Many universities are trying to bring sustainability to campus through measures such as serving organic food in dining halls, using carbon-neutral power sources and constructing buildings that qualify for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. Yet some institutions have expressed concern that some of these efforts do little to reduce environmental impact. Chemist David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., recently sat down with Science News writer Rachel Ehrenberg to discuss walking the green line. ... (p. 32)

Physician Robert Russell became president of the American Society for Nutrition earlier this year. A policy consultant to the National Institutes of Heath, Russell spent a quarter century with the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., most recently as its director. He has authored hundreds of papers on nutrition science, many in the fields of vitamins, food-derived antioxidants and gastrointestinal disease. Science News senior editor Janet Raloff spoke with him about today’s most prominent nutrition issues. What’s the biggest issue... (p. 32)

Catastrophes come in all shapes and sizes, but some basic causative principles underlie most of them. Robert Bea, an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied system failures from space shuttle explosions to levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina — but as a former oil rig worker he is most familiar with drilling disasters. Bea has thus assumed a key role in analyzing the response to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico (Page 5). He spoke with Science News contributing editor Alexandra Witze about why the spill could have been foreseen. You’ve looked at ... (p. 32)

A paper published online May 20 in Science touted the creation of the world’s first synthetic cell by researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute who assembled a bacterial genome from scratch and used it to reprogram an existing organism (Page 5). The accomplishment is a major advance in the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, which tinkers with natural cells and organisms to answer basic research questions and solve environmental, medical and other problems. This rapidly expanding field brings with it significant ethical and practical issues. Glenn McGee of the Center for Practical Bi... (p. 32)

Obama adviser weighs ‘the rightful place of science’ by Eric S. Lander In an address to scientists attending the 2010 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, genomics researcher Eric S. Lander, a cochair of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., discussed science and technology policy in the United States. Susan Gaidos, a Science News contributing correspondent, compiled some of his comments and observations, starting with Lander’s interpretation ... (p. 32)

Is science education broken in the United States? And if so, how should the country fix it? A working group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has been investigating these long-standing questions and is expected to issue a report on its policy recommendations this month. Science News Contributing Editor Alexandra Witze spoke with the working group’s cochair, physicist S. James Gates Jr. of the University of Maryland in College Park. Gates also serves on the Board of Trustees of Society for Science & the Public, the parent organization of Science Ne... (p. 32)

Science News reporter Ron Cowen's Q&A with Nobel laureate and laser-technology pioneer Charles Townes. (p. 36)

Gary Klein, a psychologist and chief scientist at Applied Research Associates in Fairborn, Ohio, has for the past 25 years studied how people make real-life, critical decisions under extreme time pressure. In his 2009 book Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making (MIT Press), Klein discusses 10 surprising ways effective thinkers deal with ambiguous situations. Staff writer Bruce Bower, who writes on Page 26 of this issue about risk and decisions, recently spoke with Klein about good decision making. What is tacit knowledge and why do you consider it so impo... (p. 32)

Recently, 895 Web experts and users were asked by the Pew Research Center and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University in North Carolina to assess predictions about technology and its effects on society in the year 2020. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington, D.C., discussed the survey’s findings with Science News contributing correspondent Susan Gaidos. This is your fourth “Future of the Internet” survey. Are there any themes that have come through all of the surveys? There’s a broad feeling among technologists that technol... (p. 32)

Caltech physicist Barry Barish is the director of the global design effort for the International Linear Collider, which is currently in the planning stages. If built, the ILC would smash together electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, at nearly the speed of light. The ILC would complement the Large Hadron Collider, a European proton collider that is the world’s most powerful but has had technical problems that will prevent it from operating at full power until 2013. That gives the world’s second most powerful collider, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laborat... (p. 32)