The original Cavendish Laboratory – the crucible of modern science – is under threat. Boris Jardine explains why it’s important and why it should be saved.Amidst a chaotic jumble of museums, offices and laboratories in the centre of Cambridge there is one building that can legitimately claim to have changed the world: the Cavendish Laboratory, designed by the great Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, where atoms were split, sub-atomic particles discovered and DNA unravelled.But the Cavendish may not survive in its current form for long. The ‘New Museums Site’ in which it lies is about to undergo a dramatic renovation: the scientific departments – in search of space and up-to-date facilities – have largely moved out of the city, and so the university wants to ‘create a window into the site’s history’. A noble aim, especially when the history of the place is so rich. But, bizarrely, the Cavendish Laboratory is slated for partial demolition. In the name of commemorating past achievement, we are about to lose some of the country’s most important scientific architecture. Continue reading...

US drug maker says disclosure of all historical trial data offers little value to patients, but critics say lack of information paints distorted picture of safetyPfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical groups, has said it will resist demands from investors and transparency campaigners that it disclose results from all historical drug trials.A powerful group of 85 investors, representing more than £2.5tn of assets, recently joined forces with medical research campaigners to press for greater transparency from the 25 largest pharmaceuticals groups in the world. Continue reading...

A new book aims to illustrate all the eccentricities of international onomatopoeia“I want Meryl Streep crying in five different accents.”

Eminent neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, who died from terminal cancer on Sunday, describes the pleasure writing gives him. In the video posted on his YouTube channel, he says it ‘takes him to another place’ where he lets go of worries and forgets about the passage of time. Sacks was a prolific writer, publishing 13 books throughout his life, including his most famous work, Awakenings, which was made into an Oscar-nominated film

The astronauts living on the ISS get to experience the wonders of the universe’s natural phenomena like no one elseThis piece was first published on The ConversationImagine seeing the lights of cities spreading around the Nile Delta and then in less than an hour gazing down on Mount Everest. The astronauts on the International Space Station(ISS) are among the lucky few who will have this humbling, once-in-a-lifetime experience of seeing the beauty of Earth from space.

Fifteen years ago, when Steve Silberman broke the story of Silicon Valley’s autism ‘epidemic’, he saw it as a problem. Now he’s changed his mind and has published a book about understanding and accepting autism spectrum disordersFifteen years ago, Steve Silberman was working as a journalist for Wired magazine in San Francisco, as the digital revolution was really taking off. He was sitting in a cafe, telling a friend how he’d recently met two Silicon Valley power couples, each with a profoundly autistic child, when a teacher at the next table overheard and butted in: “There’s an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley. Something terrible is happening to our children.” Silberman’s story on the topic, The Geek Syndrome, was published by Wired in 2001.Back then, it was not uncommon to hear autism spoken about in this way. But understanding and acceptance have since progressed in leaps and bounds. Silberman’s new book, Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, tells the story of how this transformation happened – the research, the parents and therapists, and above all, the information networks that allowed everybody interested to share what they were finding out. Continue reading...

A new Science study has highlighted a potential problem in reproducibility in psychology. But, as Dorothy Bishop points out, it’s also the starting point for the revitalisation and improvement of scienceEver since Brian Nosek and his colleagues first set up the Reproducibility Project in 2011 many psychologists have been twitchy. The aim of the project was simple: recruit an army of experimenters, with the aim of trying to reproduce results from 100 articles published in three well-established journals in 2008. Why would anyone want to do that? Well, because in psychology, as in many other fields, there have been growing concerns that scientific results are often not reproducible, but there was no hard evidence as to how serious a problem it was.A notable feature of the study was the care taken to liaise with authors of the original studies to ensure methods and materials were comparable. Also the researchers adopted transparent and audited methods for depositing data and summarising results. In addition, all replication studies had to have a sample size large enough to give convincing results – in many cases these were substantially larger than in the original study. Continue reading...

New clinical trial data suggest that nerve growth factor gene therapy is safe for extended periods of timeAn experimental gene therapy reduces the rate at which nerve cells in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients degenerate and die, according to new results from a small clinical trial, published in the current issue of the journal JAMA Neurology.Targeted injection of nerve growth factor into the patients’ brains rescued dying cells around the injection site, enhancing their growth and inducing them to sprout new fibres. In some cases, these beneficial effects persisted for 10 years after the therapy was first delivered. Continue reading...

Of 100 studies published in top-ranking journals in 2008, 75% of social psychology experiments and half of cognitive studies failed the replication testA major investigation into scores of claims made in psychology research journals has delivered a bleak verdict on the state of the science.An international team of experts repeated 100 experiments published in top psychology journals and found that they could reproduce only 36% of original findings.

Weakened form of polio from childhood immunisations lived on in subject’s gut, mutating into a strain which could cause paralysis in the unvaccinatedA British man with an immune deficiency has been shedding a highly virulent, mutant strain of polio virus for nearly 30 years as a result of childhood vaccinations.The discovery has prompted scientists to warn of other patients who could unwittingly trigger fresh outbreaks of the disease in regions where people are not sufficiently protected against the illness.