I think anyone who received last week's Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) newsletter would have been forgiven for wondering why the main article was entitled ?What is Islamism??

ESOF is a science meeting and its emailed newsletters are presumably designed to build interest levels prior to the event. Previous editions had covered fairly routine territory?lasers, neurons, galaxies, microbes, science journalists and the origin of the universe?which made... Click to continue

An urgent plea has gone out from Britain's Royal Society, calling for a ?white knight? to buy some notes written by Robert Hooke in the late 1600s and make them available to researchers.

Hooke worked with Robert Boyle, coined the term 'cell' and helped rebuild London, among other things. He was an early secretary of the Royal Society and the papers in question are annotated and draft minutes from early meetings.

Given all of which, it seems a shame that the Royal Society isn't in a... Click to continue

After 27 years, Australia's Lorne Conference on the Organization and Expression of the Genome witnessed a first on Sunday: a session dedicated to the joys of epigenetics .

The session kicked off with Carmen Sapienza from the Fels Institute for Cancer Research and Molecule Biology, Temple University School of Medicine, who showed using a combination of database analysis and lab work that imprinted chromosomal regions are historical... Click to continue

A week or so ago, Ann Maree Pearce, a government cytogeneticist from Australia's island state, Tasmania, and colleagues said in a Nature news report that a nasty facial cancer affecting the Tasmanian devil population, dubbed Devil Facial Tumour Disease, was in fact an infective cell line being passed between the ferocious, foxed-sized scavengers via bites and so on.

At the 18th Lorne Cancer Conference Erskine on the Beach in Lorne,... Click to continue

The 18th Lorne Cancer Conference Erskine on the Beach in Lorne, Australia, closed today, but not before p53 competed with the scenery for scientists' attention. Just as the Keystone Symposia are set up to allow for skiing in the afternoon, Lorne is set up to nice long break in the middle of the day during which delegates play tennis on grass courts, swim at the sweeping beach across the road or just laze on the grass in the sun.

Tony... Click to continue