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RESEARCH

Stem-cell faker A scientist who last month fabricated a story about using induced pluripotent stem cells to treat patients with heart failure (see Nature 491, 7–8; 2012) has retracted two of his papers. Hisashi Moriguchi, of the University of Tokyo, retracted research in Scientific Reports. He also withdrew his claim to be affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and to have received approval for his work from an institutional review board.

Expensive errors Mistakes in accounting for research projects funded by the European Union in 2011 may have amounted to 3% of the total spending in this area — around €360 million (US$460 million), according to a report published on 6 November. The European Court of Auditors found that “over-declaration of costs by beneficiaries” was the most common mistake by claimants, but said that most errors were likely to be unintentional. See go.nature.com/nc69zw for more.

Snow survey starts The Solid Precipitation Intercomparison Experiment, an international two-year project to measure the depth of snow and the amount of snowfall at 15 locations around the world, kicks off this week. See page 312 for more.

Ethics code Members of the American Anthropological Association overwhelmingly approved new ethical guidelines for research, the professional body announced on 7 November. The rewrite was prompted by a controversy over anthropologists’ participation in US military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan (see go.nature.com/so2doa). The new code is rooted in more flexible principles, such as avoiding harm to research subjects and obtaining their informed consent, and not the hard-and-fast rules that the previous ethics code had included.

Credit: B. Clarke/Getty

EVENTS

Killer fungus claims UK ash trees ‘Ash dieback’ is likely to kill nearly all of the United Kingdom’s 90 million ash trees, despite the announcement of a plan to control the fungal disease on 9 November. Diseased trees in nurseries will be destroyed, and an import ban will stay in place. The fungus (Hymenoscyphus pseudoalbidus) was initially misidentified by mycologists, making it hard for the European Union to control its spread across the continent. See go.nature.com/anzy6u for more.

POLICY

Berlin’s biomedicine Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit announced a deal on 6 November to form the Berlin Institute of Health, which will receive more than €300 million (US$380 million) in extra funding over the next five years, 90% of it from federal budgets. Scientists hope that the new centre, which will ally the Charité university clinic with the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, can rival research powerhouses in the United States and Britain. See page 317 for more.

Open-access funds Britain’s research-funding agencies will spend more than £100 million (US$159 million) over the next five years to pay for work that they funded to be free to read, the agencies announced on 8 November. The grants will come out of the United Kingdom’s science budget and will be awarded to universities and other research institutions. Research Councils UK (an umbrella body for seven agencies that spend a total of £2.8 billion a year) has said that from April 2013, all work funded by the agencies must be published in an open-access format — but the grants for next year are sufficient to cover only 45% of papers. See go.nature.com/d28egt for more.

Fukushima clean-up The company responsible for decontaminating the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan says that the cost of doing so will soar. The Fukushima plant suffered meltdowns in three reactors on 11 March 2011 after being stricken by an earthquake and tsunami. On 7 November, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the plant, announced that cleaning up the ruined reactors and surrounding countryside could cost ¥10 trillion (US$126 billion) — double the size of the clean-up fund set aside by the government.

Space drive The British contribution to the European Space Agency will rise by £60 million (US$93 million) per year to £240 million, the UK chancellor George Osborne said in a speech at the Royal Society in London on 9 November. He also named eight technological areas in which the United Kingdom could be a world leader, including satellites and space, synthetic biology, advanced materials and regenerative medicine. See go.nature.com/mcyniw for more.

Fat tax abandoned Denmark has abolished a tax on high-fat foods, one year into its controversial attempt to make its population healthier. The tax, which added 16 kroner (US$2.70) for every kilogram of saturated fat in high-fat products, drove up food prices and put jobs at risk, the Danish Ministry of Taxation said. “We have to try improving the public health by other means,” said food minister Mette Gjerskov. The country has also rejected a proposed tax on high-sugar foods. See go.nature.com/hkgyts for more.

Advice at risk A letter calling for the budget of the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) to be protected from cuts was published on 7 November, signed by two former British science ministers, a Nobel laureate and many UK learned societies. POST, which provides politicians with analyses of scientific issues, could face cuts of up to £98,000 (US$156,000), or 17% of its total budget. See go.nature.com/p55ezf for more.

Credit: Liu Jiansheng/Photoshot

PEOPLE

Energetic farewell Hu Jintao, China’s outgoing president, said that protecting the environment must be a top priority for the country’s next government. In his opening speech to the 18th National Congress in Beijing on 8 November, he told delegates that China must set a ceiling on its energy consumption. Hu (pictured) is likely to be succeeded this week as the head of China’s Communist Party by Xi Jinping, who will then become the country’s president in March 2013.

Palaeontologist dies Farish Jenkins, a palaeontologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, died on 11 November, aged 72. Jenkins was a noted science communicator and lecturer. His discovery with colleagues of the fossil remains of Tiktaalik roseae — a four-legged, fish-like creature that seemed to show the evolutionary transition of vertebrates from water to land — appeared on the 6 April 2006 cover of Nature and sparked a media frenzy. See go.nature.com/y5ehem for more.

BUSINESS

Vaccine tribulations A large phase III clinical trial of a malaria vaccine candidate, RTS,S/AS01, has reported disappointing results in infants who received their first injection between 6 and 12 weeks of age. The vaccine reduced the number of episodes of clinical malaria over 12 months by around a third for these babies, the key age group targeted by the trial. The protection is lower than that observed in a previous, smaller phase II trial of babies in the same age group and less than the 55% reported last year in a group of children who were vaccinated at between 5 and 17 months of age. See go.nature.com/gmw9ib for more.

Sequencing stir Genetic-testing company 23andMe, based in Mountain View, California, will make anonymized customer data available to researchers, it said at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in San Francisco, California, last week. At the same event, Pacific Biosciences of Menlo Park, California, announced technology improvements that allow genomic sections at least 5,000 base pairs long to be sequenced in a single read, compared with a few hundred base pairs for other technologies. See go.nature.com/jqfr3k for more.

Credit: Source: IEA

TREND WATCH

Subsidies to lower the price of renewable energies, such as solar and wind, rose 24% on 2010 values to reach US$88 billion in 2011, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2012, released on 12 November. But that support was less than a sixth of the $523 billion used to artificially reduce the cost of oil, natural gas and coal last year. Fossil-fuel subsidies largely track the price of crude oil. See go.nature.com/i5jt1v for more on this year’s energy outlook.

COMING UP

20–21 November The European Space Agency council meets in Naples, Italy, to put together a multi-year spending plan. www.esa.int

22–23 November At a European Council meeting in Brussels, heads of state negotiate the European Union’s budget for 2014–20, including the final amount apportioned to research. Around €80 billion (US$100 billion) has been proposed for the research framework (see Nature 489, 188–189; 2012). go.nature.com/d7rq5u