British government aims for R and D spending of 2.5% of GDP by 2014

Government tables amendments to a draft law that scientists said would hinder vital medical research

Plan includes more money and basic science funding based on excellence, not politics

Group from Newcastle has applied for license to do somatic cell nuclear transfer

Index ranks Salk, EMBL, and MIT at the top, with biotech clusters linked to excellence

New directory lets users search and retrieve articles from about 270 open-access journals

Courtesy of AffymetrixMicroarray giant Affymetrix http://www.affymetrix.com of Santa Clara, Calif., is raising the bar for whole-genome association studies. The first in a planned line of related products, the two-array GeneChip® Mapping 100K set can genotype over 100,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), 10 times more than its predecessor could.About half of the SNPs on the 100K set come from public databases. The rest stem from a proprietary database developed by Perlegen Sciences o

Regulator seeks government clarification on licensing human-animal hybrid experiments

The country sees economic and research benefits from being an educational powerhouse

Australian science and research groups win another 5 years of security in annual budget

New UK group formed to represent people targeted by animal rights violence or intimidation

Advisory panel needed to keep the bioweapons convention up to date, the Royal Society says