Excessive focus on the Millennium Development Goals risks undermining the long-term investment required for building scientific capacity.

We are now two-thirds of the way through the task that members of the UN set themselves in 2000 as a device to spur their anti-poverty efforts — the achievement of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the year 2015. And it has become clear that the overall verdict on this strategy remains as divided as success in achieving the goals themselves.

World leaders meeting at the UN headquarters in New York last week heard that substantial progress in meeting some of the goals — such as reducing mortality rates among children under the age of five — gives legitimate cause for congratulation.

Other MDG targets, however, remain far from being achieved, such as reducing overall levels of hunger, particularly in Africa. A ... Read more »

Imagine plugging your location into the Internet to find out, not just the likelihood of an earthquake or tsunami, but also the damage it might cause and its probable knock-on social and economic effects where you live.

The Global Earthquake Model (GEM) is the first global effort to map not just the likelihood of earthquakes but also the risks, based on the local population, quality of construction and numerous other factors.

It is a global effort focused on establishing uniform and open standards, so that risks can be calculated and communicated worldwide.

The GEM committee began work in 2009 and presented its pilot phase results this summer (3−4 June) at a meeting in Washington, United States, and then online last month. The ambition is to present a first version of the Global Earthquake Model in 2013.

SciDev.Net caught up with Rui Pinho, secretary general of GEM, based in Italy, to f ... Read more »

The impact of global warming on the metabolism of mosquitoes could further complicate predictions of how climate change will affect malaria, according to scientists.

Scientists have for the first time estimated how warmer climate will affect the metabolism of cold-blooded animals, such as mosquitoes, on a global scale. Such animals depend on outside temperature to regulate their body's metabolism. 

The study, published today (7 October) in Nature, says that the effect of temperature on metabolism is non-linear, affecting animals in warm regions disproportionately more than those in cold regions.

"At high temperatures, very small [temperature] changes have huge effects," said lead researcher Michael Dillon, an assistant professor of zoology and physiology at the University of Wyoming, United States.

Although the temperature has so far risen less rapidly in the tropical reg ... Read more »

[BALI] Asian institutions have launched a research initiative to develop an HIV/AIDS vaccine specifically for the region.

The AIDS Vaccine Asia Network (AVAN) brings together researchers from 13 universities and institutions in Australia, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as the WHO.

The creation of AVAN was announced at the AIDS Vaccine 2009 conference in Paris last year and an AVAN Task Force has since been established with a secretariat in China. Its vision and goals are outlined in an article in the current issue of PLoS Medicine.

"An Asia-specific vaccine development plan has a number of benefits: for example, it will focus on the wide range of subtypes and recombinants that are region-specific," David Cooper, director of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, Sydney, Australia and a member of the networ ... Read more »