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Physicists at the Max Planck Institute are puzzled-they have been playing with marbles and talking about magic numbers. But this is no holiday-season silliness, explains Philip Ball.
One of the key government officials in Britain's recent crisis over bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has been forced to quit his job as the top civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries.
Officials at the National Science Foundation are smarting at the results of a survey that places it near the bottom of a list of government services ranked according to customer satisfaction.
The American Geophysical Union is setting up a new biological sciences section to provide a clearer structure for incorporating biology into geophysics research, as well as to attract new biology members.
A major project to send a beam of muon neutrinos across the Alps to the Gran Sasso laboratories near Rome has been given the green light by the council of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva.
A scheme to build an international research centre in the Middle East around a synchrotron donated by Germany crossed a major hurdle last week when 11 countries in the region agreed to pay to dismantle the Berlin-based machine.
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.
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.
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.
