They said last week they would make environmental crime a part of European law and they may have done it.

The European Commission draft still needs approval from the European Parliament and governments of the 27 member countries - since the majority of the EU countries that were signatories to the Kyoto Treaty are not in compliance the new law could have devastating effects.

Franco Frattini, the Justice Commissioner, said companies were using loopholes because various countries had different laws.

"We cannot allow safe havens of environmental crime inside the EU," he said.

The primary targets: dumping of toxic waste, illegally shipping or treating waste and trading in endangered species.

Using a unique weaving machine of their design, Duke University Medical Center researchers have created a three-dimensional fabric "scaffold" that could greatly improve the ability of physicians to repair damaged joints with the patient's own stem cells.

"If further experiments are successful, the scaffold could be used in clinical trials within three or four years," said Franklin Moutos, a graduate student in the Orthopedic Bioengineering Laboratory who designed and built the weaving machine.

It's a bad day for ghost research, though you can be sure Discovery or History Channel will fill in the gap when they run out of Shroud of Turin articles.

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program at Princeton University, which attempted to discover if there was any way the mind could influence physical reality, closing its physical facilities at the end of February.   Well, they can just ESP the research, they don't need physical facilities.

A study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine shows that fluctuations in Vitamin D3 levels control the body's innate immune response, affecting a skin wound's ability to heal.

Richard L.

When they fly, insects use their vision for piloting, just like human pilots. The electric signals from their facetted eyes travel through specialized neurons to stimulate the wing muscles, which let the insects correct their flight and avoid crashes. Could these same neurons be used in a sort of "automatic pilot"?

This is what Nicolas Franceschini, Franck Ruffier and Julien Serres have just shown. These biorobotics specialists from the Movement and Perception Laboratory (CNRS/Université de la Méditerranée) in Marseille, France have revealed an automatic mechanism called the "optic flow regulator" that controls the lift force.

A decades-old cancer mystery has been solved by researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). "We not only found a critical tumor suppressor gene, but have revealed a master switch for a tumor suppressive network that means more targeted and effective cancer therapy in the future," said CSHL Associate Professor Alea Mills, Ph.D. The study, headed by Mills, was published in the February issue of Cell.

Specifically, Mills' discovery identifies CHD5, a protein that prevents cancer, as a novel tumor suppressor, mapping to a specific portion of chromosome 1 known as 1p36. When CHD5 is not doing its job, the machinery within our cells that normally prevents cancer is switched off.