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The government has been accused of leaving justice at the mercy of 'cowboy' experts after it stopped funding the body that assesses forensic scientists, forcing it to close. Until last week the Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners (CRFP), set up in 1999 after a series of high-profile miscarriages of justice, such as the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six cases, was responsible for scrutinising more than 3,000 independent experts in fields such as fingerprinting, ballistics, computing and DNA. But in a move that has dismayed legal experts, the Home Office and the National Policing Improvement Agency have stopped paying the CRFP grants worth some £500,000 a year - the lion's share of its income. The newly established Forensic Science Regulator has pledged to introduce a new regulatory system for forensic experts, but it is not yet known how this system will function and it may take up to four years for it to be fully implemented. Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat h

Researchers at the university of Pennsylvania have discovered that parasites hijack host-cell proteins to ensure their survival and proliferation, suggesting new ways to control the diseases they cause. The study, appearing this week online in Science, was led by Doron Greenbaum, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology in the Penn School of Medicine.

BANGALORE: In a breakthrough that could allow detection of brain defects in foetuses, researchers from the Indian Institute of Science and the national institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences , have discovered a gene that causes microcephaly, a disorder in which the brain is of reduced size, affecting mental and intellectual faculties.

Genome Canada is pulling out of a major Canadian-led international effort to map the genetic circuitry of stem cells. The non-profit, non-governmental organization finances large-scale science, but was shut out of the federal budget in January.

Carbon dioxide is a molecular gas at ambient conditions and an important constituent of the Earth's atmosphere. It is also a likely component in the Earth's mantle, and it plays an important role in the life cycle. But at high pressure, carbon dioxide can transform to a solid. Even more interesting, as the pressure increases and temperature varies, the intra- and inter-molecular interactions of carbon dioxide change dramatically and this results in different crystal structures in polymeric dense phases with interesting physical properties, such as 'super-hardness'. Thus carbon dioxide has become an extremely hot topic in science in the last decade.

Chemists at New York university and Harvard University have created a bipedal, autonomous DNA 'walker' that can mimic a cell's transportation system. The device, which marks a step toward more complex synthetic molecular motor systems, is described in the most recent issue of the journal Science. Video demonstration of the walker.