Volume 393 Issue 6685, 11 June 1998

The NIH must be ready to take firm action to protect access to the tools that are essential to a researcher's work.

moscow

The Russian cabinet wants to reduce by more than a quarter the amount spent on science this year compared to figures approved by the lower house of parliament.

munich

Galileo Galilei's personal manuscripts, in which he wrote down ideas, calculations and drawings that led to his theory of mechanics, can now be viewed on the Internet.

washington

The US government should support more basic research at universities, according to a new study conducted by business leaders and academics.

munich

The European Commission is revamping the structure of its research advisory system.

london

The British government is to close its nuclear waste reprocessing plant at Dounreay, Scotland, within the decade.

munich

The German government has admitted negotiating delivery of highly enriched uranium from the Russian government for a controversial new research reactor.

washington

Supporters of science in the US Senate are set to introduce a new, long-term proposal for civilian research funding.

san diego

A Californian biotechnology company has been found guilty of stealing research from a former junior laboratory researcher at the University at California at San Diego in a case of scientific espionage.

washington

The US National Institutes of Health has been urged to promote the freer sharing of research tools between scientists.

paris

The notorious bureaucratic obstacles facing foreign scientists wishing to work in France may soon be a thing of the past.

paris

Researchers at France's national research agency have rejected proposals by the research minister to drastically reduce the size of the body responsible for evaluating all its laboratories and administering recruitment.

paris

Negotiations over reform of the statutes of INSERM, the French national biomedical research agency, have ended with the adoption of a final text by the agency's administrative council.

montreal

A Canadian federal court judge has ruled that Harvard University's ‘oncomouse’, which was genetically engineered to be susceptible to cancers, is not patentable in Canada.

munich

Proposals to restrict genetic engineering in Switzerland were rejected by two thirds of voters in a referendum last Sunday. The turnout was 40 per cent.

new delhi

India has increased the budget of its Department of Atomic Energy by 68 per cent to $652 million. Its total science budget has also gone up by 20 per cent to just under $2.5 billion.

It can be difficult to discuss ethical dilemmas in the academic environment. One way of doing it is through ‘science-in-fiction’. The following ‘science renga’ shows how this is done with virtually total anonymity.

With annual deaths fromMycobacterium tuberculosisestimated at around three million, this single pathogen claims more human lives than any other. What we now learn from the sequence of its genome should help in devising new strategies to fight it.

At the current rate of miniaturization, metal-oxide field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) — the basic unit of modern computers — will run against fundamental limitations around the year 2015. A way around this limit might be found in a new type of field-effect transistor, called a single-electron transistor (SET), which takes advantage of quantum-mechanical effects. But only now has a SET been made that works at room temperature.

Models of how human morals develop are rooted in so-called ‘game theory’. They rely on the fact that two individuals will meet more than once — so, if somebody helped you the last time you met, you'll be more inclined to help him this time. But what if two individuals meet only once? It turns out that this situation could be very common, and a new study predicts that reputation is all important. By observing how an individual behaves in his interactions with others, you can predict how he's likely to behave if he comes into contact with you.

The record for the most distant object in the Universe is broken regularly, but the record for the object with the largest apparent luminosity has been much more durable, resting with the ultraluminous infrared galaxy IRASF10214+4724 since 1991. But there is a new champion, APM08279+5255, which appears to be ten times more luminous2, adding to the evidence that brilliant but dust-filled galaxies were relatively common in the early Universe.

Supercooled liquids — at temperatures below their normal freezing point — can undergo a subtle transition to a microscopically fixed, yet amorphous, state: a glass. The temperature of this transition depends on how quickly the liquid is cooled, so it seems more natural to describe the process in terms of kinetics, rather than some immutable thermodynamics. But it seems that the dynamic properties of glass-forming liquids can be related to an underlying energy landscape.

Stress is associated with heart attacks and other cardiac problems in people with coronary artery disease, but what effects might this have on the brain? By mapping the brains of patients with heart disease when they were or were not under stress, and comparing these results with healthy people, one group has found that there are significant differences between brain activation and deactivation when the patients are under stress.

The chemokine receptor CXCR4 has been implicated in processes from growth regulation and inflammation to entry of the human immunodeficiency virus. Two groups have now found that mice lacking CXCR4 have a similar phenotype to those that lack its ligand SDF-1 — namely, serious developmental defects in the immune and circulatory systems. But, surprisingly, the mice also show defects in the central nervous system and in the formation of blood vessels within the gastrointestinal tract, indicating that chemokines have much more widespread functions than was initially thought.

Not every fertilized human egg completes the journey from conception to birth — up to 70% are miscarried in the early stages of development. DREADCO biochemists are now setting out to find out why. They believe that the fetus and mother undergo a ‘dialogue’ of tests, which may involve biochemical signals and act to control the quality of the embryo.

Polymath of organic chemistry

Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table permitted him to systematize crucial chemical data. But its real triumph was as an exercise in theoretical modelling, allowing the prediction of the discovery of previously unknown elements.

Tools for bioinformatics and computational biology featured here include servers and computation boxes, cross-platform software, new web-based interfaces to tools and databases, as well as proprietary and public data sets. compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers.