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Spend all day peering down a microscope? Then you may well suffer from headaches and backaches. Some researchers have designed a workstation that straightens out the hunched posture that microscopists are usually forced to adopt, and that could ease the pain.
New and old satellite data are helping glaciologists understand some of the curious features on the Antarctic continent. Comparison of declassified data from the 1960s with modern satellite images has revealed great expanses of snow dunes that have apparently not moved in the past 30 years. Other high-resolution images have exposed the source of giant streams of ice that flow into the sea.
Creationism's resurgence and its exploitation by politicians pose challenges to scientists that cannot be ignored. More resolute activism is required if a decent scientific education is not to be denied to some young Americans.
The American Geophysical Union, keen to persuade scientists to becoming more politically involved to promoting the teaching of evolution in schools, has denounced the teaching of creationism.
Game-playing computer programmes, such as that which beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, generally rely on the expertise of the programmer. An approach involving checker-playing neural networks instead allows the networks to evolve competitively. The best of them have beaten human players at the ‘expert’ level.
Fierce controversy has been stirred up among Spain's 44 public universities by a government-funded study that uses a set of ‘quality’ indicators to rank institutions by giving them a score between 1 and 10.
Type 2 diabetes arises when resistance to the glucose-lowering effects of insulin combines with impaired insulin secretion to raise the levels of glucose in the blood. Studies into the molecular basis of insulin resistance have focused on the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPAR-gamma). Three patients with type 2 diabetes have been identified with loss-of-function mutations in thePPAR-gammagene, indicating that this protein is required for normal insulin sensitivity.
Germany has sent a shock wave through the international agricultural research community by making heavy cuts in its financial support for the six high-profile agricultural research centres in developing countries.
