Volume 392 Issue 6671, 5 March 1998

The abandonment of a privately managed satellite should encourage sharper thinking about such ventures.

gÖttingen

As the Max Planck Society turned 50 years old last week, its president, Hubert Markl, told participants at the celebration that new measures are essential to stop the society from sliding away from the forefront of research excellence.

london

The British government has advised against the use of UK plasma in blood products, in order to protect patients receiving the products against the ‘theoretical risk’ of contracting the new variant of Cretzfeldt-Jakob disease.

moscow

A Russian born physicist has persuaded the government to invest in a factory to make what he claims is a revolutionary three-dimensional compact disc able to store information at up to 50 separate levels.

new delhi

Medical researchers in India have urged the government to take prompt steps to prevent leptospirosis from becoming a major public health problem following several recent outbreaks of the disease.

washington

The second of two Earth-observing satellite projects designed to help jump-start a commercial remote sensing industry has been scrapped by the US space agency NASA due to cost and schedule overruns.

washington

An international study which shows that American seventeen-year olds are performing poorly in mathematics and science could serve as a wake-up call to both scientists and school districts to take action to raise school standards, according to US scientific leaders.

washington

A Congressional effort to write a comprehensive law protecting medical privacy was launched publicly last week.

washington

A public meeting is being held in Washington this week to begin an inquiry into the operation of the National Institutes of Health.

montreal

The most extensive lobbying ever conducted by Canada's research scientists has resulted in the first increase in federal funding for the three major research granting councils in the past three years.

Hopes were high within the French research community when Claude Allègre was appointed minister of research last year. But a good start has given way to frustration with the slow speed of change.

The prevailing view of the origin of complex eukaryotic cells presumes a symbiosis, based on respiration, between a bacterium and a primitive eukaryotic ‘host’. But could the symbiosis have been based instead on hydrogen metabolism, with the host being an archaean?

Kuiper-belt objects are bodies of up to a few hundred kilometres in diameter, orbiting beyond Neptune, probably made mostly of volatile ices. We know that the composition of bodies in the Solar System changes with distance from the Sun — for example, the rocky Earth-like inner planets give way to the outer, giant planets, made of ices and gases. But, unexpectedly, there appear to be two basic compositions of bodies at the outer extremity of the planetary system: Kuiper-belt objects fall into two spectral classes, one red, one grey, with nothing in between.

The boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, some 65 million years ago, is marked by a mass extinction. This is thought to have resulted from the impact of a large meteorite or comet, coupled with longer term climatic changes. But how did this impact cause the extinction? By delving into the sea-urchin fossil record, one group has shown that, for sea urchins at least, extinction was probably driven by a nutrient crisis which affected the adult life stage more severely than the larval stages.

What makes a heart beat? Synchronized contraction of cardiac muscle cells, triggered by electrical excitation, causes the ventricles to pump blood around the body. But, in the last few minutes of life, contraction of the ventricular muscle is no longer synchronized — instead, the ventricles ‘fibrillate’ (contract spontaneously) at ten times the frequency of a normal heart beat. Fibrillation was thought to be a chaotic process but, using new imaging techniques, two groups have discovered that there may be much more spatial and temporal order in the process than previously suspected.

In sonoluminescence, intense sound waves in water cause bubbles to form, which then collapse emitting a brief flash of light. We know that the collapse heats the trapped gas, but not why light is emitted. A technique that could help answer this question is laser-induced bubble collapse, in which much bigger bubbles are produced. Time-resolved measurements of the flash have been used to constrain emission mechanisms — for example, if it is ordinary thermal radiation, the central temperature in the bubble must be at least 70,000 K.

Prion diseases and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's have much in common — both seem to involve proteins which, when destabilized by (for example) genetic mutations, change conformation to form insoluble, pathogenic aggregates. Two papers now ask whether molecular chaperones might be involved in these folding changes, and they show that heat-shock proteins and prions can, indeed, interact in vitro.

It would be hard to argue with Douglas Adams's statement, in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that “Space is big”. But it may be a lot smaller than we thought. Evidence had come from the cosmic microwave background that the Universe is infinite, or at least not small compared with the distance we can see; but two astrophysicists have realized that this doesn't hold if the Universe has a low density. Such a so-called ‘open’ Universe can nevertheless be wrapped round on itself, allowing us to look at the back of our own heads, so to speak. We could soon find out for sure, as the scheduled satellites MAP and PLANCK search the microwave sky for identical rings.

Nematode worms are important. Many parasitic species infest plants, animals and insects, whilst their free-living cousins decompose plant and animal materials in terrestrial soils and marine sediments. But they have been notoriously difficult to classify, phylogenetically speaking, because they have few distinguishing characteristics. By analysing the sequences of small-subunit ribosomal DNA from 53 species, however, this has now been done. Not least, the new findings provide clues about the evolution of parasitism.

The nail is a brilliant and versatile fastener, but it could be improved — if, for instance, it was driven in by a force applied to its point, rather than its head, its shaft would be drawn in under tension and could not buckle. Daedalus finds the answer in a hammer which operates on the microsecond scale, so that, when the nail is hit on the head, the shock only travels a millimetre or so; the compressed region would be too small to buckle, but the pulse would travel down the nail and force the point into the material. Hence his current development work on the quartz-fibre piezoelectric nail.

Jan Vermeer's mastery of the use of paint was such that we see more in his pictures than is actually there. The painter achieved his illusions by using the picture as a field for perceptual exploration.

This group of products includes a collagen-based kit for identifying and quantifying megakaryocytic progenitors, flow cytometry reagents, an antigen retrieval kit and a permeabilization reagent to help detect intracellular antigens. These notes are compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers. For more details, fill in the reader service card bound inside the journal