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Traditional systems for developing drugs are failing spectacularly to deliver the goods in the fight against tuberculosis. Innovative public–private collaborations point the way forward.
One in three British scientists working in government or recently privatised laboratories has been asked to alter research findings, according to a survey.
A controversial Chinese ‘bird’ fossil — possibly a previously unknown species, but one with a suspicious tail — is causing a major flap in the paleontology community after bought at an Arizona mineral show on behalf of a small Utah museum.
The Gem, Mineral and Fossil Showcase of Tucson, a major marketplace for fossils, faces claims that many items on sale have been smuggled from China and elsewhere.
Scientists from the United States, Europe and Japan are taking preliminary steps towards establishing common procedural guidelines that will enable closer international cooperation in the field of structural genomics.
Austria's main research funding agency has called on foreign scientists not to turn their back on the country in reaction to the inclusion of the right-wing Freedom Party in the new Austrian coalition government.
The South African government has rejected two reports that were commissioned from its Medicines Control Council on the safety of the anti-retroviral drug AZT after public statements by political leaders on its potential hazards.
A consortium of scientists, donor agencies, and pharmaceutical companies has agreed to create a new multiagency public-private sector joint venture to relaunch drug discovery in tuberculosis.
The jinx that has destroyed or limited a string of X-ray astronomy missions launched in the last nine months appears not to have affected the European Space Agency's new X-ray observatory.
X-ray astronomers in Japan received a major setback last week with the loss of Astro-E, a joint US-Japan satellite carrying several innovative X-ray sensors.
Vladimir Putin, Russia's acting president and prime minister, said last week that scientists “must get salaries higher than anyone else in the country”.
The controversial issue of government-funded fetal tissue research is emerging as a flash point in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Oxford University and the Wellcome Trust are investigating the business affairs of Roy Anderson, the suspended zoology professor and Wellcome Trust governor.
Study of the giant Austronesian language family tells us a great deal about the history of Pacific peoples and boatbuilding, as well as about Aboriginal Australia.
A fourfold increase in the efficiency of a light-emitting device (LED) has been achieved by clever layering of phosphorescent and fluorescent materials in an organic device. Such organic LEDs are suitable for making flat and flexible displays that operate at low voltage and offer excellent contrast and viewing angle.
The level of iron in our blood is controlled by tightly regulating the amount of iron that is absorbed through the gut wall. This is a two-step process — iron is taken up in cells called enterocytes that line the gut, and then exported from the enterocytes into the bloodstream. The transport protein responsible for this second phase has now been identified.
Study of past climates can provide indicators of how climate might change in the future. A new temperature record has now been gleaned from 616 boreholes around the world. It confirms that the twentieth century was the warmest of the past 500 years, and also shows more natural climatic variability on the decade-century timescale than was to be expected from earlier work.
Retroviruses incorporate themselves into a host genome in the form of a provirus, and can be passed on to the host's offspring. Evidence now emerges that one such provirus has been subverted to benefit of humans and other mammals that have a placenta — its protein product, called syncitin, may play an essential part in placental formation.
Scanning tunnelling microscopy promises a new approach to the study of high-temperature superconductors, particularly when they contain impurities. Impurity atoms, like zinc, help us understand what happens when superconductivity is destroyed. Future experiments with magnetic impurities may tell us even more about the mechanism behind high-temperature superconductivity.
It is generally agreed that biodiversity — having many different species in an ecosystem — is a good thing. In particular, it increases the amount of new biomass produced. It now appears that the numbers of species in two levels of an aquatic ecosystem, producers (photosynthetic algae) and decomposers (bacteria), interact in a complex way to affect productivity.
Group theory is the mathematics of symmetry, and symmetry is fundamental to many areas of science, including quantum mechanics. Much is already known about the basic building blocks of the so-called finite groups, but mathematicians have now finished the gargantuan task of listing almost everything that can be built with them. The results highlight the striking irregularity of the group-theory landscape.
Cells in the developing nervous system rely on signals from specific organizing centres to tell them what they should become. The signals they receive depend on their position in the developing neural tube. Cells in the dorsal part of the neural tube receive signals from the roof plate, and this process involves a gene calledLmx1a. Mouse embryos without this gene or with no roof plate lack specific sets of dorsal interneurons.
Daedalus reckons London's Millennium Dome is the ultimate triumph of style over content. But with some modification, it could be put to much better use as an aerial for transmitting and receiving radar signals that penetrate the Earth.
