From today's UK papers

The Guardian

Students are mobilising parents in the their battle against loans and fees.

Students who take time out of their courses because of illness find that they fall between the social security and student support systems and may get no financial help from the state at all.

Gillian Evans, lecturer in medieval theology and intellectual history at Cambridge University and public policy secretary of the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards, argues that direct access courses may mask an emperor wearing no clothes.

A funding review produced by cash-starved university heads has set them on a collision course with a government saying a pre-election 'no' to top-up fees.

Daily Telegraph

Drugs companies are to be offered new tax breaks to encourage research into cures for the most lethal diseases afflicting the third world, chancellor Gordon Brown has announced.

A gun that fires coin-sized pellets 10 times faster than a bullet has been developed by scientists at Sandia, a US nuclear laboratory.

Miscellany

An international team of researchers, led by Imre Friedmann of Nasa's Ames Research Centre at Moffet Field in California, said that findings they have published in thel Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are "conclusive evidence" that Mars was  teeming with life about 3.5 billion years ago. ( Independent, Guardian, Times )

Researchers at Liverpool University have checked the hands of 304 professional footballers and found that the better the player, the more likely he is to have a long ring finger. ( Guardian, Times )

Scientists from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia have said that they may be able to use gene therapy to tackle some types of cancer in humans. Feeding mice with a gene they lack has been shown to control stomach cancer. ( Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Times )