Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini dies at 103
Yesterday the world lost one of its most extraordinary scientists when Rita Levi-Montalcini died at her home in Rome at the age of 103. Read more
Yesterday the world lost one of its most extraordinary scientists when Rita Levi-Montalcini died at her home in Rome at the age of 103. Read more
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ordered the only country in the world that completely prohibits in vitro fertilization (IVF) to lift its ban. Read more
US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson announced today that she will leave her post in early 2013. Read more
It wasn’t a very merry Christmas for a team of UK scientists seeking to breach the three kilometres of ice that covers a subglacial Antarctic lake. On the evening of 24 December, Martin Siegart, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol, UK, ended his team’s quest to drill to Lake Ellsworth in western Antarctica. Read more
Peru’s Prime Minister Juan Jimenez last week launched a US$100 million programme to boost scientific research, technological development and innovation. Read more
Days after declaring a voluntary moratorium on grants, the $3-billion Texas cancer institute has announced the appointment of two interim leaders with expertise in state finance. Wayne Roberts is a former associate vice president for public policy at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Former Texas Deputy Comptroller Billy Hamilton will serve as an advisor. Earlier in December, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) announced that it had hired a new chief scientific officer. Read more
One of the promises of altmetrics – an approach to measuring attention on research papers that relies on alternative measures to citations, such as downloads, social media mentions, and collections in online libraries – is that it could provide an almost real-time view of the papers provoking most excitement. Citations, by contrast, are inevitably slow to gather pace. Read more
A chronic fatigue syndrome drug that spent decades in clinical development and won fervent patient support, has been turned down for approval by a committee of advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) who voted 9-4 against it. The drug, named Ampligen (rintatolimod), has not been shown to be effective or safe, the committee determined on 20 December. Read more
Air Canada, one of the few major airline companies that still transports primates for research, was given the go-ahead to stop moving macaques and other non-human primates bound for research labs, after a decision today from its regulatory agency, the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA). The airline applauded the decision and said that, effective December 22, it will require all non-human primate shippers to sign a declaration that the animals are not intended for research or experiments. Read more
Many a cancer study seeks to tally dangerous mutations, but factors besides genes may yield insights that are just as important. Two laboratories at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco this week presented work on cancer-relevant findings that are independent of particular mutations: one group shows that a few minutes’ compression reverts malignant cells to normal, another that changes in breasts’ cellular composition may remove barriers for malignant growth. Read more
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