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Volume 392 Issue 6675, 2 April 1998

Opinion

  • Cancer patients in Italy are threatening their own survival through faith in a miracle cure. But the government is justified in sanctioning controlled tests of the therapy, even if it lacks a scientific basis.

    Opinion

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  • A lack of scientific and technical expertise among diplomats is likely to marginalize the diplomatic corps.

    Opinion
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News

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News in Brief

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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • In order to sense visual motion, the brain must determine not only where an object is, but where it was a few moments ago. To do so, the brain may depend in part on a small number of curiously shaped neurons deep in the visual cortex.

    • David Ferster
    News & Views
  • At low enough temperatures, collections of certain types of atom can collapse into a Bose-Einstein condensate, in which the atoms lose their individuality and occupy a single quantum state. Only three years after this was first achieved in the lab, physicists are now beginning to play with multiple condensates. New theoretical work predicts striking properties for a particular two-component condensate formed from sodium and rubidium atoms.

    • Brett D. Esry
    • Chris H. Greene
    News & Views
  • Steroid hormones are classically thought to bind to receptors inside cells, acting through changes in gene expression. But a study of the hormone progesterone shows that it can also act on the outside of a cell. The authors have found that it can bind the oxytocin receptor, preventing the natural ligand — oxytocin — from binding. Because progesterone is involved in maintaining pregnancy whereas oxytocin has the opposite effect, inducing uterine contractions, these findings could be used in preventing pre-term labour.

    • Didier Picard
    News & Views
  • In some materials, electronic charge can form stripes. These stripe phases may be connected with high-temperature superconductivity. A new type of stripe has been observed, one that forms in pairs and should be especially useful in studying the interplay between localizing and delocalizing electronic forces.

    • A. J. Millis
    News & Views
  • Does life have an irreducible structure? What constitutes a unit of selection? These questions are under attack from mathematicians and biologists who study the dynamics of populations of cells or viruses, or hosts. Often, spatial variation in these populations leads to complex behaviour, mimicking the movement of slime moulds or the protective membrane of primitive multicellular organisms, for example.

    • Karl Sigmund
    • Eörs Szathmáry
    News & Views
  • Opinion on the question of whether genetic problems such as inbreeding contribute to the extinction of wild populations has been divided between two camps. On the one hand, inbreeding reduces reproductive success but, on the other hand, environmental events could causes extinctions before genetic factors come into play. The debate has now been resolved by a study of a wild butterfly population in Finland — and the evidence weighs down in favour of a significant role for inbreeding in the extinction of wild populations.

    • Richard Frankham
    • Katherine Ralls
    News & Views
  • Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, has been a vibrant research topic for some time. But there has been little study of the process by which dying cells are cleared away — that is, how they are recognized, engulfed and degraded by phagocytes. Two studies (one involving the nematodeCaenorhabditis elegans, the other human cells) now implicate the CED-5 molecule in the cytoskeletal reorganization necessary for the engulfing cell to do its job, and the CD14 protein in the process of tethering apoptotic cells to phagocytes.

    • John Savill
    News & Views
  • First nuclear submarines, now a nuclear helicopter — but powered by slightly different principles. Daedalus has designed a free-flying helicopter rotor with blades that have a radioactive coating on one side. Nuclear decay will keep these surfaces warm, causing impinging air molecules to rebound with added momentum and spin the rotor. Such a helicopter would fly indefinitely at a safe height and, from there, it could even be used to repair the ozone layer, because nuclear radiation can convert oxygen to ozone much more efficiently than solar ultraviolet light.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Art and Science

  • Painting ‘portraits’ of churches might seem a limiting pursuit. But the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Pieter Saenredam turned it into a paean of praise for the geometrical way in which we perceive space.

    • Martin Kemp
    Art and Science
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Scientific Correspondence

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Spring Books

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Review Article

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Letter

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Collection

  • This NatureGuide to Scientific Opportunities in Spain (April 1998) demonstrates the enthusiasm of the country's institutions — from autonomous regional governments to universities, research institutes and industry — for extending the boundaries of the national scientific endeavour.

    Collection
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