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(credit: Bureau of Land Management)

Today, the US Department of the Interior announced that it will put a halt to new leases for coal extraction on public lands. While coal companies could continue to mine on existing leases, no new ones will be permitted until a comprehensive review of the program is completed. Roughly 40 percent of the nation's coal comes from public lands.

“We haven’t undertaken a comprehensive review of the program in more than 30 years, and we have an obligation to current and future generations to ensure the federal coal program delivers a fair return to American taxpayers and takes into account its impacts on climate change,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said via a released statement.

The announcement follows President Obama's latest State of the Union Address, in which he called for changes in how the US manages its coal and oil resources. Obama suggested that the costs fossil fuels impose on the planet need to be taken into account, language that was echoed in Jewell's announcement. The move implies that there will be some effort to have the extraction of coal include some portion of the social cost of carbon, which has until now been left as an externality.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. (credit: Computer History Museum)

The Federal Communications Commission says it has held "productive" meetings with Comcast, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA about whether data cap exemptions conflict with the goals of net neutrality.

The FCC sent letters last month asking the three carriers to meet with commission staff by January 15, and all the meetings have happened.

"FCC staff had productive discussions with company representatives as part of a larger policy examination of trends in the market. We cannot comment on the details of individual meetings," FCC spokesperson Kim Hart told Ars.

The Chang'e-3 probe carried the Yutu rover to the lunar surface in 2013. (credit: CNSA)

China plans to become the first nation to land a probe on the far side of the Moon, according to Xinhua News Agency, the country's official press organization.

Launching possibly as early as 2018, the mission represents the next step in China's plans to explore the Moon with robotic probes and, within the next decade, to return a couple of kilograms of lunar material to Earth. The proposed Chang'e-4 probe follows the successful soft landing of the Chang'e-3 probe on the near side of the Moon in December 2013.

Although the new probe was built as the engineering backup to the Chang'e-3 lander, Chinese officials said the structure could handle a larger payload. China plans to use the probe to study "geological conditions" on the far side of the moon. The Chang'e probes are named after the Chinese goddess of the Moon.

A T cell, the basis for immune therapies against cancer. (credit: NIAID)

One of the more exciting developments in cancer research involves tweaking the immune system to attack cancer. It's possible to engineer the immune system's T cells to attack and kill tumor cells based on the specific proteins those tumors produce. It's a relatively new anti-cancer therapy, but initial tests have shown it to be clinically effective, especially against leukemias (wherein B cells become cancerous).

But as with chemotherapy, the side effects are severe—when immune cells run amok, bad things can happen. The T cells raised to fight the tumor can elicit what's called a "cytokine storm," setting off an intense immune reaction. They can also overstep their bounds to kill all of a patient's B cells rather than just the cancerous ones.

One of the most promising strategies employed to alleviate these side effects is to make the anti-tumor T cells dependent upon a ”switch.” Rather than using one of the T cell's normal receptors to latch on to cancer cells, it's possible to engineer one that only sticks in the presence of an exogenous small molecule—drug-dependent killing, in effect. This way, the T cell is only activated in the presence of the switch molecule, which can be administered or removed at will or dosed as desired.