Volume 388 Issue 6642, 7 August 1997

Unesco should think again before endorsing an outright condemnation of human cloning.

washington

A widely-used research reactor at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in NewYork state, forced to close down in January after a radiation leak, is unlikely to reopen untilOctober 1999 at the earliest.

washington

Members of the US Department's of Energy's Basic Energy Sciences AdvisoryCommittee, over half of whom are female, found themselves on a collision course with theall-male witnesses who presented evidence to it last week.

washington

The science committee of the US House of Representatives has endorsed ananti-cloning bill significantly rewritten to ban the cloning of human embryos, not merely thecloning of ‘human beings’.

paris

Research budgets measured collectively across the world's industrialized nations aremoving upwards for the first time since the early 1990s, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and development.

washington

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced the award of grants worth $250 million over 10 years to five universities to help the agency efforts to simulate phenomena associated with nuclear weapons.

washington

A bill introduced in the US House of Representatives last week to reauthorizethe Endangered Species Act is unlikely to settle deep differences with ‘property rights’ advocates that have so far paralyzed debate on the subject.

munich

The European Commission has proposed a small increase in the funding of researchin the European Union's fifth multi-year framework programme, due to start in 1999, to a totalof US$17.5 billion.

munich

Concern for Germany's future scientists and European collaboration in basicresearch are likely to characterize geneticist Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker's three-year term aspresident of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

san francisco

The US Department of Energy's is to set up a high-throughput DNAsequencing factory in Walnut Creek, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

washington

A proposed declaration on genetics and human rights, due to be adopted bymember states of Unesco this autumn, has been modified to explicitly denounce humancloning and germ-line gene therapy.

sydney

Australia's scientific community has been rocked by a major attack on researchfunding in a report commissioned by the Coalition government on reforming policy onindustry.

Harmful algal blooms are a serious and increasing problem in marine waters, yet scientists and funding agencies have been slow to investigate possible control strategies.

The 1,667,867-base-pair genome of the bacterium that is responsible for peptic ulcers has been completely sequenced. Among the many features revealed is machinery for existence in an acidic environment.

Eros and Ganymed are the two largest asteroids that come close to Earth, 20 and 32 km across,respectively. A study of orbital dynamics hints that they may once have been parts of the sameparent body, a much larger object in the Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which wasbroken up in a collision and gave rise to the so-called Maria family of asteroids. So when theNEAR space probe explores Eros in 1999, it may be sampling material from a precisely fixedpart of the asteroid belt.

The roots of trees such as the Douglas fir or birch can be colonized by many fungal species, toform so-called ‘ectomycorhizza’. These symbiotic fungal networks can extend from tree to tree,and a new study shows that considerable amounts of carbon can betransferred between trees --in either direction -- through these networks. Moreover, if one tree is in the shade, it willreceive increased amounts of carbon.

Waves can usually be described in terms of normal modes -- oscillations of particularfrequencies that can be added together to produce any overall oscillation. But for internalbuoyancy waves in closed containers, the situation is a lot stranger: they converge on'attractors', geometrical points or paths whose shape has a fractal dependence on frequency, andcannot be represented as a sum of normal modes. This has implications for systems such asstratified lakes, and perhaps the Earth's liquid outer core.

NF-κB is a transcription factor that has a pivotal place in several pathways by whichsignals are transmitted from the cell membrane to the nucleus. Among other reactions, it is animportant mediator of the inflammatory response. This factor is inhibited by being in acomplex, in the cytoplasm, with a molecule known as IκB, and is activated and goesabout its business in the nucleus when IkB is phosphorylated and then degraded. But what doesthe phosphorylating? The answer turns out to be protein kinase dubbed IKK alpha, and it couldbe a highly appropriate target for drugs aimed at controlling inflammation.

Is the ocean a passive participant in the global climate, or does it take a more active part? Thisis a central question in climate modelling, which may now have a partial answer. Sea surfacetemperature oscillations have been observed in the Atlantic to persist for several years, and,along with surface pressure variations, appear to form a whole-ocean oscillation that could helpexplain some climate variations over timescales of years to decades. The orderly fluctuations ofsea surface temperature may eventually help us to make long-term climate forecasts.

In a world in which atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are rising, what will happen to the extra carbon after being taken up by plants during photosynthesis? Experiments in northern California have been carried out to address this question. They involve grassland growing under conditions of ambient and twice-ambient levels of carbon dioxide, and show that the additional carbon is not sequestered in organic matter but cycles through the system more rapidly. This is a highly complicated issue, however, and the situation in forests may well be different.

To stop liars and imitators from having their way, dominant communicators employ costlyprocesses of communication -- only by being large can male toads croak deeply to seduce theirmates, for example. Similarly, the cost of printing deters cranks from communicating with awide readership. But the Internet could change that, with fake mirror sites ofNaturepurveyingnonsense and lies, unless a new expense is introduced. Daedalus suggests a giantsupercomputer to produce a different self referential sentence every week (of the form “Thissentence contains eighteen ‘a's, five ‘b's…”) which would be easy for the reader to check buthard for the trickster to imitate.

Marine geologist who discovered seafloor spreading.

Hardware and software make up this survey — items include software for genomics work, DNA and protein sequence analysis, protein viewing, and a number of products for drug discovery and drug screening applications.