Science Magazine News

A U.S. judge's surprise decision last week to block government funding of human embryonic stem cell research has left scientists across the country confused, upset, and angry.

Authors: Jocelyn Kaiser, Gretchen Vogel

A new independent review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the increased public scrutiny IPCC is facing and the growing importance of its work mean that it must do better than it's been doing.

Author: Eli Kintisch

At a workshop last month, astronomers unveiled plans to build two major telescopes at Dome A on the East Antarctic icecap during the Chinese government's next 5-year plan, to start in 2011.

Author: Richard Stone

ScienceNOW reported this week on the first feast, the world's smallest refrigerator, the backfiring of "hunting for conservation," and a pea-sized frog, among other stories.

Last week, a consortium led by Pennsylvania State University won a federal competition for $129 million over 5 years to spur efforts to develop technologies for making buildings more energy efficient.

Author: Jeffrey Mervis

Frank Gannon probably could have finished out his career comfortably as director of the national funding agency Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). But the biologist will resign his position at the end of the year and head off to Australia to become director of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research.

Author: John Travis

ScienceInsider reported this week that the editor of the journal Cognition says he believes that fabrication is the most plausible explanation for data in a 2002 paper by Harvard University's Marc Hauser involving cotton-top tamarins, among other stories.

After a new study failed to find nanodiamonds, impact experts are flatly rejecting outsiders' claims that an impact 12,900 years ago devastated the megafauna.

Author: Richard A. Kerr

When he arrived at the dangerous Thai-Burmese border in 1984, François Nosten barely knew what research was. Today, he's one of the world's top malaria scientists.

Author: Martin Enserink

Researchers thought they knew the sun very well. Now, they are squabbling over the abundance of different elements in it.

Author: Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

This week, a long-awaited paper about the link between a virus and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) finally saw the light of day. The study confirms a controversial 2009 paper that reported CFS patients are often infected with the virus, called XMRV.

Author: Martin Enserink

Coral reefs are reeling from extensive bleaching in the Indian Ocean and throughout Southeast Asia. And although some hard-hit areas have cooled—offering hope that some reefs may rebound—other regions are just now heating up.

Author: Dennis Normile

Chinese astronomers thought they had their hands full, fine-tuning their complicated new survey telescope into next year. Now they have a more urgent problem: Light pollution could jeopardize its ambitious science program.

Author: Richard Stone

U.S. physicists want to take parts from their massive twin gravitational-wave detectors and use them to build a third detector near Perth in western Australia, greatly enhancing the experiment's ability to pinpoint sources of gravitational waves, should such waves ever be spotted.

Author: Adrian Cho

Over the past 5 years, a handful of research teams have found that mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) could become cancerlike after growing for months in the lab. But three of these research teams have now discovered that the cancerlike cells they spotted are unrelated to the original MSCs.

Author: Gretchen Vogel

ScienceNOW reported this week that martian volcano mud may have hosted life, zombies thrived on ancient Earth, hair follicles track the body's clock, and bacteria are gobbling gulf oil, among other stories.

Political tensions between Israel and the Arab world are threatening to overshadow an upcoming chemistry conference in Jordan. The verbal sparring has already created plenty of raw feelings and led to much finger-pointing.

Author: Robert F. Service

The National Science Foundation has quietly folded a recent earmark into a competitive grants program, eliminating what seemed to be one state's advantage.

Author: Jeffrey Mervis

ScienceInsider reported this week that a court decision earlier this week temporarily blocking federal funding for work with human embryonic stem cells has left some researchers working with the cells facing a cutoff of funding, among other stories.

Archaeologists are using Google's eye in the sky to bring covert activities to light, from prison building at Guantánamo Bay to looting in the Middle East.

Author: Heather Pringle