From today's UK papers

The Independent
Oxford University's new £14m Sackler Library yesterday became home to a 36ft-long and 6ft-tall bronze frieze by the Scottish artist Alexander Stoddart.

The system of grading teachers by their performance is likely to be scrapped under plans to reform inspections.

The Human Genome Diversity Project has all but disintegrated ten years after its inception, having fallen victim to accusations of racism and commercial exploitation. 

Daily Telegraph 
Wales is a haven for "gun-toting crackpots" says an Englishman living there. Not content with outing Saint David as a homosexual, writer Mike Parker also said that the level of racism he had encountered in his new home had "taken him by surprise".

Financial Times
Xenova, the UK biotechnology company, will today start the world's first clinical trials of a vaccine against nicotine.

The Guardian
Lord Dearing, the former education adviser, has called on the goverment to consider restoring the student grant. His landmark report into university funding paved the way for the introduction of tuition fees.

University finance: Two-thirds of undergraduates work during term time to make ends meet

The government secretly ordered the production of 10,000 biological cluster bombs in the cold war to take  disease-carrying bomblets towards Soviet targets, according to Brian Palmer, a  researcher at University College London.

Psychologists at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, now know how Miss Muffet detected the spider beside her and why some people always spot the snake in the grass. It all comes down to the things we fear most seeming to leap out at us.

Heather Stewart: Labour needs tuition on price of university education.

A flood of letters takes the paper to task for its unflattering feature on journalism degree courses.

The Times
When Mark Ashton-Smith's kayak capsized in treacherous seas off the Isle of Wight, the Cambridge University lecturer with a PhD in psychology did not think to dial 999. Clinging to the upturned kayak in 6ft waves, Dr Ashton-Smith telephoned his sister in Cambridge and his father 4,000 miles away in Dubai in search of a rescuer.

Walking in the aisles of aircraft may fail to protect passengers from potentially fatal blood clots, a government study has found.

Divorced and seperated fathers are often ignored by social workers and excluded from any discussions about their children's welfare, a study shows.    

Miscellany
The government's farm-scale trials of GM crops will not provide enough evidence to allow them to be grown commercially, says a key advisory body. (Guardian, Independent)

Thirteen of the world's leading medical journals today accuse drug companies of distorting the results of scientific research for the sake of profits. (Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Independent)