Volume 388 Issue 6645, 28 August 1997

Plans to merge Japan's Science and Technology Agency with the Ministry of Education need more thought.

tokyo

Hopes that an independent ministry for science and technology might emerge out of Japan's ongoing administrative reform appear to have been dashed.

tokyo

The Council for Science Technology, Japan's highest science policy-making body chaired by the Prime Minister, may take over some of the functions of the present Science and Technology Agency.

london

The environmentalist group Greenpeace says it has no intention of scaling down its disruption of oil exploration, despite being threatened with bankruptcy by the oil giant British Petroleum.

paris

The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm is distancing itself from the work of one of its former researchers six months after an investigation concluded that the researcher had ‘most probably’ committed scientific fraud.

washington

A dispute is brewing between some academic scientists and industry over the adequacy of efforts to prevent the emergence of genetically engineered crops that are tolerant to insecticides.

munich

The quality of Swiss science remains high -- but it is living off the success of its past, according to a new report from the Swiss Science Council.

washington

Despite the restoration of power to the Mirspace station, many experiments will be scaled back fromtheir original design, as questions remain about thelong-term utility of Mir as a research platform.

canberra

The government of Victoria has become thefirst of Australia's six states to develop a science andtechnology strategy that is independent of federalgovernment policy.

washington

Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, will decide next month whether to put himself forward for a second, six-year term as head of the United States’ most prestigious scientific body.

canberra

The president of Australia's governing Liberal party, has challenged a report which recommends cutting by 70 per cent funding for a scheme that forges research partnerships between universities, government agencies and industry.

Europe is warmed by the North Atlantic Current, part of a system of warm and cool ocean currents that is driven by convective overturning at the northern end of the Atlantic. But human emissions of greenhouse gases could change temperature and rainfall patterns enough to stop this circulation, and so radically alter the regional climate. The rate of greenhouse-gas increase may be as important as the final concentrations reached.Europe is warmed by the North Atlantic Current, part of a system of warm and cool ocean currents that is driven by convective overturning at the northern end of the Atlantic. But human emissions of greenhouse gases could change temperature and rainfall patterns enough to stop this circulation, and so radically alter the regional climate. The rate of greenhouse-gas increase may be as important as the final concentrations reached.

Biological hydrostats (for example, elephants’ trunks or our own tongues) hold their shape because the pressure of the fluid inside is resisted by tension in the surrounding sheath. This sheath must be strong, and it is reinforced by helically wound supporting fibres in most hydrostats. But a new study shows that the penis of the nine-banded armadillo is reinforced by longitudinal and circumferential fibres -- a pattern that has never been seen before.

‘Entanglement’ is one of the oddest consequences of quantum mechanics. If two particles are entangled, they do not have individual properties, but can only be described by a collective quantum state -- even if they are widely separated in space. Entanglement between sub-atomic particles has been observed before, and now it has been seen between two atoms, which is a useful step towards the physical systems needed for quantum computing. There is no reason to believe that larger things, even macroscopic objects, cannot be entangled too.

In defined regions of the genome of eukaryotic organisms DNA is packaged into a form of chromatin known as heterochromatin, the main feature of which is that the DNA generally cannot be transcribed. In the yeastSaccharomyces cerevisiae, the so-called Sir proteins are associated with this transcriptional silencing, and it now emerges that they are also involved in repairing double-strand breaks in DNA induced by ionizing radiation. This is an unexpected and potentially fruitful connection.

High levels of structural complexity were once thought to be confined to proteins, but one of the conclusions to emerge from a meeting on RNA structure was that this molecular ‘jack-of-all-trades’ shows an equally high level of structural organization. RNA molecules twist and bend themselves into many different shapes, allowing them to bind metal ions and proteins, and to carry out many diverse functions.

The ragwormNereis virensis of considerable commercial importance. It is widely used by anglers for bait, and in toxicity assays. Demand outstrips natural supply, largely because the creatures’ breeding is highly seasonal. The successful cryopreservation of ragworm larva means, however, that Nereiscan now be stored and reared to adulthood any time of the year.

There are several different types of diabetes, one of which -- insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus -- is characterized by the systematic destruction of insulin-producing β-cells in the pancreatic islets of Langerhans. A new study indicates that the trigger for this self attack may be a superantigen that is produced by a hitherto unknown endogenous retrovirus.

The concentration of calcium in living cells can be measured using differently coloured green fluorescent protein (GFP) mutants. Two groups have independently linked blue-shifted GFP mutants to longer-wavelength GFP mutants through connecting sequences to which Ca2+-calmodulin or Ca2+ alone can bind. Fluorescence energy resonance transfer occurs between the two mutants, but it is very sensitive to the distance and orientation of the fluorophores, and so can detect Ca2+ binding.

The ‘bias cut’, invented by Mme Vionnet in 1922, is when fibres in the fabric of, say, a dress run at 45x to one another; the result is a garment that, if it stretches vertically, will shrink horizontally. Daedalus plans to try this idea in three dimensions, with cotten, polyester or metal wire, to make an engineering component that when pushed into a hole can be manipulated to fit the hole exactly. The uses of these ‘Vionnet solids’ would be as buffers, seals and shock-absorbers.

Climatologist who pioneered the study of climate change.

This round-up of molecular tools includes a thermal printer module, a PCR-product amplification detection system, plasmid purification kits, and a system for in situ hybridization, RT-PCR, PRINS and immunohistochemistry.