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France's ‘contaminated blood’ trial is a reminder that witch-hunts, however well disguised in legal formalities, are no substitute for a credible, wide-ranging and dispassionate judicial inquiry.
A Scottish research institute has lifted a six-month ban on one of its scientists from speaking to the press, in a bid to dampen allegations that it had tried to suppress his data on the potential health risks of eating genetically modified food.
A United Nations conference held to reach a global protocol on the safety of genetically modified organisms opened this week amid signs that African countries are preparing to compromise in order to achieve a positive outcome.
The prosecution case against three former ministers in France's ‘contaminated blood’ affair has been strongly challenged during the first week of their trial that opened in Paris last week by a number of prominent AIDS scientists.
A former neuroscientist from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, has been found to have fraudulently falsified data in published articles and grant applications.
The National Cancer Institute says it has finally succeeded in replicating an experiment of Harvard researcher Judah Folkman with a compound that shrinks tumours in mice by choking off their blood supply.
A conservative Republican has introduced a bill banning federal payments to any organization that “engages in human cloning or human cloning techniques”
A scientific examination will begin to determine the origins and disposition of a set of 9,000 year-old human remains found near Kennewick, Washington State, nearly three years ago.
The university of Toronto unfairly treated a researcher claiming racial discrimination in his failure to win a tenure-track position, according to a report from a Canadian university teachers union.
A committee of the National Academy of Sciences has set out the three factors it believes are essential to effective assessment of research performance.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the SETI Institute plan to build the world's largest radio telescope designed to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The administration of Mexico's President Ernesto Zedillo is seeking a wide-ranging overhaul of the way in which public funding for research is allocated and administered.
An experiment with atoms at nanokelvin temperatures has produced the remarkable observation of light pulses travelling at velocities of only 17 m s−1. The large optical nonlinearities seen in this system may open up new opportunities in quantum optics.
Spectacular images from the Mars Orbiter Camera — an instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft — are providing new views of that planet. These images, and what can be inferred from them, add to knowledge of the processes that shaped the Martian surface; together with other data, they offer the hope that a self-consistent view of the planet's early climate can be pieced together.
The hippocampus is thought to be essential for learning and memory, but is it a highly specialized memory store for spatial memories, or does it deal with more general memory? A study using rats that learn to associate particular smells with foraging for food indicates that hippocampal neurons fire when the rat detects certain odours, indicating that the hippocampus may have a much broader function than previously thought.
The bony fishes gave rise to two living subgroups, the ray-finned fishes, and the lobe-fins and tetrapods (or land vertebrates, including ourselves). An analysis of the evolutionary position of a 400-million-year-old fossil both adds to the current picture of bony-fish origins and complicates it — the fossil has such a mix of characteristics that large parts of the vertebrate family tree come into question.
Explanations for the nature of excess protons in liquid water, including their extraordinarily high mobility, have long eluded researchers. New quantum molecular dynamics simulations suggest that the hydrated proton is of an inherently fluxional character, with two favoured theoretical views featuring only as limiting structures.
Chemists have just achieved the total synthesis of the antibiotic vancomycin. The structure was 99% complete last year, but two sugar groups had to be added to produce totally synthetic vancomycin. The selective addition of these sugars may suggest ways of modifying antibiotics to produce drugs that are effective against multidrug-resistant bacteria.
DNA methylation is important for repressing gene expression, and much is known about how methyl groups are added to DNA. But little has been done to work out how they're taken off again. Now, a hitherto unknown gene has been cloned, which encodes a protein that seems to catalyse demethylation by directly removing the methyl groups from 5-methyl-cytosine.
Stem cells have the remarkable ability to become one of any number of different cell types. Take neural stem cells, for example, which can develop into neurons or different types of glial cell. Two studies indicate that these cells are not only much more widespread in the central nervous system than previously thought, but that they can somehow cross from the brain and develop into blood cells.
To propel itself forward, any spacecraft needs to fire something in the opposite direction. But Daedalus likes the idea of a motor that acts on the tenuous gas in space itself. So, he proposes to build a device based on the Crookes radiometer — the little ‘light mill’ in a glass bulb, which spins in sunlight.
Software is the peg for this week's selection of recent introductions. Packages for application development, and updates to software packaged with lab instruments are included. And turn to nature.com for a new web-only Software Review. Compiled in the Nature office from information provided by the manufacturers.
