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Creationism's resurgence and its exploitation by politicians pose challenges to scientists that cannot be ignored. More resolute activism is required if a decent scientific education is not to be denied to some young Americans.
Germany has sent a shock wave through the international agricultural research community by making heavy cuts in its financial support for the six high-profile agricultural research centres in developing countries.
Officials at the National Science Foundation are smarting at the results of a survey that places it near the bottom of a list of government services ranked according to customer satisfaction.
The American Geophysical Union is setting up a new biological sciences section to provide a clearer structure for incorporating biology into geophysics research, as well as to attract new biology members.
A major project to send a beam of muon neutrinos across the Alps to the Gran Sasso laboratories near Rome has been given the green light by the council of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva.
The American Geophysical Union, keen to persuade scientists to becoming more politically involved to promoting the teaching of evolution in schools, has denounced the teaching of creationism.
Fierce controversy has been stirred up among Spain's 44 public universities by a government-funded study that uses a set of ‘quality’ indicators to rank institutions by giving them a score between 1 and 10.
A scheme to build an international research centre in the Middle East around a synchrotron donated by Germany crossed a major hurdle last week when 11 countries in the region agreed to pay to dismantle the Berlin-based machine.
One of the key government officials in Britain's recent crisis over bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has been forced to quit his job as the top civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries.
A study of colour perception shows that, when assigning colour to objects, the seeing brain takes into account subtle reflections of light between the surfaces in a scene.
Improving the sensitivity of photographic emulsions requires much chemical processing, which increases the risk of fogging. A new way of increasing emulsion sensitivity without introducing fog has the potential to improve high-speed films, which may suffer from poor image quality.
Spend all day peering down a microscope? Then you may well suffer from headaches and backaches. Some researchers have designed a workstation that straightens out the hunched posture that microscopists are usually forced to adopt, and that could ease the pain.
Game-playing computer programmes, such as that which beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, generally rely on the expertise of the programmer. An approach involving checker-playing neural networks instead allows the networks to evolve competitively. The best of them have beaten human players at the ‘expert’ level.
New and old satellite data are helping glaciologists understand some of the curious features on the Antarctic continent. Comparison of declassified data from the 1960s with modern satellite images has revealed great expanses of snow dunes that have apparently not moved in the past 30 years. Other high-resolution images have exposed the source of giant streams of ice that flow into the sea.
Type 2 diabetes arises when resistance to the glucose-lowering effects of insulin combines with impaired insulin secretion to raise the levels of glucose in the blood. Studies into the molecular basis of insulin resistance have focused on the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPAR-gamma). Three patients with type 2 diabetes have been identified with loss-of-function mutations in thePPAR-gammagene, indicating that this protein is required for normal insulin sensitivity.
Much of human appreciation of the natural world — sky, sea and so on — stems from its slowly changing features. Daedalus now plans a slowly changing statue, the pose of which will drift subtly all the time. Instead of fading into the urban background, it will continue to surprise and delight the passer-by.
