Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Volume 388 Issue 6644, 21 August 1997

Opinion

Top of page ⤴

News

  • MUNICH

    The European Commission has backed an initiative to encourage Europe's research fellowship holders to join industrial laboratories and laboratories in poor regions.

    • Alison Abbott
    News

  • LONDON

    Virtually all members of the new Select Committee on Science and Technology in Britain's House of Commons have science qualifications.

    • David Dickson
    News

  • WASHINGTON

    The Knoll pharmaceutical company has agreed to pay nearly US$100 million to settle potential legal claims from patients who have taken the thyroid drug Synthroid.

    • Meredith Wadman
    News

  • ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

    The US Interior Secretary has urged scientists to help convince the American public of the case for man-made global warming.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News

  • PARIS

    Signatories to the Biological Weapons Convention will meet to hear allegations thet the US discharged the insect pest Thrips palmiover Cuba to damage the country's agriculture.

    • Declan Butler
    News
Top of page ⤴

News in Brief

Top of page ⤴

Correspondence

Top of page ⤴

Commentary

Top of page ⤴

News & Views

  • Research on the nematode wormCaenorhabditis elegans has delivered much of what is known about apoptosis (programmed cell death). About a dozen or so cell death (ced) genes are involved, but one of the most important of them, ced-4, has remained enigmatic. Two papers now lift the veil on the gene and its product. One describes the mammalian homologue, and thus provides further grist for speculation about parallels between the cell-death process in very different organisms. The other shows how CED-4 protein may function; it looks as if it acts as a context-dependent ATPase which facilitates the autoactivation of CED-3, another player in the process.

    • Michael O. Hengartner
    News & Views

  • Zeolites are materials that have open pores in their structure, large enough to allow some molecules inside, but not others. This, and their acidic properties, make them excellent catalysts — but limited in the reactions that they can catalyse. A new method has been found to make similar structures that contain a high proportion of cobalt, a transition metal, which should allow a wider range of reactions including reduction and oxidation.

    • Robert L. Bedard
    News & Views

  • Many human neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease are caused by the death of specific populations of nerve cells. Using a strain of mutant mouse known aslurcher-- which has a peculiar gait caused by the loss of neurons in a brain structure that is important for motor coordination -- a new study has shown that cell death is due to a mutation in the δ2 subunit of the glutamate receptor.

    • Peter H. Seeburg
    News & Views

  • Many galaxies have intensely bright nuclei, perhaps containing massive black holes. To be so luminous, these nuclei must have a supply of gas to use as fuel, either for accretion or nuclear burning. In certain types of spiral galaxy the gas may get driven into the centre by tides from large bar-shaped structures. This idea is bolstered by a striking new image of a scorpion-like galaxy, where star-forming regions extend in a spiral right into the galactic core.

    • Karen Southwell
    News & Views

  • Carefully crossed laser beams can hold cool atoms in a lattice, sitting at the point of constructive interference between the beams, one wavelength apart. Because they are under such precise external control, these optical lattices allow some textbook solid-state physics phenomena to be observed cleanly. Now they are also being used to push at the apparent barriers of quantum mechanics -- to transiently squeeze atoms to a smaller size than the usual quantum limit, for example.

    • Christopher Monroe
    News & Views

  • The molecular chaperones GroEL and GroES are needed to fold some proteins under what would otherwise be non-permissive conditions. The two chaperones form an asymmetrical complex that has now been crystallized and analysed by some clever mutagenic studies. The new results reveal that the substrate protein first binds to GroEL, and it is stretched apart as GroEL changes its shape. This shape change also encapsulates the substrate in a cavity within GroEL, in which it can then fold.

    • George Lorimer
    News & Views

  • Mortality statistics from Russia for the period 1984-94 show that life expectancy at first rose over this period then, from the mid-late 1980s, declined alarmingly. But are the statistics to be believed? Analysis of them by an Anglo-Russian collaboration not only concludes that the phenomenon is real, but also puts down the cause of the decline in life expectancy to an increase in alcohol consumption.

    • Tim Lincoln
    News & Views

  • A proposal for a magnetic nerve stimulator, specific for controlling particular physiological phenomena, can be turned to the resolution of sexual problems, argues Daedalus. Rapists, for instance, are usually young, sexually driven males. If tagged with the neuromagnetic nerve stimulator they could be driven to orgasm frequently and at will _ resulting in complete loss of their sex drive, and thus their tendency to commit rape.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
Top of page ⤴

Scientific Correspondence

Top of page ⤴

Book Review

Top of page ⤴

Article

Top of page ⤴

Letter

Top of page ⤴

Correction

Top of page ⤴

New on the Market

  • Items on view at the meeting of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in San Francisco may include a versatile hybridization oven, affinity purification reagents and a dual-laser-induced fluorescence detector.

    • Brendan Horton
    New on the Market
Top of page ⤴
Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links