Path to the right result
How can researchers best manage conflicts of interest? Nicholas Winterton of the MRC explores the issue. It is vital that those funding and undertaking research know what standards of professional...
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Experimenting with drugs for science's sake
Geoff Watts explains a quest to find bacteria with a taste for heroin. Humans have been giving thanks for opium for at least 3,000 years. Now, our oldest painkiller has attracted the attention of our...
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Not so common spuds
A collection of 2,500 types of potato, many unique, faces ruin. Richard Rawles reports. In the 1930s, the Soviet plant geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov and his co-workers gathered a remarkable...
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Sights set on galactic birth
Astronomers have produced the deepest ground-based image of the sky, allowing them to probe galactic birth at an unprecedented scale. The team from the University of Durham used the Anglo-Dutch...
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A very random peer review
The peer review, one of the pillars of modern scientific method, is a perilously random process, according to a new study. Researchers have carried out detailed analysis of how the opinions of...
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Dino with trick up its sleeve
Pterosaurs, the largest creatures ever to fly, used the same engineering tricks to stay airborne as Barnes Wallace's wartime bombers. Scientists have discovered that the wing bones of the extinct...
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Vital stash of panache
Why isn't web study suitable for all? Because, Sally Brown argues, teachers need to know which students are staring out of the window. Olga Wojtas talks to an inspiring don Sally Brown, deputy...
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Star Turn
In a discipline sensitive to power, Olga Wojtas meets a woman geographer whose lack of arrogance inspires There is a popular belief that students are reluctant to spend time on topics that are not...
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UHI 'utterly condemned'
A damning report on the troubled University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) project was made partially public this week. The report, which found senior management had given staff the impression of...
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Gap year is more popular than ever
The number of students taking a gap year is up 7.3 per cent on last year, according to figures released this week. More than 22,000 students have accepted a full-time place starting in autumn 2001,...
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French research minister shows X-ray vision over project approval
France is to go ahead with plans to build a third-generation synchrotron on its home ground. Research minister Roger-Gerard Schwartzenberg this week announced that the Soleil project, abandoned by...
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First Impressions
This week's competition, in which you have to identify a book from its opening sentence, is from a work that features a lady of crime with a taste for disguise: " 'There's no such thing as a perfect...
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Changing, feeding, neuron pruning
What's Going on in There?
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Suspended in webs of meaning
Available Light
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Society does exist after all, and it's good for you
Mary Douglas