Archive by date | August 2013

Two scientists to join Italian senate

Two scientists to join Italian senate

Two scientists are among the four new senators for life appointed today by Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano. Particle physicist and Nobel Prize winner Carlo Rubbia and stem-cell specialist Elena Cattaneo will become permanent members of the Italian Senate, along with the orchestra conductor Claudio Abbado and the architect Renzo Piano, whose appointments were also announced today.  Read more

Taiwan court set to decide on libel case against scientist

Taiwan court set to decide on libel case against scientist

A Taiwanese court will rule on 4 September in a libel lawsuit filed by a petrochemical company against an environmental engineer whose studies had suggested that a plant operated by the company was causing higher cancer rates in its vicinity.  Read more

Differences on display on US informed-consent rules

Was it enough for doctors to tell the parents of extremely premature infants that there was “no additional risk” to their babies if they enrolled them in a randomized trial?  One treatment group, in which the preemies were maintained with higher blood oxygen, risked eye damage.  The other kept the babies at lower oxygen levels, risking brain damage and perhaps death.  Both were within the range of care that the babies would have received anyway.  Read more

Magnetic bubbles may mean Voyager 1 has left the Solar System

Leaving the Solar System is like leaving any familiar territory without maps — you have no idea what’s coming next, or even what you’ve just journeyed through. Such is the fate of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, which, at 18.7 billion kilometres from the sun, has been flirting with the edge of interstellar space for the past year. Conflicting data from its various experiments suggest that it both has and hasn’t left the Solar System.  Read more