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Volume 393 Issue 6680, 7 May 1998

Opinion

  • Even with the US federal budget in surplus, the scientific community needs to present a more sophisticated argument than merely demanding an across-the-board doubling of research funding for government agencies.

    Opinion

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  • The success of Britain's Technology Foresight exercise is no grounds for complacency about its successor.

    Opinion
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News

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News Analysis

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News in Brief

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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • An analysis of the light from a γ-ray burst shows that it occurred in a very distant galaxy. This confirms that bursts are by far the most powerful bombs in nature's arsenal, and only the most copious known energy source can explain them.

    • Ralph Wijers
    News & Views
  • Fusion of intracellular membranes is essential to cellular processes ranging from growth to neuronal communication. But how does it occur? By reconstituting the proteins that are thought to be involved into artificial membranes, one group finds that three so-called SNARE proteins can form ternary complexes and induce interactions between lipid bilayers. These results are consistent with previous theories of how membrane fusion occurs, and they should allow other aspects of the process to be studied.

    • Reinhard Jahn
    • Phyllis I. Hanson
    News & Views
  • Microelectronics based on silicon is probably the technology that has most changed the twentieth century. But in the coming century, carbon may take over. An early sign of that promise is the construction of a transistor based on a single large molecule & a semiconducting carbon nanotube.

    • Paul L. McEuen
    News & Views
  • Over 100 Mediterranean monk seals, members of a population inhabiting the Cap Blanc peninusula in north-west Africa, died mysteriously in a two-month period in 1997. The mass mortality of this endangered species has been attributed to a morbillivirus. But an alternative & or additional & explanation is that the seals died because they had eaten fish contaminated by phycotoxins produced by a bloom of algae. The controversy demonstrates the practical and conceptual problems in investigating unusual cases of mortalities in wildlife.

    • John Harwood
    News & Views
  • Some biological systems, such as those involved in chemotaxis, combine high sensitivity with wide dynamic range. For instance the bacterium Escherichia coli can sense chemical attractants over a concentration range of several orders of magnitude, and respond even to small signals in which ligand binds to only a minute fraction of chemotaxis receptors. New theoretical work shows how this may be achieved & the authors put forward the idea that adaptive receptor clustering is the mechanism concerned.

    • N. Barkai
    • S. Leibler
    News & Views
  • The need for sophisticated catalysts is driven by the need to reduce waste emission from chemical synthesis. In manufacturing complicated chemicals, especially pharmaceuticals, the amount of waste often exceeds the amount of product. A promising new class of shape-selective catalyst, a zeolite functionalized with organic groups, has now been made by adding an organosilicon compound to the synthesis gel.

    • Edward J. Creyghton
    News & Views
  • One of the mechanisms that eukaryotes possess to regulate the movement of transposable elements & DNA sequences that can hop from one chromosomal location to another & is DNA methylation. A new study shows the consequences of removing this methylation-induced protection. The authors describe a hybrid between two species of wallaby that shows genome-wide undermethylation. Looking at the chromosomes of this hybrid, they find vast numbers of an amplified transposable element that is not found in either of the parental species.

    • Margaret G. Kidwell
    • Damon R. Lisch
    News & Views
  • Twenty years ago a unique ecological experiment was set up, to monitor the effects of a rapid influx of people into one of the most sparsely populated areas in the world — the Amazon. Scientists have now met in Manau, Brazil, to discuss the results of this experiment. They conclude that of the two questions that caused controversy back in 1978, only one — that of forest edge effects — is still relevant.

    • Stuart L. Pimm
    News & Views
  • Gravity can bend light, distorting the images of astronomical objects on the sky. Daedalus wonders whether this might be used to detect gravitational waves by training a big telescope on a binary neutron star, and watching the variation in sources behind it. Once we've learned to extract the effects of gravitational waves, otherwise invisible binaries might be discovered in this way.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Science and Image

  • Over almost 130 years, this journal's appearance has evolved along with changes in design fashions and in the way scientists present their results. The first in a series exploring how science uses visual images.

    • Martin Kemp
    Science and Image
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Scientific Correspondence

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Book Review

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Article

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Letter

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New on the Market

  • Molecular biologists converge on Washington, DC for the annual American Society for Biology and Molecular Biology meeting, May 17-21. On exhibition will be tools for PCR, purification, sequencing, and bibliographic support. compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers.

    New on the Market
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