A new year is a good time to make long-term plans, and NASA has jumped into the deep end of planning. On 20 December the US space agency’s astrophysics division released a wish list of future space missions — looking three decades into the future, and even beyond. Read more
The H10N8 avian flu strain, first detected in humans in a 73-year old woman in Eastern China this month, appears to pose little immediate risk to people, despite her death, preliminary information has shown. The sequence of the virus has not yet been published, but Nature has learned that the haemagglutinin surface protein shows none of the worrysome amino acid changes that typically would allow the virus to infect humans. This means that, unlike H7N9, which is behind a current fatal flu outbreak in southern Guangdong province, the virus cannot easily jump from poultry or other birds to humans. Read more
In May 2004 Daniel Markingson, a patient with schizophrenia in an anti-psychotic drug trial at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, “stabbed himself to death in the bathtub with a box cutter, ripping open his abdomen and nearly decapitating himself,” as a magazine article would report six years later. Read more
Gaia, a European mission to map the Milky Way, has successfully launched from the European Space Agency’s base in French Guiana. Read more
Europe has shied away from regulating electronic cigarettes as medical devices. Read more
Europe should slash the acceptable human exposure limits on two neonicotinoids – a class of insecticide previously linked to bee declines – says a key European Union safety agency. Read more
In a ceremony hosted by actor Kevin Spacey and which featured a live performance from singer Lana Del Ray, six biologists and two physicists took home a combined US$21 million last night at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. It was the latest tranche of science mega-prizes sponsored by philanthropic billionaires. Read more
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a set of guidelines intended to curb the widespread use of antibiotics for livestock, which contributes to the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria (see Nature‘s feature story “MRSA: Farming up trouble“). But some worry that the voluntary nature of the rules — and their many loopholes — will do little to fix the problem. Read more
The internet’s wealth of free chemistry data just got significantly larger. Today, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) has launched a website – www.surechembl.org – that allows anyone to search through 15 million chemical structures, extracted automatically by data-mining software from world patents. Read more
Science played only a minor role in today’s key statement on government spending from George Osborne, the United Kingdom’s chancellor of the exchequer. But he did promise more funding for science courses at universities, as the government seeks to expand the number of students in higher education. To this end, 30,000 extra university places will be created next year, and the current cap on numbers will be abolished entirely the year after that. Read more
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