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RESEARCH

Antarctic lake flop  UK scientists have abandoned their efforts to drill through 3 kilometres of ice to reach the subglacial Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica. The team from the British Antarctic Survey had planned to use high-pressure hot water to bore through the ice, but burned too much fuel trying to connect boreholes. The researchers say that they will try again in future Antarctic summers. See go.nature.com/xcclen for more.

Credit: Alessandra Benedetti/Corbis

PEOPLE

Nobel laureate dies Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel-prizewinning neuroscientist who became a national heroine in her home country of Italy, died on 30 December, aged 103. Levi-Montalcini (pictured) shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on the discovery of nerve growth factor. In her last decades she was made a senator for life in Italy’s parliament, and created sparks by blocking legislation that might have been unfavourable to research. See go.nature.com/li2pjn for more.

EPA chief quits US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson will step down early this year after four years in the job, she announced on 27 December. Jackson championed tighter pollution standards and worked to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions. It is unclear who will take over her position, but deputy EPA administrator Robert Perciasepe is likely to step in until the next appointee is approved. See go.nature.com/jzaiyn for more.

Microbiologist dies Carl Woese, a microbiologist who established that archaea are a third domain of life, died on 30 December, aged 84. In 1977, Woese and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign examined evolutionary relationships using ribosomal RNA sequences to show that prokaryotes comprise two different groups: bacteria and archaea. His theory was not accepted until the mid-1980s.

POLICY

Polio setback Pakistan has partly suspended a three-day vaccination campaign led by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative that focused on the country’s polio hotspots, after gunmen killed nine local health workers between 17 and 19 December last year. Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio has not been eradicated. On 1 January this year, seven health workers and teachers working for a Pakistan charity were also killed by gunmen in northwest Pakistan. No organization has yet claimed responsibility for the shootings, but militants linked to the Taliban are suspected. See go.nature.com/xzsc4s for more.

Fisheries progress Commercial fishing in Europe is closer to being set on a more scientific footing, after members of the European Parliament’s fisheries committee voted through reforms to the European Union’s fisheries policies. The changes include the stipulation that levels for catches be set on the basis of scientific advice. The proposals must next be voted on by the whole parliament and then be agreed on by ministers. See go.nature.com/hcm4yv for more.

TB drug approval The US Food and Drug Administration has for the first time approved a medicine to treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (TB). Bedaquiline was approved on 28 December as part of a combination therapy. Made by Janssen Therapeutics of Titusville, New Jersey, the drug works by inhibiting a mycobacterial ATP synthase enzyme. For more on forthcoming TB therapies, see page 14 and Nature 487, 413–414 (2012).

Science in Korea Park Geun-hye, elected South Korea’s first female president on 19 December, has promised to make science a cornerstone of the government’s policy. Park’s conservative Saenuri party has also said that it will increase spending on research and development from 4% (in 2011) to 5% of the nation’s gross domestic product by 2017. The proportion of that money going to basic research will also rise from 35.2% to 40% over the same period, Park said. See go.nature.com/on2lqh for more.

Credit: Source: CERN

TREND WATCH

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ended 2012 with a bang, or rather 6 million billion billion bangs. That’s the number of proton–proton collisions the accelerator has produced since it began running in 2010. Only 5 billion ‘collisions of interest’ were recorded, but that’s still 60 petabytes of data — enough to fill the hard drives of around 80,000 laptop computers. The LHC will remain closed until 2015 for an energy upgrade. That will give physicists time to catch up with their analysis.