BY KATIE PALMER

The jury is out on the use of neuroimaging as hard evidence in the American courtroom, concluded a panel of legal and academic experts convened on 20 February at the 2010 AAAS meeting in San Diego. The panel, composed of California Superior Court judge Luis Rodriguez, litigators Henry Greely and Robert Knaier, and expert witnesses James Brewer and Michael Rafii, presented a mock trial of the hypothetical Will Johnson, accused murderer and victim of a severe brain lesion.

Self-described as a science writer and the Bush Administration's worst nightmare, physician Bruce M. Psaty told CASW conference attendees what it is like to blow the whistle on the Federal Drug Administration's drug approval process.

Unmask plagiarism in PubMed by flagging similar texts. Assess disease risk by finding repeated DNA segments. These are just two applications for new analytical tools from the lab of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center computational biologist Harold "Skip" Garner.

You have entered a college student's room. As your eyes scan from left to right, you are shocked to see a neatly made bed, folded laundry, and books not only in the bookcase, but alphabetically arranged. Even the slippers — slippers! — have been placed at a right angle to the bed. Ah, but there it is, sitting in a corner, a beautiful, bright blue bong inside a plastic crate.