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Volume 388 Issue 6638, 10 July 1997

Opinion

  • The ITER partners must acknowledge that the world has changed since the project's inception, and reconsider what they want from collaboration on magnetic confinement fusion.

    Opinion

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  • The verification of the CTBT will provide data whose open availability would serve scientists and defence interests.

    Opinion
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News

  • london

    The Royal Greenwich Observatory, currently based in Cambridge, is to close and merge with the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. One hundred jobs will be lost from both sites. British astronomy, however, will gain at least £2.4 million per year.

    • Ehsan Masood
    News
  • washington

    Scientific researchers should have open access to data collected for the purpose of monitoring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, according to a panel of the US National Research Council.

    • Laura Garwin
    News
  • london

    Images of a galaxy, which were more than a million times more detailed than those produced by the human eye were released this week using Very Long Baseline Interferometry with a radioastronomy satellite.

    News
  • london

    Predictions that the expected El Niño - the appearance of warm waters off the coast of South America bringing droughts, storms and floods in its wake - will be stronger than usual are running into scepticism from South American scientists.

    • Ehsan Masood
    News
  • new delhi

    The Indian Meteorological Department has expressed doubts about whether the predicted return of a strong El Niño this year will plunge parts of the country into drought, and thus affect the seasonal monsoons.

    • K. S. Jayaraman
    News
  • munich

    Sixty east Berlin scientists who had kept their jobs due to now-defunct 'rescue' funds following the reunification of Germany have been saved once again from unemployment by a new scheme supported by the European Union.

    • Quirin Schiermeier
    News
  • munich

    Draft legislation has been introduced into the US Congress to lift tariff restrictions on pieces of large scientific instruments brought into the United States from other countries.

    • Tony Reichhardt
    News
  • paris

    France's public research agencies often encourage the politicization of decision- making, nepotism and cronyism, according to an ethics committee set up by France's national research agency, the CNRS.

    • Declan Butler
    News
  • washington & new york

    Huundreds of scientists will this summer serve as mentors for inner city school teachers who will spend their long vacation discovering or re-discovering science.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News
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News in Brief

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Briefing

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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • Mitochondria have to import almost all of the proteins they need for their function as the cell's energy producers. A combination of biochemistry and genetics now reveals a tiny but crucial cogwheel in the import machinery.

    • Gottfried Schatz
    News & Views
  • The earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906 was a milestone for seismologists, for it revealed a great deal about the physics of the process. Geodetic measurements made before and shortly after the event are still yielding important information, for they can provide invaluable measurements of fault slip. New analyses of these venerable data provide fresh and surprising estimates of the extent to which certain parts of the San Andreas fault slipped in 1906.

    • Paul Segall
    News & Views
  • Death of individual cells is part of the normal process of life, and how it is controlled has become a hot research area. That's plain from the identification by no less than four groups of a protein which, after stimulation of receptors of the tumour necrosis factor family, seems to have a key part in regulating the cells' killing mechanism. The groups give the protein different names, and moreover variously believe that it acts to inhibit the induction of cell death or to activate it.

    • David Wallach
    News & Views
  • One would expect a galaxy cluster to be a cluster of galaxies. Now a strange object has been discovered whose X-ray emission betrays it as a massive cluster, but which only contains one obvious galaxy at optical wavelengths. Odder still, this dark cluster is rich in heavy elements, presumably produced by stars - but what stars?

    • Richard Mushotzky
    News & Views
  • Mantle plumes are huge, rising columns of warm rock which cause magma to erupt above them, creating volcanic island chains, such as Hawaii, and continental flood basalts. Detecting their chemical signature is tricky, because the lavas they produce are modified in rising to the surface. But a new geochemical tool, the neon isotope system, may be revealing preserved plume signals in Australian rocks less than two million years old.

    • Bernard Marty
    News & Views
  • Our rubbish-disposal systems are burdened by a flood of outmoded computers, sound systems, radios and TV sets. How can they be recycled? DREADCO biologists are searching for strains of mould, cousins to those able to metabolize arsenical pigment in wallpaper to arsenic trimethyl, that can turn solder into a volatile mixture of methyl derivatives. In a special 'electronic compost heap', such moulds will disintegrate the joints of the appliances, resulting (hey presto!) in clean resistors, capacitors, chips and circuit boards ready for reuse.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Scientific Correspondence

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Correction

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Book Review

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Article

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Letter

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Erratum

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Techniques and Technology

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New on the Market

  • This is a mixed bag of new products that includes bibliographic and reference software, chromatography media and columns, a diode array detector, a microplate luminometer and sample heating and cooling units.

    • Brendan Horton
    New on the Market
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Erratum

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