Volume 393 Issue 6686, 18 June 1998

The temptation to eliminate Britain's ‘dual support system’ for university research should be resisted.

washington

President Bill Clinton's $224 million spending package to protect and restore ocean resources includes only modest increases for oceanographic research.

paris

France's attorney general has called for all charges to be dropped against three former ministers involved in the country's long-standing contaminated blood affair. The three were accused of “collusion in poisoning”.

washington

The effectiveness of Institutional Review Boards, the linchpin of the US system for monitoring the safety of human experimental subjects, is "in jeopardy", according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

washington

An Institutional Review Board chair who approved experiments on healthy minority boys with fenfluramine, a now-banned diet drug, has defended his panel's decision.

san francisco

The California senate is expected to finalize legislation this week to prohibit employers from discriminating on the basis of genetic characteristics.

jerusalem

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu decided this week that Israel should participate in the European Union's fifth four-year Framework programme of research, which begins next year.

washington

The US Department of State is to appoint a science advisor in response to widespread criticism that it has been neglecting science and technology.

washington

The US space agency NASA, and the National Science Foundation have been approved modest budget increases by a Senate committee in the first stage of the annual congressional budget process.

tokyo

Scientists in Japan claim that the public is overreacting to concerns over the possible health impacts of ‘endocrine disruptors’.

montreal

The Medical Research Council of Canada is planning to combine the country's 16 major academic health science centres into an integrated Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

After a series of annual meetings that have failed to challenge the attractiveness of those organized by its US rival, the European Neuroscience Association is changing its name — to the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies — and structure, and has made financial savings. There are already signs that these changes, to be formally announced at its meeting in Berlin later this month, will reverse the trend.

The quest to make integrated circuits entirely out of plastic has reached a landmark: functioning wafers have now been made that contain many such circuits. Their main advantages over much faster silicon electronics are simple — all-polymer devices are cheap and bendy.

The emerging picture of how autonomous circadian clocks are regulated has been built up from studies in a number of organisms. Four papers now report the identification of one mouse protein — calledClock — in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Moreover the researchers concerned have found that, in both mice and flies, Clockacts as a heterodimer with a protein dubbed Cycle, and that the two together activate the transcription of the per and tim genes.

Many industrial and natural processes depend on controlling the interactions between micrometre-sized colloidal particles dispersed in fluid suspensions. Even so, colloidal interactions are not entirely understood — a strange attractive force has been observed between like-charged particles in some circumstances. It now seems that this force is due to a combination of nonlinear effects and geometrical confinement.

Flagella and cilia can propel bacteria or cells through bends that travel from their base to their tip. In an attempt to find out what controls the timing of these waves, one group has studied sea-urchin flagella. They find that oscillatory movements can be generated by surprisingly simple substructures of each flagellum's core (or axoneme). Although the authors don't yet know what controls these oscillations, they discuss several possible explanations.

The basic way in which new ocean crust is generated at mid-ocean ridges has been clear for some years, but there are many unanswered questions about the details. Does, for instance, the deep mantle participate in the process? The MELT experiment, which involved laying arrays of instruments across the fastest spreading mid-ocean ridge system, the East Pacific Rise, was designed to find some answers. The results — both seismological and electromagnetic — are now emerging, and are testimony to the power of complementary data of this sort.

The decreasing cost of storing data has been a crucial impetus for the information revolution. But conventional data storage, in which individual bits are stored on the surface of a recording medium, is approaching physical limits. Storing information as a hologram throughout the volume of a medium is an intriguing high-capacity alternative. A two-wavelength process has now been used to make such read-write holograms stable.

So-called trace fossils are traces that once-living animals have left behind them as a result of something they did. They include footprints and fossilized faeces or pellets (coprolites). One such coprolite is now described. From its large size and content, it can be reliably assigned to a very large carnivorous species of dinosaur — possibly evenTyrannosaurus rex.

The latest step in the fight against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) comes with the crystallization of the gp120 glycoprotein. This structure reveals much about how HIV interacts with its receptor (CD4) and co-receptors (CXCR4 and CCR5), and provides further knowledge to guide the design of agents to block these interactions.

Disposal of organic waste is a huge problem, and Daedalus plans to tackle it with an oxidative process. Not by burning, however, which creates smoke pollution, but in water. The rubbish will be shredded, suspended in air-saturated sea water and subjected to strong magnetic fields, with a high-frequency a.c. being passed through the suspension. The resulting sonolysis of the waste will reduce it to sterile gas and ash.

Synthesizer of development and evolution

Pictures of far-off planets sent back to Earth by spacecraft allow us all to be armchair explorers. The rendering of these images in a form that we can see involves choices that would be familiar to any traditional landscape painter.

Cell and tissue culture are the focus of this week's lineup which includes synthetic culture media, an automated tissue resistance measurement system, a cell culture respirometer and trace elements for media enhancement. compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers.