Archive by date | September 2012

Clouds gather over European stem-cell funding

As the debate over the form and content of the European Union’s next research funding programme – the seven-year, multibillion-euro Horizon 2020 – heats up, the prospect that it will include research involving human embryonic stem cells is looking more fragile.  Read more

US cancer institute director meets the press

US cancer institute director meets the press

Nature last spoke in-depth with Harold Varmus in July, 2011, one year after he became director of the $5 billion National Cancer Institute (NCI), the largest of the 27 institutes and centres at the National Institutes of Health. (NIH).  Read more

NASA Mars programme retains focus on sample return

NASA Mars programme retains focus on sample return

After months of effort, NASA on Tuesday released the results of a study that laid out options for the Mars programme — a re-planning process that was kicked off in the wake of the agency’s devastating pull-out of the joint 2016/2018 ExoMars missions with the European Space Agency, and one that was made more urgent by the crummy budget that the planetary sciences division was handed in February.  Read more

Prosecution asks for four-year sentence in Italian seismology trial

Public prosecutors in L’Aquila, Italy, have requested a four-year prison term for the six scientists and one government official charged with manslaughter after a magnitude-6.3 earthquake hit the city and its surroundings on 6 April 2009, killing 309 people (for more background on the case, read the Nature feature article ‘Scientists on trial: At fault?‘).  Read more

Cancer centre shoots for the Moon

Cancer centre shoots for the Moon

Invoking John F. Kennedy’s 50-year-old vow to put a man on the moon within a decade, the director of the largest cancer treatment centre in the United States has launched an equally audacious quest.  Read more

Fermilab prepares for a future of muons

Fermilab is creating high-intensity muon beams for two experiments.

At Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, protons were always the primary particles, coursing through the circular tracks of the Tevatron, which until 2009 was the highest energy collider in the world. But there’s a new particle making the rounds at the Batavia, Illinois campus: the muon, a heavy but short-lived cousin of the electron — interesting both for its usefulness in testing the Standard Model, as well as potentially being used someday in a powerful collider.  Read more

Ig Nobel prizes honour science of ponytails, coffee spills, and dead salmon

Diamonds made from ammunition, ponytail swishing, and how to stop a medical patient from exploding: these were all topics of genuine research that were celebrated yesterday evening at the Ig Nobel awards at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Read more