[Opinion] Cutting Social Science Funding Stalls Future Innovation. The House of Representatives seems determined to stall this country's innovation pipeline for generations to come. Two pieces of recently passed legislation - the America Competes Act of 2015 (H.R. 1806) and the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2016 (H.R. 2578) - take aim squarely at the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate. The Competes Act authorizes a 50-percent cut, while the appropriations bill directs resources away from social science into other disciplines. Gutting funding for social and behavioral science research in favor of other scientific research exhibits a key misunderstanding of today's emerging research areas, which are increasingly interdisciplinary in practice. The Hill 

Acidification Takes Toll on Beaufort Sea; Threats Loom in Chukchi and Bering. With their low temperatures that hold onto the carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere, their shallow depths, their rich supply of marine life and carbon dioxide carried in by currents from elsewhere in the world, and their increasing supply of runoff from melting glaciers and glacier-fed rivers, Alaska's ocean waters are known to be highly vulnerable to acidification. Now comes a finding that the Beaufort Sea has already crossed an ominous ocean acidification threshold, and the Chukchi Sea and Bering Sea will follow in the foreseeable future, with water conditions that would be corrosive enough to cause many marine species to struggle. Alaska Dispatch News

Arctic Council Must Prepare for New Ice-Free Ocean, US Rep Says. The governments of the United States and Canada must not let overseas conflicts distract them from commitments to curb global warming and prepare for ice-free seas in the Arctic, the U.S. special representative for the Arctic Council says. Almost two months into his country's chairmanship of the Arctic Council, the United States' top Arctic official, the retired Coast Guard commandant Robert Papp, says the governments of China and Singapore are already lining up to "gain influence" in the Arctic, bearing in mind that global warming is melting away frozen seas to make way for new trans-polar shipping routes. Nunatsiaq Online

A Race Against Commerce. America's Office of Coast Survey, which is responsible for maintaining the country's maritime charts, traces its roots back to Thomas Jefferson, a 19th century president. Some of the information it uses to base its navigational charts is even older. With maritime traffic in the Arctic expected to grow in the coming decades, the age of the information is proving worryingly inadequate, and that has NOAA, the science agency under which the Office of Coastal Survey falls, in a hurry to update the data. Arctic Journal

Kotzebue Fishery Expects a Big Year. Commercial fishermen in the Arctic are readying their nets and boats in preparation for next month's chum run in the Kotzebue region. And after last year's second-highest run on record, all involved are expecting another big year. But big fish numbers don't always mean huge paydays. There are a lot of factors when dealing with the Kotzebue Sound fishery, including plane availability to fly the catches out, and the number of fish buyers on the beaches. Maniilaq Services, LLC and Copper River Seafoods both confirmed last week that they will be buying in Kotzebue this summer, however Great Pacific Seafoods, the main buyer in Kotzebue for more than a decade is rumored to have pulled out. (Repeated requests for interviews were not returned by press time.) With three buyers last year, the price per pound peaked early, at $0.78, but quickly dropped down as the market was flooded with salmon to about $0.45 - $0.48. The price averaged $0.56 per pound. The Arctic Sounder