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Britain's inquiry into the BSE crisis has revealed significant weaknesses in the way the government used scientific advice and established research priorities on a topic of urgent social concern. These require more detailed public scrutiny.
The long-awaited report from the public inquiry into the official handling of Britain's BSE epidemic, released last week, concludes that ministers and civil servants did not deliberately lie to the public - they genuinely believed that the risks were minimal.
An agreement over a potential HIV vaccine drafted between a British research tram and the University of Nairobi is to be revised after the Kenyan scientists complained that their names had been excluded from a patent application on the vaccine.
An international consortium led by the US-based Joint Genome Institute last week announced plans to sequence the genome of the puffer fish Fugu rubripes.
The US fusion community is isolated from other scientists, struggles to attract young talent and tends to put the pursuit of fusion energy ahead of the pursuit of good science, the National Academy of Sciences has warned.
High-tech manufacturers Corning and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT have entered into a $10 million partnership to develop post-genome technology including DNA microarrays.
The Marine Aquarium Council, an international non-profit consortium based in Honolulu, hopes to eliminate reef-threatening practices such as 'cyanide fishing' by launching a voluntary certification programme next year.
Unusually for a specialist research conference, last week's International Coral Reef Symposium has pushed scientists to the forefront of the public debate on the effects of climate change on coral reefs.
Large telescopes are starting to dominate astronomy, putting their smaller predecessors under pressure to close. But if astronomers can adapt their ways of working, says Alexander Hellemans, both big and small could thrive.
A tiny RNA molecule ensures that the larvae of a roundworm develop into adults. The discovery of this RNA in many other animal groups implies that this way of keeping developmental time may be universal.
Cereal seeds contain an embryo and an endosperm, which is used as a food source. Differentiation of the endosperm is guided by several 'positional' molecular cues throughout development.
It has been hard to relate the activity of the northern lights to specific events in space. But the latest data show that 'auroral streamers' can be matched to bursts of ionized particles from Earth's magnetotail.
The two types of cell that make up blood vessels can develop from the same precursor. This discovery might improve our understanding of the role of blood vessels in disorders ranging from cancer to heart disease.
Switches lie at the heart of electronics and their design puts a limit on the size of integrated circuits. By harnessing chemistry, researchers have reduced this problem to a molecular level.
The list of proteins whose activity is controlled by transport into different subcellular compartments keeps growing. The latest additions are two regulators of gene expression.
New data on the cosmic background radiation are making cosmologists revise their view of the Universe. The biggest surprise is that the data favour a larger amount of 'ordinary matter' than was thought.
