Volume 393 Issue 6684, 4 June 1998

Environmental sciences are not the only disciplines that would benefit from quantitative stiffening.

london

The European Southern Observatory last week unveiled the first images from its Very Large Telescope on Mount Paranal in Chile.

washington

A 'rough draft' of the human genome, 95 per cent finished, could be created within the next three years.

sydney

The Australian Prime Minister's Science Engineering and Innovation Council has decided its most immediate task is to address the rising salinity in agricultural land.

london

Britain's Natural Environment Research Council wants more physical scientists, computer scientists and molecular biologists to take up research on the environment.

london

Pakistan's scientists are weighing up the costs — and potential benefits — of their government's decision to carry out a series of nuclear tests last week.

new delhi

Indian scientists fear that the subcontinent's 'tit-for-tat' nuclear tests are likely to set back attempts to improve scientific cooperation with Pakistan.

munich

German universities should increase the number of female academics, according to a report by Germany's influential science council.

munich

Just two of the 47 scientific papers tainted in one of Germany's biggest fraud scandals have so far been retracted.

washington

NASA has begun to streamline its grants administration process following widespread dissatisfaction among scientists.

cape town

The government of South Africa is to foot half the bill for the construction of the new Southern African Large Telescope. The rest of the money is expected from foreign sources in exchange for observing time.

tokyo

A primate research centre in Japan has come under attack by animal rights activists for brokering the sales of monkeys obtained from zoological parks to medical research laboratories.

washington

US consumer advocates and scientists are suing the Food and Drug Administration for failing to require manufacturers to label genetically-modified foods.

paris

Lionel Jospin, the French prime minister, wants to create "a university without walls" in Europe similar to that which allowed the free flow of intellectuals in Europe during the Renaissance era.

munich

Tension is running high among scientists in Switzerland on the eve of the 7 June national referendum on genetic engineering.

munich

NASA and the Italian Space Agency are offering to help double the lifetime of Mars Express, the European Space Agency's proposed fast and cheap voyage to Mars.

The concept of Six Degrees of Separation has been formalized in so-called ‘small-world networks’. The principles involved could be of use in settings as diverse as improving networks of cellular phones and understanding the spread of infections.

Analysis of 16S ribosomal RNA from samples of the bacterial groupProchlorococcus (a component of phytoplankton) shows that closely related Prochlorococcus populations that are genetically adapted to different levels of light coexist. This technique has been used to study genetic diversity in samples that are difficult to culture in the laboratory. But the technique is not perfect and leads to a tendency to group together organisms that appear very similar genetically but may be different physiologically — such as the Prochlorococcusecotypes.

One of the oldest problems in game theory, known as 'the big match', can be told as the story of a king who traps his minister into working for him unsupervised. The minister is promised a life in the dungeon if he is caught idling, or the throne if he is 'caught' working. It has now been proved that ideal strategies for both king and minister can be found in all such problems. These new models of conflict and cooperation will undoubtedly be used in the study of social interactions and economics.

To kill invading pathogens, the immune system often has to kill its own infected cells. But how does it control this potentially dangerous mechanism? Three groups have done experiments that support one model of T-cell activation. T-helper cells recognize a specific antigen on professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs), and deliver a signal that activates, or 'licenses', the APC. This activated APC can then stimulate the T-killer cells to mount a response against that antigen.

The cold summer of 1601 resulted from a spectacular eruption of the volcano Huaynaputina in Peru in February 1600. Analysis of tree growth has shown that the summer of 1601 was the coldest of the past 600 years, and, from a reconstruction of the deposits of volcanic ash around the volcano, it can be calculated that the volcano ejected about 10 km³of molten rock. Other cold summers have been linked with volcanic eruptions, but in some cases it is not certain which eruptions caused the climate change.

We experience many emotions every day, but as a topic of study emotion has been neglected until recently. Now, however, with the development of sophisticated techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, the neural basis of emotion can be studied. Four new reports have used slightly different approaches, and conclude that the amygdala — a complex structure within the temporal lobes of the brain — is involved in the responses to fear.

Asteroids must have been hitting each other throughout the age of the Solar System. What has it done to them? To make analytical calculations of what happens when one asteroid hits another, one is forced into the unrealistic assumption that the bodies are spherical and rigid. But now a numerical model shows what happens when irregular, inhomogeneous asteroids suffer high-velocity impacts. The 'rubble-pile' asteroids that result would be relatively difficult to deflect from a collision course to Earth.

Although deserts appear to be barren landscapes, many organisms grow and thrive in the top millimetre or so of desert soil. A new study reveals that these organisms are uniquely adapted to the conditions of the deserts in which they live. For example, one lichen found in southern Utah requires a lot of water for maximal photosynthesis compared with lichens from the Negev desert in Israel. This is because, whereas lichens in the Negev get their water in small, frequent doses, from early-morning dew, lichens in Utah get water from the heavy showers that occur there.

When nylon is produced, one component is dissolved in water whereas the other is dissolved in an immiscible solvent. When the two are mixed, the nylon forms at the liquid interface. In this case, the interface is permeable to the reagents, but Daedalus is now looking at ways to create monolayer films that form a barrier to separate the two reagents. Such monolayers could have many applications, especially if they're brought together to form loosely bonded multilayers.

The sixteenth-century anatomist Vesalius debunked many of the doctrines of the Greek physician Galen. Vesalius chose his illustrations carefully to act as powerful tools in proving the accuracy of his scientific observations.