriously disappeared from Pittsburgh just when the scandal was breaking and did not return to Seoul when her South Korean colleagues were being summoned back to South Korea. (via blog.bioethics.net)

Something new is afoot in the science blogosphere. Seed Magazine has been busy inviting science bloggers to its ScienceBlogs website to create one big, aggregated science blog. Some of the bigger names in the science blog category have abandoned, or presumably will soon abandon, their old blog servers to join ScienceBlogs, including Pharyngula, Cognitive Daily, and Living the Scientific Life. The ScienceBlogs homepage operates like an RSS feed to give you a place to quickly scan the latest posts from all of their science blogs. According to Tim Lambert of Deltoid, "The main reason for the move is the chance to be associated with the fine group of blogs here. The designers at ScienceBlogs are dreaming up ways to provide links to interesting posts at other blogs on this site in the sidebar, so my readers can get some more value out of my blog. I also now have advertising in the sidebar. I hadn't bothered with this before because it was extra work for not very much money, but I don't have to do anything except write the posts and cash the thin cheques." Ahh, so there's the hook: They're getting paid to blog for ScienceBlogs. Nothing new there actually, since this is the business model of Weblogs, Inc., which founder Jason Calacanis just recently sold to AOL for a cool $25M.

The American Museum of Natural History Bulletin has a great series of feature articles on the latest tsunami research that includes interactive multimedia files and essays on how tsunami reseachers are trying to get ahead of the next big wave. This video provides an overview of the feature, complete with interviews of scientists including Vasily Titov, who created the first animated model of the Sumatra tsunami that was shown by major news outlets all over the world. Watch how a subduction zone earthquake creates a tsunami like the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean in 2004. The essays cover computer modeling approaches, high-tech buoy monitoring systems, and research in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., which shows that a major tsunami hit the coast near the Cascadia subduction zone only 300 years ago.

An anonymous do-it-yourselfer who goes by the name of JavaMoose on Flickr built his own deep-towed underwater camera using PVC tubing, a color camera, and a black and white camera capable of seeing in the dark with infrared illumination. A 100-foot-long cable provides power to the cameras and connects them to an external video capture device and laptop, which allow real-time monitoring and recording of the underwater images. You can see a slideshow of the construction and sample videos of underwater critters recorded by the cameras: Initial Testing, Second Run, and The Feeding Frenzy! In The Feeding Frenzy, JavaMoose and his crew dropped bait into the water and managed to record a swarm of little fish around the color camera. The videos come complete with a clever selection of soundtracks to get you in the spirit. (PS: We'll gladly post his name if we ever find out his true identity.)

Literature.org, the free, online library, has dozens of complete, unabridged books from English literature as well as a few science texts available for you to read online. Three works by Charles Darwin are available on the site, including The Voyage of the Beagle, two editions of The Origin of Species. and The Descent of Man. The site can get away with posting the works online because the authors have been dead for at least 75 to 90 years.

Yes, that is a bike with a rocket on its rear. No, you shouldn't try to build one of these yourself, unless of course you actually happen to be a rocket scientist. Tim Pickens, who not only is a rocket scientist, but is president of his own rocket design firm, built a 200-pound-thrust rocket engine that attaches to a bicycle for a mere $750 and lots and lots of work. The rocket blasted his bike from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 5 seconds - as fast as a Porsche. According to Popular Science, "the rocket bike employs the same hybrid rocket technology as the suborbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, whose propulsion system Pickens helped design. In place of synthetic rubber fuel, however, the bike uses ordinary roofing tar. To ignite it, Pickens placed a model-rocket motor inside the engine. A button on the handlebar fires the model-rocket motor, which in turn sets off Pickens's larger motor by lighting the roofing-tar fuel. His next project is to build a company car: a pickup truck with a removable 2,000-pound-thrust rocket strapped into the bed." We all can see where this is headed, and let's just say it isn't pretty; no, not when your helmet has melted around your head.

The award of the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) management contract to the University of California on December 21 by the U.S. Department of Energy is being criticized by the editors of top science journal Nature in the January 5 issue. A consortium led by the University of California and industrial engineering partner Bechtel corporation beat out a challenge by a group led by the University of Texas and Lockheed Martin. In an editorial entitled "No new start at Los Alamos," Nature writes, "Once, this news would have led to celebrations among the 8,000 or so University of California staff at Los Alamos. But their mood is instead forlorn. Staff pensions and other benefits are not guaranteed under the new arrangement, and recent actions by the University of California have eroded goodwill. ... The process by which the Department of Energy awarded the contract has been murky, even by the usual standards of such exercises. Few believe that the department's grey-suited administrators really made an independent choice. Rather, the process was characterized by delays and heavyweight political lobbying from Senator Pete Domenici (Republican, New Mexico), among others. That's par for the course, as the 'management crisis' at Los Alamos has always been more about Washington politics than about actual administrative issues at the lab." This was the first time that the contract has come up for rebidding since Los Alamos National Laboratory was established in 1943 to develop the first atomic bomb and was triggered by recent security scandals and claims of espionage, which in fact aren't all that new at LANL. More on the reaction to the LANL contract decision can be found in LANL: The Real Story, an insider's blog by retired LANL computer scientist Doug Roberts.

The Cascades Volcano Observatory of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has released truly awesome videos created from photos taken daily by an automated digital camera on the Sugar Bowl Dome, located 2.3 km (1.4 miles) north-northeast of the vent. The camera, on loan from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, was installed on October 10, 2004. The camera snaps one photo every 3 minutes and sends a picture to observatory scientists once every hour. The pictures shown in this movie were taken from June 16 to August 16, 2005 - only two months! The video shows the dome on the left rising then collapsing as the dome on the right diverts the flow of magma. The current status as of today (Jan. 3) of Mount St. Helens is at volcano advisory alert level 2, color code ORANGE. Small earthquakes are being recorded every 2-3 minutes with intermittent larger events. According to the USGS, "The eruption could intensify suddenly or with little warning and produce explosions that cause hazardous conditions within several miles of the crater and farther downwind."