President Barack Obama yesterday signed an executive order to make it the default policy of his administration to make government information open and available in a machine readable format.

With the order, the president took "historic steps to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs and others as fuel for innovation and economic growth," the White House said yesterday.

The order declares that information is a valuable resource and a national strategic asset, and that newly generated government data will be more accessible and useful – ensuring for privacy and security

"Openness in government strengthens our democracy, promotes the delivery of efficient and effective services to the public, and contributes to economic growth," the order reads.

According to the statement, one of the principles guiding the policy is the notion that "making information resources easy to find, accessible, and usable can fuel entrepreneurship, innovation, and scientific discovery that improves Americans' lives and contributes significantly to job creation."

Decades ago, the order notes, the government made weather data and Global Positioning System information freely available, and since then American entrepreneurs and innovators have used these data to create navigation systems, weather newscasts and warning systems, and new applications and tools for farming and location systems, the White House explained.

Under the new Open Data Policy, within 30 days the chief information officer and chief technology officer will publish an online repository of tools and best practices to help agencies integrate the new policy into their operations; within 90 days several government councils and executives will initiate measures to support the integration of the new policy and to establish a cross-agency effort to track the policy's implementation; and within 180 days agencies are expected to start reporting their progress on putting the new policy in place.

In Science this week, researchers from McGill University reported new details about the activation of Parkin, a gene that, when mutated, is responsible for an autosomal recessive form of Parkinson’s disease. Using x-ray scattering, the team determined the crystal structure of the full-length parkin protein in rat tissue. The protein is ordinarily inactive, but they found that mutations that the disrupted two inhibitory binding interactions activated it. The findings may offer insights into enhancing parkin’s neuroprotective activity.

Also in Science, investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published new data detailing how changes in certain protein-protein have contributed to species diversity. The scientists examined the basic region-leucine zipper, or bZIP, transcription factors and quantified bZIP dimerization networks for five metazoan and two single-cell species, measuring interactions in vitro for 2,891 protein pairs.
They found that metazoan bZIP interactomes have “broadly similar structures,” yet there has been “extensive rewiring of connections compared to the last common ancestor.” At the same time, each species network is highly distinct, and many metazoan bZIP orthologs and paralogs display “strikingly different” interaction specificities.”

Overall, the data suggest that the changes in biochemical functions related to signaling and gene expression had a major impact on the rise of different species.

A group of synthetic biology do-it-yourself researchers want to develop and sell glow-in-the-dark plants that could be used as decoration or, in the case of trees, to light streets, Andrew Pollack writes in the New York Times.

The plan is to work out of the BioCurious hacker lab space in Silicon Valley to initially splice DNA from a luminous organism like a jellyfish or marine bacterium into an Arabidopsis mustard plant and to move on to other plants later.\

The partners, including San Francisco tech entrepreneur Antony Evans and Omri Amirav-Drory, who runs a firm called Genome Compiler, also hope that their project will inspire others to pursue independent biology engineering, Pollack writes.

To fund the effort, the partners have raised $250,000 from around 4,500 Kickstarter donors in around two weeks, the Times reports.

“We hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like glow-in-the-dark paint), but don’t expect to replace your light bulbs with version 1.0,” according to the project's Kickstarter page.

Not surprisingly, the plan has drawn concerned criticism from environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, who have asked Kickstarter to remove the project from its website and have asked the US Department of Agriculture to take some action, according to the Times.

The environmental groups said that the glowing mustard plant project will lead to the "widespread and uncontrolled release of bioengineered seeds and plants through the controversial and risky techniques of synthetic biology," Pollack notes.

So far, Kickstarter has told the critics to talk to the project's partners, and USDA has not responded to the letter, according to the Times.

Even 'intelligent design' proponents need evolution for their ideas to work, Gerhard Adam writes in Science 2.0.

The common critique that advocates of 'intelligent design' level against evolutionary biology is that there are instances of complexity in the natural world that cannot have evolved, and must have had a designer.

But Adam says that even the examples and analogies they provide for evidence of a designer have required evolution to become what they are.

Take a look at the example of the 747 jumbo jet, which has been used as an analogy to biological phenomena that intelligent design advocates see as being far too complex to have arisen through randomness, Adam says.

Leaving aside the "complete misunderstanding about randomness," Adam notes: where did the design for the 747 come from?

"We can immediately see that it didn't occur directly, but rather was the result of an evolutionary process beginning with the Wright Brothers [and even previous unsuccessful attempts at flight]," he says.

The same holds for finely crafted and complex watches, or any other complex objects that are proposed as too complex.

"Rather the object in question is invariably the result of design, evolution, and selection. At each design step, the characteristics that work best get selected for incorporation in future versions of the object. There are simply no exceptions," Adam adds.

Any such object that exhibits design also "exhibits evolution and selection," he says, pointing out that it is "what we call progress."

Could the US business community play a role in supporting basic research while the sequestration's spending cuts to federal science budgets are still in effect, asked a group of tech policy watchers in a teleconference yesterday.

In a Scientific American blog post, Larry Greenemeier reports that participants in the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies conference call were asking what role business could play in making up the funding shortfall that has and will continue to hit the academic research communities as long as the sequester is in effect; it is set to last through 2021.

The big question here is how to make up for cuts in the kinds of early stage research that benefits industry in the long-term, but which companies do not want or cannot afford to pursue, Greenemeier says.

C-PET President Nigel Cameron said in the call that Apple, which ended its most recent earnings period holding $145 billion in cash, “is sitting on more money than the federal government spends on all of its discretionary R&D combined.”

It is conceivable that the business community could cover some of the gap in early stage R&D that the sequester has created, Greenemeier writes.

How companies would explain such expenses to their shareholders, however, may be another matter. But if they do not choose to spend cash on funding basic research, businesses may want to burn some of their extra dough lobbying Congress hard to increase the government's flexibility under the sequester, allowing agencies to better allocate their decreased resources, Nagy Hanna, a C-PET senior fellow said during the call.

The aim of such a lobbying effort would be to impress upon policymakers how important basic R&D is for the greater US economy, as well as university systems.

Christian de Duve, who won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has died, the New York Times reports. He was 95. De Duve discovered the lysosome and received the Nobel along with Albert Claude, who discovered mitochondria, and George Palade, who uncovered the ribosome, "for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell," according to the Nobel Foundation.

Those discoveries, the Times notes, paved the way for modern cell biology, and de Duve's finding particularly influenced the study of Tay-Sachs disease and other genetic lysosomal storage disorders. "We are sick because our cells are sick," de Duve said.