On the Record

“The challenge will be to produce large quantities of this glue without it sticking to everything.”

Indiana University bacteriologist Yves Brun discusses plans to mass-produce a powerful, natural glue formed by Caulobacter crescentus.

“A few years ago this kind of thing happened in Britain.”

Chinese government spokesman Qin Gang rebuts a report from the British Transplantation Society that accuses China of harvesting organs from executed prisoners. Britain executed its last prisoner in 1955; Gang did not elaborate.

Sources: Indiana University, Reuters

Scorecard

Cephalopod quirks

Squids are found to have genetically inherited personality traits, such as shyness.

Climateprediction.net

A programming glitch delays the distributed computing climate-modelling project by months.

Campus health

A mumps outbreak sweeps the US Midwest, prompting health officials to administer thousands of vaccines.

Medicinal pot

The US Food and Drug Administration declares there is no proof that smoking marijuana eases illness.

Number crunch

A study in The Lancet quantifies the US government's return on 28 phase III clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health.

$335 million was the total cost of the trials.

470,339 years of healthy life will be gained by patients over a ten-year span.

$15 billion is the estimated economic benefit that these trials will provide over the next ten years.

Source: Johnston, S. C. et al. Lancet 367 , 1319–1327 (2006)