Scientists have developed a soap composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution.  That's right, magnetic soap.

But there is a practical side. The generation of this property in a fully functional soap could calm concerns over the use of soaps in oil-spill clean ups and improve industrial cleaning products.

A neuro-imaging study found that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered money to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.

Sacred values - those 'sell your soul' issues - prompted greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits, where selling out can be rationalized.

One hypothesis goes that electric toasters became popular because something had to be done with electricity. So it may go with some vaccines.  Roche has set up a co -marketing agreement with private laboratory Unilabs-IHS to support greater access to HPV testing throughout the UK. 

Like global warming?  You can thank nuclear power protesters.  Since the 1970s, a full-scale public relations war on nuclear power has been waged, meaning a growing population became more reliant on fossil fuels instead of zero-emissions nuclear power.

 Now, a formal complaint about subsidies for nuclear power has been sent to the European Commission (DG Competition). If it is upheld, it unlikely that any new nuclear power stations will be built in the UK or elsewhere in the EU. The complaint may be followed by legal action in the courts or actions by politicians to reduce or remove subsidies for nuclear power. The complaint has been prepared by lawyers for the Energy Fair group, with several other environmental groups and environmentalists. 

Should researchers be obligated to publish null results?  Should they have to publish all trial data? Missing data distorts the scientific record, so that clinical decisions cannot be based on the best evidence, and that can harm patients and lead to futile costs to health systems, accoding to an editorial at BMJ.

It's no secret that a large proportion of evidence from human trials is unreported, and much of what is reported is done so inadequately but there is no real accounting for the consequences of unpublished evidence.

If you don't think the government should be artificially mandating winners and losers among clean energy companies with artificial subsidies, don't let that turn you off of basic research, where the real improvement in future clean energy will be made.

A discovery by military and academic researchers that embedding charged quantum dots into photovoltaic cells can improve electrical output by enabling the cells to harvest infrared light, and by increasing the lifetime of photoelectrons, may mean dramatically increasing the amount of sunlight that solar cells convert into electricity.