In science news around the world, Pacific marine reserves get a big boost from the United States and Kiribati, NASA's New Horizons mission is given time on the Hubble Space Telescope to hunt for a Kuiper belt object to study, Japan's RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology is threatened by a stem cell scandal,Science chats with paleontologist Jan Zalasiewicz about fossils from the Anthropocene, and more.

A long-delayed plan to follow the health of 100,000 U.S. children from birth to age 21 is in limbo again, in the wake of a critical outside review. A National Academies panel finds that the National Children's Study has some strong points—but also a host of weaknesses. The panel recommends that the study's leader, the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) child health institute, make changes to the study's design and management that would likely delay initial recruitment, now planned for 2015. And the price tag that the panel puts on the revamped effort—upward of $1.5 billion—could erode support for the ambitious effort. In response to the report, NIH Director Francis Collins has put the study on hold.

U.S. astronomers now regard their chances of obtaining a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as no better than those of winning the lottery. It's a new and unpleasant feeling for a community accustomed to relatively good success rates, and NSF officials say limiting researchers to one proposal a year is the best way to relieve that frustration, which extends to reviewers. An advisory panel to the main government agencies that support astronomy and astrophysics also agreed to collect data on the community's behavior in applying for and reviewing grant proposals, so that federal officials can have better information on which to base future decisions.

Several state legislatures, prodded by desperately ill patients and a libertarian think tank, are defying federal regulators to make experimental drugs available to terminally ill patients outside of clinical trials. The new laws, called Right to Try, went on the books in two states last month and are being considered in several others. One company has already announced its plans to use the laws to offer its stem cell treatment well ahead of approval from the Food and Drug Administration. But skeptics say few companies will be willing to bear the costs and risks of offering a drug outside of its clinical trials, especially if it means defying federal law.

The D-Wave computer, marketed as a groundbreaking quantum machine that runs circles around conventional computers, solves problems no faster than an ordinary rival, a new test shows. For random test problems, the time it took the D-Wave machine to solve a problem increased exponentially with the problem's size, just as with a conventional computer, report Matthias Troyer, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and colleagues online this week in Science(http://scim.ag/quantspeedup). So as the size of a problem grows, the D-Wave computer produces no quantum speedup. Some researchers call the test of the controversial device the fairest comparison yet. But D-Wave argues that the computations used in the study were too easy to show what its novel chips can do.

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, born a thousand years ago in Central Asia, calculated Earth's circumference with astounding accuracy and invented specific gravity, the measure of a substance's density compared to that of water. He rejected creationism, accepted that time has neither a beginning nor an end, and—5 centuries before Copernicus—argued that the sun might be the center of the solar system. Now, an influential U.S. scholar has proposed adding another laurel to that list: inferring the existence of America. Whereas some scholars think Biruni deserves credit for his continental prediction, others argue that his inference of unknown landmasses between Europe and Asia does not constitute a discovery.

What is your university paying for academic journal subscriptions? The answer can be surprisingly hard to find. Universities buy access to most of their subscription journals through large bundled packages, much like home cable subscriptions that include hundreds of TV stations. But whereas cable TV providers largely stick to advertised prices, universities negotiate with academic publishing companies behind closed doors, and those deals usually come with nondisclosure agreements that keep the bundled prices secret. After several years of digging, and even legal action, a team of economists has pried out some of those numbers, revealing the bundle prices charged by Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. Some universities are paying nearly twice what universities of seemingly similar size and research output pay for access to the very same journals.