Here are a few interesting news morsels I’ve come across in the last several days. The big international stem cell meeting happened in Australia last week. Nature blogged from the scene…sounds like there was quite a bit of news from down under. For one, Woo-Suk Hwang, the disgraced stem cell scientist from South Korea, apparently did achieve something of note.

Discussions are underway about what sectors of life sciences research in Massachusetts will receive funding as part of the $1 billion Governor Patrick has pledged the state will spend over the next 10 years. Expect to see legislation next month that will give the details. Will the money go mainly into basic research to make up for the NIH downturn or will it go more into industry research, or translational research?

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Dupont and the environmental group, Environmental Defense, released “guidelines”:https://www.nanoriskframework.com/page.cfm?tagID=1095 last week for the evaluation of the risks of nanotechnology, in response to public and environmental health concerns over materials on the nanoscale. The “NY Times”:https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/technology/21nanotech.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1182459757-XY/lgQRHifRIriR8xMH8nQ called the report “the most extensive effort yet” to address these safety concerns. It’s interesting to see a company with a large stake in the technology trying to stay ahead of the regulation curve.

This may inform the debate locally; Cambridge City Council says it’s “halfway through its review of regulations of the use of nanomaterials in the city.”:https://masshightech.bizjournals.com/masshightech/stories/2007/06/18/story1.html

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And finally, will Web 2.0 type of technologies and websites (blogs, wikis, social networking/bookmarking, tagging) have a use within companies as communications tools between workers? IBM, Microsoft and other software giants are working on new collaboration products and were “giving demos at a conference in Boston last week.”:https://www.boston.com/business/personaltech/articles/2007/06/25/social_network_sites_give_businesses_ideas_for_new_collaboration/

I can say that within the Nature Network team at NPG, we actively use wikis and blogs for internal communications/collaborations…we even have our own private group within NN to talk about the project. Of course, we’re believers of the technology, but we also rely on it since we’re so spread out across different cities and countries. We’re hoping that other people (scientists collaborating across borders) will use our website in the same way.