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The fashion for strategic research that stamps this year's US budget echoes Britain's passion for wealth-creation — and may similarly begin to fade as the difficulties become apparent.
How can we extend the Montreal Protocol to other ozone-depleting chemicals, such as fuel from the Space Shuttle and pharmaceuticals, when the life cycles of these compounds and the scales of the industries are different?
A sixty-year old calculation by Enrico Fermi is discovered to be in error, and interatomic signalling between atoms to be potentially faster than light. But this is not a sign that time machines that defy causality can now be built.
Apart from the usual crop of gene assignments (for hereditary haemorrhagic telanglectasia, for example) this month's issue carries further the genetics of expanding repeating elements.
