Volume 392 Issue 6672, 12 March 1998

South Korea's president has taken a bold first step by strengthening the science ministry, but problems abound.

washington

The apparent discovery announced last week of significant amounts of ice on the Moon appears unlikely to lead government space agencies to invest in lunar bases or other large undertakings in the near future.

munich

A laboratory head and one of his technicians resigned last week from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding in Cologne, following accusations of scientific misconduct involving the manipulation of experimental results.

new delhi

A few ill-tempered remarks about the motivations of scientists fleeting Hitler's Germany may have deprived India of a “golden opportunity” to to boost its status as a scientific nation.

tokyo

South Korea's new President, Kim Dae-jung, has upgraded the status of the Ministry of Science and Technology, and appointed a powerful politician to head the strengthened ministry.

tokyo

The economic crisis in Korea has left several South Korean universities facing a major debt problem as they struggle to pay back loans and leases for new facilities, high-tech equipment and medical apparatus.

paris

French plans to build a new national synchrotron are set to be approved once next month's regional elections are out of the way, according to several sources in the synchrotron user community.

london

Britain's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has been accused of "parasitizing" UK taxpayers during the construction of a £49 million (US$80 million) oceanography research centre off the south coast of England.

munich

French astronomers are about to carry out a scientific ranking of the ground-based and space-based projects in which they participate to help decide where to make required cuts in this year's astronomy budget.

munich

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) will have to tighten its belt this year in order to keep construction its Very Large Telescope (VLT) on schedule after its council decided to cut 2.5 per cent from its budget for 1998.

washington

A panel charged with deciding if and how the the US National Institutes of Health should change how it sets research priorities seems unlikely to recommend dramatic changes when it reports in early July.

sydney

Lobbying of the Australian government to stem an anticipated large drop in funding for medical research has been answered by establishment of the first strategic review of Australian health and medical research in 20 years.

washington

Public interest groups are trying to block a deal between Yellowstone National Park and a Californian company which wants to exploit enzymes from the park's hot springs.

jerusalem

Concessions made by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to ensure approval of his budget have clouded prospects for a $100 million venture capital fund promised to Israel's biotechnology industry last September.

The US government sometimes funds research in private companies. But there has been disagreement about the type of research that should receive public money. A consensus may be beginning to emerge.

Bose-Einstein condensates are a strange form of ultracold matter, first created in the lab less than three years ago. A way has now been found to manipulate the interactions within condensates to an extraordinary degree, heralding previously impossible experiments and applications.

The menstrual cycles of women who live in close contact can converge over time. Is this due to shared environmental stimuli, or do the women communicate chemically? A new study by the scientist who pioneered these studies 27 years ago provides support for 'unconscious' communication through pheromones. Axillary (armpit) odours were wafted under the noses of recipient women and, depending on the stage of the menstrual cycle that the donor had reached, these odours had strikingly different effects on menstruation in the recipients.

Water, like any other liquid, can be cooled below its freezing point without crystallizing. The physical properties of supercooled water are unusual: the lower its temperature, the easier it is to compress, and the more pronounced its anomalous tendency to expand when cooled. As if these characteristics were not peculiar enough, there is now evidence for the coexistence of two different forms of supercooled water. A phase transition between two liquid forms of a pure substance has never been observed before.

An astonishing 1% of babies have some form of congenital heart defect, and the genetic cause behind one class of cardiac disorder has now been identified. Two groups independently disrupted theNF-ATcgene in mice, and found that the resultant embryos showed severe defects in cardiac valve and septum formation, leading to death after 14-15 days' gestation. The result was a big surprise, as NF-ATc protein had previously been implicated as a transcriptional regulator within activated T cells.

Chains of craters are thought to be produced when large bodies approaching a planet break up, the fragments then hitting the planet in sequence to produce the chain. The impacts of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter provided a dramatic example of the way this might occur. Finding traces of such chains on Earth is complicated by the movement of tectonic plates, which over geological time will pull craters out of alignment. But by reconfiguring the Earth's surface to its appearance about 214 million years ago, a crater chain spread over more than 4,000 km has now been identified.

From bacteria to humans, light is perceived through photoreceptors, each of which is associated with a single light-sensitive molecule known as a chromophore. Although the chromophore can perceive light in a matter of femtoseconds, the ensuing response involves thermally driven movement of the surrounding protein, and is up to 108 times slower. The relationship between these two parts of the photocycle is now much clearer thanks to a study of one photoreceptor protein — photoactive yellow protein — at an amazing resolution of 0.85 Å.

The dust in meteorites often contains tiny diamonds, probably formed from a stellar outflow before the birth of the Solar System. Hence the interest in such diamonds, and new work which attempts to identify the kind of star which produced them, by analysis of the diamonds' spectral and absorption properties at various wavelengths. The parent star investigated here is a type of carbon-rich red giant.

The ceramic high-temperature superconductors, discovered 11 years ago, behave like two-dimensional metals when they are above their superconducting transition temperature. The electrons are confined to move in parallel planes, which restricts their momentum distribution to a two-dimensional zone in momentum space. Angle-resolved photoemission has been used to show that this distribution is gradually eaten away as the temperature is lowered, showing that some sort of electron correlations begin before superconductivity sets in.

Every organelle in a eukaryotic cell contains enzymes with specialized functions, unique to that organelle. But the endosome does things differently — it is regulated, in part, by a unique lipid called lysobisphosphatidic acid (LBPA). This lipid seems to be crucial, because anti-LBPA antibodies affect both the structure and function of the late endosome. Moreover, LBPA is recognized by autoimmune sera from patients with antiphospholipid syndrome, indicating that it may be involved in pathogenesis of this disease.

This week Daedalus describes his plans to create 'Liquid Air' — a dense breathable foam, containing salts that bring it into osmotic balance with lung tissue, which contains 74% of air by volume. His planned applications for the foam include a relaxing immersion bath and, because of its high water content, uses in firefighting.

Max Ernst delved into his childhood experiences to find images for his art that would both explore Freudian psychology and mock those who put unquestioning faith in scientific rationality.