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In the United States, suspicion of fraud has become a cancer in research. To tackle the problem, real and perceived, scientists will have to become more practised at public relations.
Three years after the most recent apparition of Halley's Comet, estimates of the time for which the comet has been circuiting in something like its present orbit seem to be converging on a few tens of thousands of years.
At next week's meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans, Louisiana, products for growing, analysing and engineering microbes will be on display.
