Following World War II, the U.S. began increasing its commitment to publicly-funded science. The responsibility of the scientist was thought to be a straightforward process: if the scientists asked the “right” questions, their answers would help policy makers to make the “right” decisions.

However, the questions asked by researchers do not always translate easily into policy.

Which genes are passed on from mother to child is decided very early on during the maturation of the egg cell in the ovary. In a cell division process that is unique to egg cells, half of the chromosomes are eliminated from the egg before it is fertilised. Using a powerful microscope, researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) have now revealed how the molecular machinery functions that is responsible for chromosome reduction of egg cells in mice. In the current issue of Cell they report the assembly of this machinery, which is very different from what happens in all other cells in the body. The process is likely conserved across species and the new insights might help shed light on defects occurring in human egg cell development.

Oregon Health & Science University researchers have figured out how to turn a mouse into a factory for human liver cells that can be used to test how pharmaceuticals are metabolized.

The technique could soon become the gold standard not only for examining drug metabolism in the liver, which helps scientists determine a drug's toxicity.

The space shuttle Endeavour and its seven-member crew lifted off at 6:36 p.m. EDT Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts are on their way to the International Space Station for an assembly mission, designated STS-118.

"This is serious business we're in here," said Endeavour's Commander Scott Kelly to the shuttle launch director shortly before lift off. "I'm proud of your team for getting Endeavour ready to go fly. I'm also proud of my crew and the rest of the astronaut office for the competence and professionalism and consistently making something that is incredibly difficult look easy."

Kelly then added, "We'll see you in a couple of weeks, and thanks for loaning us your space shuttle."

A new WWF study tracking pygmy elephants by satellite shows that the remaining herds of these endangered elephants, which live only on the island of Borneo, are under threat from forest fragmentation and loss of habitat.

Borneo pygmy elephants depend for their survival on forests situated on flat, low lands and in river valleys, the study found. Unfortunately, it is also the type of terrain preferred for commercial plantations. Over the past four decades, 40 percent of the forest cover of the Malaysian State of Sabah, on the northeast of the Island of Borneo – where most of pygmy elephants are – has been lost to logging, conversion for plantations and human settlement.

Most people think of Sir Isaac Newton as the father of gravity but he also created one of the earliest observations of interference in his “dusty mirror” experiment.

In a darkened room, he used a prism and a small hole in a screen to form a quasi-monochromatic beam from sunlight, which he shone onto a back-quick silvered mirror. The mirror was angled to return the beam back through the hole and on the screen. Newton observed dark and light rings of light, which he found “strange and surprising.”

It was 100 years later when the British scientist Thomas Young determined the rings were caused by interference at the screen between two paths of light scattering from dust particles on the mirror's front surface.