And now strange but true developments in the world of animal research.
Critics also bemoan a lack of adequate research to gauge the impact of some new developments on the local environment and economies.
CNN: Africa's 'new cities': Urban future or utopian fantasies?
We got a glimpse this week of where the rocket is heading after research ministers approved a 600m euros programme of developments at their European Space Agency council meeting in Naples.
One of the most innovative developments since the last IPCC report in 2007 has been a multiplication of collaborative research efforts involving indigenous peoples and natural and social scientists.
The so-called autonomous adaptive structures are part of a long-term research into shape-memory healing which could impact long-term developments of implantable medical devices, for instance.
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Equally, your citation of recent Japanese research in the use of prosthetic fingers does little service to the more recent technical developments in biometrics (there are products resistant to these attacks in varying degrees) or to the obvious fact that there is a competitive market out there, where buyers are seeking value for money and fitness for purpose.
The research looked at commercial and residential developments within 1km of new stations on the route.
Written by a team of independent experts who are each covering the country or region from which they hail, the UNESCO Science Report 2010 analyses the trends and developments that have shaped scientific research, innovation and higher education over the past five years, including the impact of the current global economic recession.
Paul Smith, executive director of the Spinal Injuries Association, told BBC News Online, welcomed the research, but warned that many developments simply led to unfairly raised expectations.
He said although the results disagreed with the findings of previous studies, they should be viewed as positive because they suggested that further research might lead to developments in treating specific health problems common to people with Down's syndrome.
Some 34 of the world's leading biologists, physicists, chemists, Earth scientists and computer scientists, led by Stephen Emmott, of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Britain, have spent the past eight months trying to understand how future developments in computing science might influence science as a whole.
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