Eli Bressert planned to spend his academic career in search of forming stars. He had completed a PhD in astronomy at the University of Exeter, UK, and had won a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship to study radio astronomy near Sydney, Australia. Citations of his papers and invitations for collaborations and conference talks were on the rise. He had no reason to want to work outside astronomy.

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Stefan Green always wanted to pursue biology, and fell in love with microbiology as a graduate student. As he advanced through his graduate education and postdoctoral fellowships, he reckoned that everything would come together because he had ticked all the right boxes. Following the pathway of his parents, both of whom are biologists, he earned a master's in environmental engineering and a PhD in microbiology and plant protection, completed two postdocs and has a long list of publications and posters. But — not surprisingly in today's discouraging research-career environment — his drive for a tenure-track position stalled in 2010. He could not get an academic tenure-track position despite his stellar CV. “I did two postdocs. I taught microbial ecology for a semester,” he recalls. “But after several interviews for permanent positions, I wasn't having any luck.”

Green gave up the academic-research battle and found a different way to keep his hand in science. During one of his postdocs, Green had tried to find ways to characterize microbial communities without using modern sequencing techniques because the financial and labour costs of the technology was out of the reach of his lab. From this experience, he discovered that he enjoys and has a knack for working with instrumentation. Today, he is director of the DNA-services laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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When chemist Fred Holzhauer started a job at a cleaning-products company in 2008, his first assignment was to create a tablet dishwasher detergent that contained no polyacrylates, or any other ingredients commonly found in dishwashing products that have negative impacts on human health and the environment. Of course, the detergent also had to work well in a dishwasher — and to last for months on shop shelves without degrading or losing effectiveness. It also had to be affordable.

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Momentum is building to establish a new geological epoch that recognizes humanity's impact on the planet. But there is fierce debate behind the scenes.

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Short-sightedness is reaching epidemic proportions. Some scientists think they have found a reason why.

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Transfusions are one of the most overused treatments in modern medicine, at a cost of billions of dollars. Researchers are working out how to cut back.

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   Information scientist Cassidy Sugimoto was initially sceptical that Twitter was anything more than a self-promotional time-sink. But when she noticed that her graduate students were receiving conference and co-authoring invitations through connections made on Twitter, she decided to give the social-media platform a try. An exchange that began last year as short posts, or 'tweets', relating to conference sessions led to a new contact offering to help her negotiate access to an internal data set from a large scientific society. “Because we started the conversation on Twitter, it allowed me to move the conversation into the physical world,” says Sugimoto, who studies how ideas are disseminated among scientists at Indiana University in Bloomington. “It's allowed me to open up new communities for discussions and increase the interdisciplinarity of my research.”

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Brain-scanning techniques promise to give an objective measure of whether someone is in pain, but researchers question whether they are reliable enough for the courtroom.

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    It seemed too good to be true, says Allard Mosk. It was 2007, and he was working with Ivo Vellekoop, a student in his group at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, to shine a beam of visible light through a 'solid wall' — a glass slide covered with white paint — and then focus it on the other side. They did not have a particular application in mind. “I really just wanted to try this because it had never been done before,” Mosk says. And in truth, the two researchers did not expect to pick up much more than a faint blur.

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     La communauté mondiale possède suffisamment de ressources pour faire face à la plupart de ces problèmes sanitaires ; mais le fait est qu’aujourd’hui de nombreux systèmes nationaux de santé sont affaiblis, peu réactifs, iné-quitables  voire dangereux. Ce dont on a besoin maintenant, c’est de volonté politique pour mettre en œuvre des plans nationaux accompagnés d’une coopération internationale pour adapter les ressources, exploiter les connaissances et mettre en place de solides systèmes de santé pour traiter et prévenir les maladies et promouvoir la santé des populations. Si l’on veut faire sauter les blocages qui s’opposent à la réalisation des objectifs nationaux et mondiaux en matière de santé, il est essentiel de constituer un corps d’agents de santé compétents, motivés et bénéficiant des sou- tiens nécessaires. Les soins de santé constituent une activité de services exigeant un personnel nombreux. Les prestateurs de soins personnifient les valeurs fondamentales du système  ils s’occupent des malades et les soignent, assurent la prévention des maladies et réduisent les risques –, ils sont l’intermédiaire humain qui relie la connaissance à l’action sanitaire. Œuvrant au cœur du système, le personnel est l’élément moteur de tout progrès en matière de santé. Il est largement prouvé que le nombre et la va leur du personnel influent de manière positive sur la couverture vaccinale, l’extension des soins de santé primaires ainsi que sur la survie juvéno‐infantile et maternelle (voir Figure 1). On a montré qu’il y avait une corrélation entre l’issue favorable des affections cardio‐vasculaires et la compétence des médecins, ainsi que leur densité.

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