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The US Secretary of State has announced some tentative steps towards the elusive goal of a scientifically literate State Department. Her successor will need to go further.
British vice-chancellors have warned that academic recruitment difficulties — especially in scientific disciplines — could undermine the future prospects for the United Kingdom's ‘knowledge economy’.
Germany's minister of legal affairs is to file a formal objection against the patent mistakenly issued by the European Patent Office that includes claims on technologies that could be used to alter the human germ line.
Scientists at the US Department of Energy say they will withdraw from large-scale human gene sequencing later this year when a preliminary draft of the human genome sequence is completed.
Australian authorities have sent a strong warning message to those who trade illegally in fossils by jailing an individual who removed and attempted to a sell a dinosaur footprint and two human footprints.
The US National Institutes of Health is telephoning every investigator who has registered a gene therapy clinical trial in an expanded effort to track down unreported adverse events in trials.
A world-renowned study of the population dynamics of red deer on an island off Scotland's west coast is being threatened by a proposal to substantially cull the deer in order to protect and enhance the local environment.
Researchers who often refuse to share data may earn a reputation that encourages others to withhold results from them, according to a study by a team of health policy analysts at Harvard University.
Israeli scientists will have an easier time visiting and working with laboratories run by the US Department of Energy under an agreement signed last week by Secretary of Energy and Israel's Minister of National Infrastructure.
The Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Hoffman-La Roche Inc. is facing a series of legal hearings over the validity of two key patents that it holds on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) process.
The only millimetre-wavelength radioastronomy telescope that serves the entire US research community will be shut down in July, the victim of continuing tight budgets.
Sir Robert May, currently chief scientific adviser to the British government and head of the Office of Science and Technology, is to be the new president of the Royal Society.
New forms of international linkages need to be established between scientists to meet the emerging political needs and dynamics of the post-Cold War world, a meeting in Paris on the changing political role of scientific collaboration heard.
What caused the great ice ages? Accurate dating of the end of one of these ice ages makes us reconsider which part of the climate system drives severe glaciation.
Mutations in the p53 protein or components of the pathway that regulates it are one of the main causes of cancer – normally, p53 prevents cells that have been damaged from contributing to tumour formation. Now another function of p53 emerges. It seems that the protein also participates in the process of DNA repair itself.
Most animals and plants show circadian rhythms – behavioural or physiological cycles tied to a 24-hour clock. These cycles are controlled by internal clocks that are 'entrained' to external time by daylight. It has now been shown that the circadian clocks in the heart or kidney cells of zebrafish can respond directly to light, without any input from the visual system.
We live in a world with four observable dimensions (three of space and one of time). Physicists have long proposed extra dimensions as a way of unifying particle physics with gravity. It may now be possible to have an extra dimension of infinite extent (rather than a compact one as previously thought), provided that space–time is curved in a certain way.
Images of the brain taken using scanning techniques are usually static – they represent activity at a single moment in time. But neurons in the brain show temporal patterns of activity, as well as spatial patterns. Now the dynamics of neural activity have been studied in people listening to sequences of musical notes. The technique shows that different brain areas fire more synchronously in response to melodic sequences than they do in response to random notes.
Female mallards find some males more attractive than others. If they mate with 'preferred' males, female ducks seem to produce more surviving offspring. It appears that this may occur not because the attractive males have better genes, but because the females invest more in their offspring, producing bigger eggs than if they had mated with less attractive males.
The surface of Mars is abnormally rich in sulphur, but where it came from has been something of a mystery. Work on the isotopic composition of sulphur in martian meteorites now implicates atmospheric processes in the surface sulphur enrichment. The evidence for this conclusion has a further edge to it. It implies that the large shifts in isotopic ratios produced by living organisms are not necessarily characteristic of life.
The DREADCO team is attempting to create pets with a short shelf life. The idea is to shorten the teleomeres at the ends of the pets' chromosomes, thereby encouraging a shorter life span. This would be the answer to all those pets bought as Christmas presents, but who are unwanted by Easter.
