On the Radar

The pick of the science news

Drug trials rap

Many unfavourable drug trials have gone unpublished, which could bias safety and efficacy information in the scientific literature about medicines, according to a report in PLoS Medicinethis week.

A study at the University of California, San Francisco, identified 33 new drugs approved in 2001 and 2002 by the FDA. By June 2007, one quarter of the trials had not been fully published in the scientific literature.

The analysis found reports of trial data sometimes painted more favourable pictures of the drugs, and that trials with favourable outcomes were nearly five times more likely to be published.

Turning landfill green on top

Capping landfill sites with layers of topsoil and vegetation could help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from decaying waste, according to new research from Australia.

Biodegradable material buried in landfills breaks down quickly when it comes into contact with water, but techniques such as capping the landfill with compacted clay can still let water percolate through, say the Queensland-based scientists.

Instead they trialled the "phytocapping" technique near Central Queensland University and found the approach could reduce surface methane emission by four to five times when compared with an adjacent un-vegetated site.

By numbers

10The estimated weight in tonnes of an asteroid fragment that zipped into the Earth's atmosphere last week, creating a "fireball" seen by thousands of people in Canada

180The force, in kilos, that a dolphin's tail can exert, solving the puzzle of how they can swim so fast and "walk" upright in the water, according to US researchers