DIOXIN IN VIETNAM
During the 1960s, US forces fighting in Vietnam showered the country with twice as much dioxin-containing weedkiller, such as the notorious Agent Orange, as previously thought.
The revised figures, which are published this week in Nature (vol 422, p 681), suggest that compared with previous estimates US Air Force planes dumped an additional 7 million litres of toxic weedkiller on Vietnam, much of it directly onto US ground troops and Vietnamese civilians.
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MARS AND PLUTO
NASA has chosen the landing sites for its two Mars Explorer spacecraft, due for launch in May and June. The first will head for the Gusev crater, the site of an ancient lake 15 degrees south of the Martian equator. The second will aim for the Meridiani Planum, a plain with evidence of past water action, roughly halfway round the planet from Gusev.
NASA has now also authorised construction of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. The spacecraft is due for a 2006 launch, to reach Pluto in 2015.
CLONING HURDLE
The European Parliament has backed controversial legislation to ban therapeutic cloning across the European Union and severely restrict research on stem cells. But the measures could be jettisoned or eased in later stages of Europe鈥檚 complex law-making process.
Even if the measures do eventually become enshrined in European law, countries like Britain that allow therapeutic cloning want the right to choose for themselves whether to support such research.