Archive by date | March 2014

Lawmakers aim to restrict US agency’s social-science programmes

Conservative politicians in the US House of Representatives are renewing their push to limit the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) support for social-science research. The agency’s social, behavioural, and economic (SBE) sciences directorate would see its recommended funding cut by 42%, under a proposal introduced on 10 March by Representative Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas), the chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.  Read more

Call for acid-bath stem-cell paper to be retracted

Less than 40 days after a team led by Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, presented two stunning papers claiming a method of using a simple acid-bath method to reprogramme mature mammalian cells back to an embryonic state – so called STAP cells – researchers in Japan, including one of the paper’s co-authors, are calling for them to be retracted.  Read more