A new defence of the fossil Ida as a precursor to today’s primates, including humans, has emerged from the research team that last year bought and promoted the 47-million-year-old remains.
Ida, or Darwinius masillae, was described in 2009 by Jens Franzen at the Research Institute and Natural History Museum of Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany, and colleagues, who identified it as a haplorrhine, precursors to modern-day monkeys and apes. However, two studies by other groups since then citing evidence from a new fossil and an independent study of similar primate fossils concluded Ida was closer to the strepsirrhine branch, precursors to today’s lemurs, (see ‘Fossil primate challenges Ida’s place’). Continue reading Palaeontologists go to bat for Ida→
The US Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) will pay over $1.5 million to the family of a child whose parents allege acquired autism after routine vaccinations in 2000. CBS called the payment to the family of Hannah Poling the “first court award in a vaccine-autism claim” (9 September 2010, CBS).
However, the payment does not acknowledge a vaccine-autism link.
Read the rest of this blog post on Nature’s news blog, The Great Beyond: [html] or read the accompanying news briefing as it appeared in the magazine: [html] & [pdf].
A judge has prohibited Bayer Cropscience from marketing Liberty Link corn, a genetically modified crop resistant to Ignite and Liberty herbicides, in Brazil. If the Leverkusen, Germany–based company fails to suspend marketing, planting, transportation and import immediately, it will be fined R$50,000 ($28,500) a day. This ruling issued in July by an environmental court in the southern state of Parana is only the second time a Brazilian court has overturned a commercial GM crop already approved by the country’s technical commission on biosafety (CTNBio), says the commission’s coordinator Jairon Nascimento. Continue reading Brazil bans Bayer→
The European Commission (EC) is inviting biotech firms to apply for research grants, if partnered with academia. For the first time, a quarter of the biotech-specific grants will require the participation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The EC plans to hand out €240.3 million ($310.2 million) in direct research grants in 2011, up 26% from the €190 million ($245.3 million) this year. Continue reading EC woos SMEs→
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
