A team of scientists and engineers will pump water through a high-pressure hose suspended from a helium balloon 1km above a disused airfield in Norfolk next month in an unlikely effort to develop a technological solution to combating climate change.

The test at Sculthorpe will be Britain’s first experiment in the controversial field of geoengineering - counteracting global warming by deliberately cooling the climate.

Scientific experiments using monkeys should continue in the UK subject to rigorous safeguards, according to a review of research over a 10-year period. But the study, commissioned by the country’s biomedical science funding agencies, found that 9 per cent of research projects using monkeys showed “no clear scientific, medical or social benefit”. “We found that some research projects were unlikely to be beneficial and the claims made for them were implausible,” said Sir Patrick Bateson, president of the Zoological Society of London, who led the review.

Genetically modified crops are continuing to spread across the world, according to the leading annual survey of GM in agriculture, published yesterday.

Two Americans and a Japanese have won the Nobel chemistry prize for discovering the glowing proteins that have become an essential tool in biomedical research.

Osamu Shimomura, a Japanese citizen who has worked in the US for almost 50 years, originally extracted

Three European scientists shared the first of this year's Nobel awards, the medicine prize, for identifying the viruses responsible for Aids and cervical cancer.

As a war of words rages over biofuels and their impact on world food supplies, researchers in India are promoting sweet sorghum as a crop that combines the best of both worlds. The plants, which grow three metres high in dry conditions, yield grain that can be eaten by people or animals; their stalks provide sweet juice for bioethanol production and a crushed residue that can be burnt or fed to cattle.

A potential new weapon in the battle against global warming - to remove carbon from the atmosphere by locking it up permanently in soil minerals - is being developed at Newcastle University in the UK. When plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis, they use some of the carbon to grow. But most is pumped through the roots into the earth around them and then escapes back into the atmosphere or groundwater.

Scientists today publish the first genetic clues to unravelling the mystery of why some smokers puff their way through life without developing disease while others die young of lung cancer. Three research teams have independently discovered a set of genetic variations that increase the risk of lung cancer and may make smokers more addicted to nicotine. Their papers appear in the journals Nature and Nature Genetics. The gene affected seems to make a protein that acts as a "receptor", or docking point, for nicotine in the brain.