Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
One of the most obvious relics of Stalinism is the continued survival in Eastern Europe of academies of science whose purposes have never been fulfilled. This is a time for changing them.
Biologists in Japanese universities are hamstrung by an obscure and unfair system of allocating grants. Reform is needed if Japan's scientists are to compete with first-class international research groups.
A remarkable research report claims that an object spinning on a vertical axis weighs less if spinning clockwise (seen from above) than anticlockwise, but it may be too soon to cast off Newton's laws.
