Volume 394 Issue 6691, 23 July 1998

New results on cloning technology increase the urgency for regulations to ensure its responsible use.

washington

The Clinton administration hopes new scientific evidence of soaring global surface temperatures will persuade Congress to implement a $6 billion programme to curb the growth in US greenhouse gas emissions.

new delhi

Rajagopalan Chidambaram, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), has been refused a visa to attend a meeting of the International Union of Crystallography of which he is vice-president.

washington

The National Institutes of Health has approved a new procedure for research grant applications that will require budgets to be based on multiples of $25,000.

washington

A new Republican backed bill will prohibit health insurers from using genetic information to set premium costs, or deny insurance policies to people who have not been previously or recently insured.

dunedin, new zealand

The city of Dunedin in New Zealand's South Island has marked the 150th anniversary of its foundation by Scottish immigrants by mounting the country's largest ever promotion of science.

tokyo

Japan's Science and Technology Agency has asked the government to reduce restrictions on scientists who work at national research institutes.

paris

Controversy over an alleged case of scientific misconduct in France is set to reopen.

paris

France's science minister wants to double the impact of French publications in the international scientific literature, treble the number of international patents held by French scientists, and create several hundred stable high technology companies —all within four years.

washington

NASA may get an additional $20 million to reopen a study into the use of satellites to beam energy from the Sun to Earth, more than a decade after it was all but laid to rest.

moscow

A multi-million dollar boring machine that has almost completed digging a 21-kilometre tunnel for an abandoned particle accelerator project may suffer a similar fate.

Hungarian science has undergone considerable post-communist reform, but the country's academy of sciences feels that further change is needed to allow it to take tough decisions on spending priorities.

After the furore that surrounded the arrival of Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from differentiated adult cells, doubts were raised that she really was a clone. Those doubts can now be set aside, and the technique has been further validated by the cloning of mice.

Oscillations occur naturally in many systems (in heart muscles, fireflies, and Josephson junctions, for example). When many oscillators are coupled together, complicated collective behaviour such as wave propagation can emerge. A new phenomenon has been predicted for some sets of oscillators, when there is a time-delay in their coupling: they can drive each other to stop oscillating.

Ras is an especially important molecular switch —it is part of the machinery for transmitting signals for growth and other processes to the cell nucleus, and mutated forms are implicated in about 30% of human tumours. Further insight into how this switch is turned on comes from solution of the structure of Ras complexed with another protein, Sos, one of the factors essential for Ras action.

The Los Angeles area is prone to earthquakes because it is caught between converging tectonic plates and cut by geological faults of many shapes and sizes. New estimates of movement along some faults of a particular type (strike-slip) are as much as four times higher than previous values, and imply that these faults may pose more of an earthquake hazard than had been thought.

Roughly 55 million years ago the world underwent a climatic change from the warm temperatures of the Eocene to the cooler, more arid environment of the Oligocene. This Eocene/Oligocene boundary is associated with an extinction/origination event in Europe known as theGrande Coupure, whereby new immigrants from Asia replaced most of the old Eocene genera from Europe. But was such an extinction a worldwide event? One group has now looked at the fossil record from Central Asia, and has found that a similar extinction event —called the Mongolian remodelling by the authors —did indeed occur.

Neutron stars are the remnants of supernova explosions, packing a mass as great as that of the Sun into a radius of only about 10 km. Some of them rotate at up to about 1,000 revolutions per second. These ‘millisecond pulsars’ are believed to be old neutron stars that have been spun up by material consumed from a companion star. Now one has been caught in this process of transition.

Just over a year ago, Kazuhiko Kinosita and colleagues reported that they could visualize rotation of the F₁-ATPase by tethering an actin filament to the γ-subunit and watching it spin. Now they've taken that work a step further, and in their latest study report that the F₁-ATPase rotates its actin tag in discrete 120° steps. Not only that, but the work done by each step is close to the energy available from hydrolysing one molecule of ATP —translating to almost 100% efficiency.

From the skeleton of Lucy, the best known example of the early hominidAustralopithecus afarensis, it seems clear that the favoured form of locomotion was walking. But with what kind of gait? Biomechanical analysis of a numerically simulated model skeleton of Lucy delivers the verdict that A. afarensiswalked upright, like modern humans.

The pharmaceutical industry has for several years successfully used a combinatorial approach in drug development. The technique involves the micro-scale synthesis and screening of organic molecules for activity, and is now being applied in other areas. One such is the development of better systems for heterogeneous catalysis, and new work provides proof of principle that the combinatorial route may prove highly productive here also.

Attempts to make metallic hydrogen, says Daedalus, have been proceeding along the wrong lines. He suggests that the way forward is to use pressure, but not on pure hydrogen but on a solution of hydrogen in water. The result should be a new metal, hydroxonium, a sort of metallic ice which may even be stable down to normal pressures. Potential uses are as rocket fuel or as a minor constituent of metal alloys.

The nineteenth-century creative genius Sir Charles Wheatstone invented a wave machine and other ‘philosophical toys’ that had a serious purpose in demonstrating the laws of physics.