Chemical studies of exoplanets—planets that orbit not the Sun, but distant stars—rely on spectroscopy. Such studies used to be the domain of space observatories and of the world's largest ground-based telescopes. Now, a new data analysis technique successfully pioneered by a group of astronomers from the US, the UK and Germany has brought exoplanet spectroscopy to a much smaller (and more wide-spread) class of ground-based telescopes.

AB Sciex has been launched as a new company combining the two halves of the AB Sciex mass spectrometry joint venture into an integrated organisation. AB Sciex intends to use its new operating structure to increase speed to market in developing new solutions and expanding service and support to enable the scientific community to continue its increasing use of mass spectrometry for a broader range of applications.

Magnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopy may in the future be able both to pinpoint the precise location of prostate cancer and to determine the tumour's aggressiveness, information that could help guide treatment planning. In Science Translational Medicine (doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3000513), Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report how spectroscopic analysis of the biochemical makeup of prostate glands accurately identified the location of tissue confirmed to be malignant by conventional pathology.

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Children as young as five months old will follow the gaze of an adult towards an object and engage in joint attention, according to research at Birkbeck, University of London, funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council. The findings, published in Biology Letters (doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.1069), suggest that the human brain develops this important social skill surprisingly early in infancy.