Regulators are due to make a decision whether to allow human-animal embryos to be created and used for research.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is expected to give the plan the go-ahead in principle - but each case will still be judged individually.
An HFEA consultation showed the public were "at ease" with the idea when told it could pave the way for therapies for conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.
But a leading opponent said many people would be "horrified" by such a move.
IT'S a speed record that is supposed to be impossible to break. Yet two physicists are now claiming they have propelled photons faster than the speed of light.
This would be in direct violation of a key tenet of Einstein's special
theory of relativity that states that nothing, under any circumstance,
can exceed the speed of light.
Günter Nimtz and Alfons
Stahlhofen of the University of Koblenz, Germany, have been exploring a
phenomenon in quantum optics called photon tunnelling, which occurs
when a particle slips across an apparently uncrossable barrier. The
pair say they have now tunnelled photons "instantaneously" across a
barrier of various sizes, from a few millimetres up to a metre. Their
conclusion is that the photons traverse the barrier much faster than
the speed of light.
<Modern human brain. Image source: Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison Brain Collection.
* Scientists know that information travels between
brain cells along hairlike extensions called axons. For the first time,
researchers have found that axons don’t just transmit information –
they can turn the signal up or down with the right stimulation.
This finding may help scientists develop
treatments for psychiatric disorders such as depression and
schizophrenia in which it is thought that different parts of the brain
do not communicate correctly with each other.
“Until now, scientists have thought that in the brain’s cortex --
where most cognitive processes occur -- information was only processed
in the cell body,” said Raju Metherate, author of the study, associate
professor of neurobiology and behavior, and director of the Center for
Hearing Research at UC Irvine. “The result of our study suggests that
we must consider the axons as sites of information processing – and of
potential problems when things go wrong.”
SCIENCE 
source 
source 
