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EVENTS

Periodic addition Four new elements have been officially added to the periodic table, completing its seventh row. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, announced on 30 December that evidence supporting the discoveries of elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 by laboratories in Russia, the United States and Japan was valid. See go.nature.com/vgug27 for more.

Volkswagen sued The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking Volkswagen to court after revelations that the company fitted vehicles with devices that circumvent emissions regulations. Volkswagen has admitted using such ‘defeat devices’ and has apologized for fitting them to some models of Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche cars. On 4 January, the Department of Justice, acting on behalf of the EPA, said that nearly 600,000 vehicles sold in the United States had used the illegal devices, causing harmful air pollution and violating the US Clean Air Act.

Guinea Ebola-free Ebola virus is no longer spreading in Guinea, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared on 29 December. The announcement came 42 days after the West African country’s last patient, a newborn, tested negative for the virus for a second time. Health officials will now watch closely for flare-ups of the deadly disease. Last November, a cluster of three Ebola cases emerged in Liberia, months after the WHO had announced the end of Ebola transmission there.

Credit: Tim Sharp/AP

PEOPLE

Alfred Gilman dies Pharmacologist Alfred Goodman Gilman (pictured), who shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of G proteins, died on 23 December, aged 74. G proteins are attached to the internal surface of a cell’s membrane and are involved in transmitting signals from the outside to the cell’s interior. Around 40% of pharmaceuticals act by binding to specific receptors that are coupled to G proteins. Gilman was an editor of the textbook The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, originally co-written by his father.

Fellowship refusal The American Association for the Advancement of Science said on 22 December that it will not award an honorary fellowship to chemist Patrick Harran, who was prosecuted for the accidental death of 23-year-old researcher Sheharbano Sangji in his lab in 2009. Last November, Harran was named as one of 347 scientists elected to receive the honour. But the organization subsequently learnt of the death, from a chemical fire in Harran’s lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, and reconsidered his nomination. See go.nature.com/jsujun for more.

FACILITIES

Moon base no more Russia’s plans to build a Moon base are on hold, according to 29 December reports. The Russian newspaper Izvestiasays that a draft revised programme to 2025, developed by the country’s space agency Roscosmos, no longer includes plans to create a lunar base, a long-held goal. The agency proposes cutting the budget for human Moon missions by 20%, or 88.5 billion roubles (US$1.2 billion), the newspaper adds. Roscosmos told the news agency Reuters that it was revising the scale of its programme, but declined to comment on the figures.

BUSINESS

India biotech boost India has launched a strategy for biotechnology development for 2015–20, aiming to increase its biotech turnover from US$7 billion to $100 billion by 2025. The country will invest in a new generation of biotech products, create infrastructure for research and development and commercialization, and establish India as a major biomanufacturing hub, science and technology minister Harsh Vardhan announced on 30 December. Plans include a network of biotech incubators, technology-development centres and 150 technology-transfer organizations.

Credit: Source: Paul Ginsparg/arXiv

TREND WATCH

Theoretical physicists are rapidly churning out papers as they rush to analyse tantalizing hints of a new particle — a boson — in data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Experimental results announced on 15 December at CERN, which hosts the LHC near Geneva, Switzerland, sparked a flood of papers posted on the preprint server arXiv — 150 had been published as Nature went to press — even though the statistical significance of the findings is low. See go.nature.com/eqmchr for more.