Volume 391 Issue 6665, 22 January 1998

Xenotransplantation's risks make a moratorium essential.

washington

A ban on on the participation of foreigners in a joint programme between US universities and the nuclear weapons laboratories indicates the practical challenges which the government faces in operating the programme.

washington

US universities should reconsider their willingness to work closely with the nuclear weapons laboratories as their efforts could lead indirectly to the development of new nuclear weapons, according to an influential Washinton-based lobby group.

munich

Switzerland has moved to pre-empt the outcome of a national referendum calling major restrictions on genetic engineering by presenting proposals for strengthening the rules covering the use of such techniques.

tokyo

Japan's Council for Science and Technology announced last week that it plans to set up a committee to discuss the possibility of imposing a legal ban on human cloning.

london

Responding to the recent crisis over bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and other food safety scares, the British government has published proposals for an independent food standards agency.

washington

A US presidential commission is likely to recommend that in genetic studies whose outcomes potentially affect whole groups of people, researchers should lose the liberal access to anonymous tissue samples that they now enjoy.

london

Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory have produced a ground-based colour image of far-distant objects which is described as being "unique in covering four bands with an image quality better than one arc-second".

paris

Over three-quarters of the American public would consider a transplant of an animal organ for a loved one "if the organ or tissue was not available from a human", according to a poll carried out for the US National Kidney Foundation (NKF).

washington

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lacks an adequate means of locating tissue transplant recipients in the event that donor tissue is discovered to be infected, according to General Accounting Office.

munich

Proposals from the European commission on how poor countries and regions could be encouraged to spend more of their European Union subsidies on research are scheduled for internal approval this week.

munich

The number of separate thematic programmes in the next five-year Framework programme of the European commission has been increased from three to four in response to proposals from the European Parliament.

paris

Neuroscience is being increasingly recognised as a potential threat to human rights, according to speakers who addressed the annual public meeting of France's national ethics committee last week.

são paulo

The World Bank has given its approval to the third phase of Brazil's Programme of Support for Scientific and Technological Development, which appears to have overcome significant difficulties encountered in the past.

tokyo

Nanjing University in southern China continues to stand out as China's most productive source of scientific papers listed in the Science Citation Index of the Institute of Scientific Information.

US regulations are soon to be released allowing trials of animal-to-human transplants. Some feel this is premature, arguing that the risks of creating human diseases remain uncertain, and more preclinical research is needed.

In chewing food, we break it into small fragments that are mixed with saliva to form a soft ball, or ‘bolus’. A new study reveals that the number of chews is optimized for particular foods — too few, and the bolus doesn't stick together; too many, and it begins to fall apart.

An extraordinary new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, may have been produced. In collisions between high-energy heavy nuclei, temperatures of 1012 K or more are achieved, roughly ten thousand times that in the solar core. Theorists predict that under these conditions there is a drastic change in the structure of nuclear matter. The usual description in terms of baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons (such as pions) must be abandoned in favour of the truly fundamental particles, quarks and gluons. Experiments have now provided the first substantial evidence that such a change occurs.

The brain often reorganizes itself after damage to some of its sensory inputs, amputation of a forearm for instance. Work involving both microelectrode recording and stimulation of an area of the brain known as the somatosensory thalamus, on people with and without amputations, shows that brain reorganization can take different courses — but that, in amputees who suffer from phantom sensations from the missing limb, such reorganization has not resulted in the respecification of neural function.

Conventionally, crystals are infinitely repeating lattices of atoms or molecules, in which every lattice site is identical to every other. Clusters of clusters are an alternative to strict crystalline arrangements, and could form an entirely new family of condensed matter. Such a structure has now been created: hierarchically clustered icosahedral particles of boron sub-oxide can be grown to sizes several micrometres across. As well as being of theoretical interest, this substance is very hard, and could be a useful engineering material.

Most galaxies that we observe are ancient, containing some stars almost as old as the Universe. But blue compact dwarf galaxies (BCDs) had been thought younger — rare baby galaxies in among the adults. Now that is called into doubt by observations of a nearby BCD, observations sharp enough to resolve old red giant stars. It may be that there are no new galaxies.

The last glacial maximum, when glacial conditions were last at their severest, occurred 21,000 years ago. Simulating the behaviour of the oceans and atmosphere of that time provides a test of any climate model's ability to track climate change accurately. A new simulation carried out with a properly tuned, simplified coupled ocean-atmosphere model, rather than a classical three-dimensional general circulation model, stands up well to this challenge.

Mutations in the presenilin-1 gene (PS1) cause an aggressive form of familial Alzheimer's disease, and a new study goes some way to showing how. The authors created PS1 knockout mice, and found that they produced 80 per cent less amyloid-beta peptide (the protein that accumulates to form senile plaques) than normal mice. They propose that presenilin-1 normally stimulates production of amyloid-beta peptide by activating alpha-secretase-mediated cleavage of the amyloid precursor protein.

If only it could be sunny all of the time — even on a cloudy day. That's the aim of the ‘weather-brightener’, currently being developed by DREADCO. Droplets make up only 10 p.p.m. of a cloud's volume but, because they are arranged in a random array, the chances that a photon of light will hit one and be scattered are high. So Daedalus plans to use an intense radio signal to align the droplets, making a non-random array through which light can pass.

The faces of the four apostles in Dürer's painting speak volumes about the saints' temperaments. This is no accident, as the artist was following the Renaissance medical theory of the four humours.

Kicking off this eclectic collection is a new higher capacity ‘smart’ card — other items of interest include a microscope for birefringence imaging, an assortment of astronomy tools and a real-time LC/FTIR instrument. compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers. c b B H f i p b t