The people have spoken. Antibiotic resistance has been voted by the British public as the subject of the UK government’s £10 million ($17 million) Longitude Prize – an initiative aimed at tackling society’s greatest issues. Read more
The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta has taken its first disciplinary steps in response to a laboratory mix-up that potentially exposed dozens of employees to anthrax earlier this month. Read more
Five mathematicians will take home $3 million each as winners of the inaugural Breakthrough Prize for Mathematics, announced today. Read more
COPENHAGEN — Physicists working at CERN, the European particle accelerator near Geneva, have snared a new first for the Higgs boson. They have watched it decay directly to the particles that make up matter (called fermions) rather than just the particles that convey force (bosons), as they had before. Read more
NASA’s controversial plan to capture an asteroid and study it is facing a challenge beyond the obvious technical feat: the potential shuttering of the Spitzer Space Telescope, whose observations can help calculate an asteroid’s size. Read more
The Hubble Space Telescope has begun searching for an icy world in the outer solar system that NASA’s New Horizons probe can visit after it flies past Pluto in July 2015. Read more
Germany’s science funding may look healthy to outsiders, but its research ministry seems to have stretched its cash too thinly. Last week, it decided that helping to fund the world’s biggest radio-telescope – to be built in South Africa and Australia by 2024 at a cost of more than €1.5 billion – was one international mega-project too many. On 5 June, it said it would pull out of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), to the dismay of German astronomers, who say they were not consulted and are hoping to reverse the move. Read more
Allowing development of valuable ecosystems in return for protections elsewhere could ruin attempts to protect biodiversity, researchers warned at a major conference in the United Kingdom this week. Read more
The retraction of two controversial papers which promised a simple way to create embryonic-like stem cells appears imminent today after the lead author unexpectedly gave her full consent. Haruko Obokata, of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, had been the last obstacle to the retraction of both papers. Read more
Synthetic biology, heralded by some as the next biotechnology revolution, could be seriously undermined if the public is not informed about its potential benefits early on, according to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report today. Read more
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