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MPs say Royal Society offers good value but must be more transparent and guard against elitism

National Academy of Sciences committee considers eliminating and regrouping institutes

Suzanne Cory, Raymond Freeman and Sir Richard Peto are awarded the 2002 Royal Medals.

Experts cite funding benefits but worry that open access to research could be compromised.

US Department of Energy gives $103 million for study of microbial systems biology and bugs that could help environment.

American Society for Microbiology president calls for meeting to discuss withholding of critical data by journals

A House of Lords report supports the use of animals in research but calls for greater efforts to seek alternatives.

Did polio vaccines contaminated with SV40 cause increased incidence of rare cancers and non-Hodgkin lymphoma?

Tony Blair's government has underlined its commitment to UK science in the strategy document just released.

A long-awaited report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics says fewer patents on DNA sequences should be granted.

Worst-case scenarios don't come much uglier than the plume of an aerosolized biowarfare agent infiltrating a city. What happens then? Do alarms ring, evacuations and vaccinations begin? Or will anyone even know what the cloud contains? The answer could depend on efforts to improve molecular recognition systems that identify biowarfare agents in the air, water, or food. Problems of accuracy and efficiency that have dogged such technologies for decades are approaching resolution, but even then,

Like some coevolutionary SWAT team, John Thompson, Bradley Cunningham, and colleagues have headed out every spring and summer for the last decade to the wilds of western Idaho and bordering areas in Oregon and Washington to camp out and infiltrate the world of the prairie starflower, Lithophragma parviflorum, and a little gray moth known as Greya politella. Now, their published rare case study in coevolution describes how the two species have coevolved in a variety of habitats, from open grass