Today's news

Negligent advice to Keele may cost PwC £1.7m
Accountant PwC could be forced to pay almost £1.7 million to Keele University after the firm gave negligent advice over a so-called profit-related pay scheme in the late 1990s. A High Court judge ruled yesterday that the accountant's negligence cost the university the opportunity to make savings to its overall payroll bill, and that it should be held liable.
(Financial Times)

Demand for university places could rise by 60%
Universities face an influx of 250,000 extra students at an annual cost to taxpayers of more than £1 billion within seven years, the Higher Education Policy Institute said yesterday. The equivalent of 12 to 15 new universities would be needed to cope with the extra demand.
(Times, Daily Telegraph)

Better be British, Scots students told
Students at one of the UK's oldest universities have been advised to call themselves British rather than Scottish, Welsh or Irish on job applications, in case prospective employers regard them as troublesome nationalists. Career advisers at Aberdeen University have issued a guide to students seeking work outside Scotland, which warns them that their best chance is to declare British nationality.
(Independent)

Nanotech boosted by £90m to fund research
The government is to spend £90 million over the next six years on the commercialisation of nanotechnology. The money will fund collaborative university-industry research into ultra-small devices and build a national network of facilities to help companies exploit nanotech.
(Financial Times)

Creator of 'she-males' spurned by embryologists
Experts at the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology meeting in Madrid yesterday rounded on a team from Chicago that has created "she-male" embryos in an attempt to find cures for genetic diseases in children born through IVF. The work was denounced as flawed, pointless and damaging to the public image of fertility specialists.
(Guardian, Daily Mail, Independent)

Scientists puzzled by blob on the beach
A mysterious lump of gelatinous flesh washed ashore on the coast of Chile is puzzling marine scientists. The size of a small bus, the blob was first reported as a beached whale, but it was too big and did not have the texture or smell of a whale's skin. Experts who went for a closer look pronounced the flesh as having once belonged to a marine invertebrate.
(Guardian, Independent)