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When negotiators gather in Seattle this weekend for the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization, the future of genetically modified crops will be high on their agenda.
Champagne corks were popping on both sides of the Atlantic on Tuesday when participants in the Human Genome Project celebrated the successful sequencing of the one-billionth base pair of human DNA.
The Social Democrats (SPD) in the German parliament have declared their opposition to an all-parliamentary commission of inquiry on human rights and bioethics.
Government laboratories should be set up in Israel to carry out basic defense research, according to a report on revitalizing the country's military industries.
Officials of a US foundation that has raised a million dollars to prevent paediatric AIDS in Africa are expressing concern at recent statements made in Southern Africa about anti-AIDS drugs that are widely used in the developed world.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has appointed a new management team which is expected to shake up the institute's $500 million research portfolio in the new year.
Europe's new research commissioner has promised to publish a 'white paper' early next year outlining plans for the creation of a 'European Research Area'.
Biotechnology company Genentech agreed to a $200 million settlement over a patent infringement lawsuit with the University of California at San Francisco.
China has successfully launched its first unmanned spacecraft 'Shenzhou' - which literally means 'God Ship' - making it the third country in the world to launch a craft capable of carrying a man into space.
Under-representation of women and “old-fashioned” employment practices that continue to discriminate on the basis of gender, are undermining efforts to achieve excellence in European science, says a new European Commission report.
Some quantum states are hard to create and maintain, but are a valuable resource for computing. Twenty-first century entrepreneurs could make a fortune selling disposable quantum states.
Flowering plants are comparative newcomers in evolutionary terms, but identifying their origins and the relationships between the 250,000 or so living species remains one of evolutionary biology's big questions. Two studies have taken the approach of multigene analysis to map out the deepest branches of the flowering-plant evolutionary tree.
Clouds of hydrogen gas moving at unusually high velocities have long puzzled astronomers, who have proposed two competing theories to explain their origins. New measurements showing surprisingly different compositions for two nearby clouds are likely to increase the debate rather than lessen it.
As genome sequences become more widely available we need to be able to translate the information into protein function. Traditional approaches involve working out the functions of small groups of proteins involved in specific biological processes. But a new approach has been developed in the budding yeastSaccharomyces cerevisiae, to generate thousands of mutants and then screen them for function.
The precursor of the gas dimethylsulphide (DMS) is produced by phytoplankton. Oceanic emissions of this compound put sulphur into the atmosphere, where it is thought to exert a cooling effect on climate. A new study shows that the depth of surface-layer ocean mixing, which itself depends on climatic factors such as wind and temperature, seems to be a determinant of the level of DMS production.
As techniques to sequence and map genomes and chromosomes improve, we should be able to learn more about our evolutionary history and what the genomes of our ancestors might have looked like. Three studies illustrate the potential of these approaches, comparing the genomes of 15 primate species with those of species from four non-primate orders to try and work out which are the ancestral mammalian genes.
A long-standing ecological puzzle is why plant communities don't consist of a single competitively dominant species. A new model shows that plankton diversity can be maintained by the population dynamics that result from species competing for resources.
The ability of a growing fetus to accept foreign tissue as part of itself could be exploited to create mixed species. The most challenging mixture would be an animal-plant hybrid, which would allow ‘little green men’ to photosynthesize once the problem of a common sap and blood supply is solved.
