Teresa Riera Madurell, member of the European Parliament from Spain, was appointed last month as the rapporteur responsible for establishing Horizon 2020, the next European Union (EU) research-funding programme that will run during 2014–20. The former computer scientist leads five other parliamentary rapporteurs who, over the next year, will craft four legislative documents that will [...]

Early in his career, Paul Olsen sat in front of a television, expecting to see his own image. He had hosted a television crew on a research expedition to Manicouagan Crater in Canada, where he and his team were investigating the Triassic–Jurassic boundary in the geological record. Olsen, a palaeontologist at Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of [...]

Spanish scientists have collected more than 32,000 signatures in less than a week in support of a petition that urges Spain’s tax authority to adopt a novel way of raising funds for research: adding a checkbox to income tax forms that would allow taxpayers to direct 0.7% of their contribution to science. The petition, launched [...]

The ricochet of a rock fall resonates in the mind of anyone who has heard it. But it also sets off subterranean waves detectable by far-off seismic stations — and now researchers are using those signals to remotely model rockslides. Franziska Dammeier, an engineering geologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and [...]

An antibiotic and a protein can work together to fight radiation-induced infections better than either can manage alone. Doctors already use antibiotics to treat radiation sickness. But the addition of a protein from the immune system — bactericidal/permeability-increasing protein (BPI), which acts against poisons called endotoxins — improves the survival rate of irradiated mice, according [...]

A flagship biomedical research facility in Valencia, built during the heady days of the last economic boom, is now going bust. It is a casualty of Spain’s deep spending cuts and, some say, of poor management. The Prince Felipe Research Centre (CIPF), which hosts 260 scientists and has produced high-profile publications in regenerative medicine and [...]

Glaciologists and climatologists are racing to correct an error in the latest edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, which they say overstates the extent of ice loss in Greenland over the past 12 years. The 13th edition of the atlas was released on 15 September. The map’s publisher, London-based HarperCollins, said in [...]

Here’s my overview story about the Malaspina expedition for Nature’s news section. See the original at Nature’s website [html] or as it appeared in print: [pdf]. In the age of networked buoys and remote-sensing satellites, a global oceanographic cruise might sound like a relic from the golden era of exploration. But the seven-month trek of [...]

In the scientists’ lounge aboard the BIO Hespérides one evening last March, Jordi Dachs points at the schedule for the next day’s oceanographic observations. The Spanish research vessel is chugging across the Indian Ocean at a speed of about ten knots. “The storm has put us seven hours behind,” warns Dachs, an environmental chemist at [...]

Nuclear accidents can have devastating consequences for the people and animals living in the vicinity of the damaged power plants, but they also give researchers a unique opportunity to study the effects of radiation on populations that would be impossible to recreate in the lab. Tim Mousseau, who directs the Chernobyl Research Initiative at the [...]