Volume 391 Issue 6669, 19 February 1998

philadelphia

Industrial science in the United States is enjoying a resurgence despite the demise of the corporate research laboratory, say research managers.

munich

Germany has become the first country to accept DNA tests as proof of a blood relationship in immigration applications.

canberra

The Gemini optical telescope consortium has been joined by Australia alongside the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Chile, Argentina and Brazil.

munich

A criminal investigation may soon begin into the alleged theft of fossils said to be worth a million US dollars from the Palaeontological Institute in Moscow.

philadelphia

Neal Lane, the director of the National Science Foundation, is to succeed Jack Gibbons as science adviser to President Bill Clinton.

washington

The US National Institutes of Health has announced the 15 members of a panel charged with the task of overhauling the structure of its peer-review system.

washington

The US National Cancer Institute is to identify, catalogue, and enter into the public database its own set of single base variations in human DNA that are useful genetic markers, and known as ‘snips’.

montreal

High technology firms are being urged to set aside one per cent of the public funds they receive to promote public understanding and appreciation of science.

paris

Controversy has erupted over a deal giving a French biotechnology company access to a DNA bank that contains samples of DNA taken from centenarians built up for longevity research.

new delhi

India has been dragged into another dispute with the US Patents Office, this time over the patenting of "Basmati rice," the long grain rice from the subcontinent known for its distinct aroma.

moscow

A department of the Russian Academy of Sciences has partially won its fight to return to a property in the centre of Moscow, from which it claims to have been unlawfully removed.

london

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is to consider a moratorium on patent applications on original varieties of seeds.

london

A one-year postgraduate degree, designed to train students in research skills, has received the thumbs up from students, universities and research councils.

munich

The European Union's next five-year Framework programme of research has cleared another hurdle in its problem-strewn path towards approval.

Although much has been made of the value of the international space station to science, many researchers remain deeply sceptical. But useful science may still emerge, even though various obstacles remain to be overcome.

Island chains such as Hawaii are produced by hotspots — points of volcanic activity driven by plumes of hot rock. New analyses reveal that hotspots are much more mobile than had been thought.

In 1987, the brightest supernova seen since 1604 appeared in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way about 170,000 light years away. Eleven years later, a new light show is beginning, as the shockwave from the explosion hits a mysterious ring of material that surrounds the star. This collision may show us whether the ring was emitted by a merger between the precursor star and a binary companion, or created in some other way. And it will probably look very pretty.

During protein synthesis, many proteins destined to be carried to the cell surface are tagged with a so-called signal sequence which guides their translocation into the endoplasmic reticulum. Once that job had been done, such sequences were thought to be redundant. A striking and unexpected twist comes in the form of the discovery that signal sequences have a highly specific function in immune recognition through the agency of class I molecules of the major histocompatibility complex. It turns out that they have a central place in controlling the tolerance of types of lymphocytes known as natural killer cells to the body's own tissues.

Noise, is familiar from communications, where a single parameter such as voltage varies with time. Usually it is a nuisance, but sometimes, because of the peculiar phenomenon known as stochastic resonance, it is a boon, increasing signal strength. Noise is also present in many extended natural phenomena, such as calcium-ion waves in the brain. Are there also extended systems in which the noise can increase some collective, or coherent, dynamical property? Such spatiotemporal stochastic resonance has now been achieved experimentally for the first time.

To study the function of genes, we need to be able to turn them on and off. A surprising new way of doing this in the nematode wormCaenorhabditis eleganshas just been reported. Double-stranded RNA that is complementary to a specific worm gene is injected into the gonads of adult animals, resulting in the production of progeny that do not express that gene. The technique is specific and reproducible at the levels of phenotype, RNA and protein.

The optical properties of cholesteric liquid crystals have been turned to good effect in ink and paint technologies, and in flat-panel displays and thermal imaging. Now a new development involving these materials has come along. It is a cholesteric glass, which is stable at room temperature, and offers rewritable, full-colour image recording. Among the potential applications are information display and storage.

Ice shelves are the floating parts of the huge ice sheets that cover the Earth's polar regions, and their stability is a matter of considerable interest. Two such sheets in the Antarctic are Larsen A and B. The first has collapsed, while the second is intact but retreating. New work involving finite-element computer modelling of the strain rates for these shelves indicates that if Larsen B shrinks by only a few more kilometres it too may disintegrate.

Since it was discovered over 70 years ago, the ‘organizer’ has been regarded as a group of cells that produces the signals that induce development of neural tissue. Indeed it does, but a new paper shows that it is just one of what could be a series of organizing centres that specify initial patterning of the central nervous system along the anteroposterior and forebrain-to-spinal-cord axes. Unlike the organizer, which is found posterior to the neural ectoderm, the new centre is found at the prospective anterior end of the zebrafish neuraxis.

Many mammals, even some large ones such as bears, hibernate. Why don't we? After all, winter is a depressing time for many people, and the elderly sometimes struggle to keep warm and well fed. Daedalus believes that the main obstacle to safely cooling the human body (and so slowing the metabolism enough to effectively hibernate) is keeping the blood moving. DREADCO's hibernator, or ‘iron heart’, will solve this problem by rhythmically altering the pressure on different parts of the body. Soon, pensioners will be chilled in bulk, saving themselves discomfort, and saving the government money.

The theoretical chemist who had fundamental insights into chemical reactivity.

Viewpoints revolve in space and are transformed in time in the art of Umberto Boccioni, a member of the Futurists, who embraced the new sciences and technologies of their age. Boccioni aimed to express a series of relativities.

Opportunities abound throughout the world for young people interested in cell biology. The most successful will be those who can learn new skills and work collaboratively. But Europe needs to learn an urgent lesson from the United States if there is to be any future for biomedical research in the next millennium.