Today's news

Professor calls for Iraqi looters to be shot
Looters are systematically stripping many of Iraq's 10,000 archaeological sites and should be shot on sight by coalition forces, an expert said yesterday at a British Museum conference session on antiquities looting. Gangs are stealing antiquities for the international market and some sites have been largely destroyed, said Elizabeth Stone, an archaeology professor from Stony Brook University, New York. She reported that so many treasures are being stolen that specialist local markets are now being held by the thieves.
(Daily Telegraph, Guardian)

Notts shrugs off critics over ethics course
Nottingham University Business School is sticking robustly to its widely attacked decision to run the UK's first MBA in corporate social responsibility (CSR) with money provided by British American Tobacco (BAT). The business school has resolutely ignored criticism from organisations such as Friends of the Earth, which believe that the decision makes a mockery of the concept of CSR. Nottingham's centre for CSR was founded last year with a £3.8 million endowment from BAT.
(Guardian)

Fans who download music buy more CDs
Illegal downloading of music over the internet is encouraging fans to buy more albums, according to a survey. The Music Research and Programming survey of 500 British fans aged 13-45 with internet access challenges the received wisdom that downloading is the prime source of a slump in music sales. Although 91 per cent of music fans admitted to downloading music tracks over the internet, 87 per cent said that they then went on to buy the full album.
(Times)

Little wonders of micro-medicine
A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told an American Society for Microbiology conference in New York yesterday that the kind of nanotechnology used to etch the surfaces of a silicon chip could make layers of liver or kidney cells and create a network of microscopic tubes that could deliver oxygen and nutrients to them. Garth Ehrlich of the Allegheny Singer Research Institute in Pittsburgh told the conference that he and colleagues were working on intelligent implants that would signal to a physician when things went wrong.
(Guardian)