Volume 394 Issue 6692, 30 July 1998

As the conference season approaches, it is time to reflect on the negative effects of ill-prepared presentations.

paris

The Dutch government is about to announce deep cuts across its scientific research organizations and universities.

london

The Hubble Space Telescope has been used to record the youngest massive stars ever seen in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Each star is around 300,000-times brighter than the Sun.

london

A ‘private’ visit by China's science and technology minister, to meet senior academics and industrialists in Taiwan appears to have helped pave the way for enhanced scientific and technological collaboration between two long-standing political rivals.

dunedin

New Zealand's researchers are voicing concern over the emergence of a radical agenda for changing the allocation of shrinking funds.

london

Most of Europe's disused oil rigs will have to be dismantled onshore, and not disposed of in the sea.

london

Europe's nuclear industry will have to make “substantial reductions” to emissions of radioactive substances by year 2000 following a decision reached by the continent's environment ministers.

tokyo

Japanese scientists are concerned that a government proposal to publicize early stages of animal cloning research could jeopardize the originality of their work -- including the publication of research results in scientific journals.

washington

Last week's predictions that human cloning may be much nearer than expected provoked muted reaction from Congress, the White House and the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

tokyo

Scientists in China are planning to attempt to clone its national symbol, the giant panda, in a desperate bid to save the endangered animal from extinction.

paris

The Roslin Institute in Scotland, which cloned Dolly the sheep, and the University of Hawaii, which cloned Cumulina the mouse, may clash over patent rights to the technology of cloning by nuclear transfer.

washington

There is widespread concern over an impending data privacy bill, which science advocates believe will threaten the free exchange of scientific information.

munich

Ground-based radio telescopes have located the $1 billion US-European solar space mission SOHO, which slipped out of radio contact at the end of June.

There are only three scientists in Congress, but Rush Holt, former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, believes he can become the fourth. He comfortably won the primary to become the Democrat nominee in New Jersey's twelfth district.

The global stockpile of separated plutonium is expensive and hazardous to reprocess, vulnerable to terrorist threat and disposal is costly. But there are apparently simple ways to reduce this problem.

A heightened sense of smell, achieved by proxy through chemistry, offers solutions to problems where biologically based sensors are inappropriate. Detection of the TNT in landmines using fluorescent chemosensors is one example.

Worldwide declines in amphibian populations have caused so much concern over the past ten years that a special committee was set up to investigate them. One of the conclusions that this group came to was that there seems to be no single cause that can explain this. But a new study shows that, for frogs and toads in Panama and Australia at least, a pathogen -- the chytrid fungus -- is responsible.

Research with thin films of material has unveiled physical phenomena that are not apparent in the bulk matter. Now, in the field of superconductivity, come indications that when films of a particular copper oxide are grown under compressive strain, their transition (critical) temperature as much as doubles. Increases in transition temperature have been achieved using pressure, but they have not been nearly as large as that described in the new work.

The phrase ‘original antigenic sin’ was first used to describe the antibody response to influenza virus. After an initial infection, reinfection with a different strain of the virus boosted the concentration of antibodies specific for the earlier infecting strain. A new study shows that this is also the case for the response of cytotoxic T lymphocytes to lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus.

So-called ‘millennial-scale’ climate variability refers to abrupt flips between a cold and a warm global climate at intervals of a few thousand years. The cause has generally been held to lie in oscillations of water flow in the North Atlantic. At a conference devoted to the topic, however, the Pacific entered the picture as the possible driving force behind these climate changes, raising the intriguing prospect that there might be a millennial-scale El Niño.

Copepods are dominant constitutents of the marine zooplankton, and so are central players in the dynamics of ocean ecosystems. The seemingly arcane business of how they find mates and copulate is, then, a matter of some importance. Increasingly it is emerging that these tiny creatures are not completely at the mercy of the viscous forces of water, as might be expected -- rather, their mating behaviour involves the sensing and pursuit of complex patterns of hydomechanical and chemical signals.

Mayflies normally mate above, and lay their eggs on, water. But they have also been seen to do this on dry, asphalt roads. Why? One group has come up with an answer -- the reflected light from asphalt roads is strongly and horizontally polarized, and this mimics a highly polarized water surface.

Within the past ten years, inositol lipids have increasingly been implicated in membrane-transport processes. Three studies now show what connects one inositol lipid — phosphatidylinositol-3-phosphate, PtdIns(3)P — to endocytosis. It turns out that a protein called the early endosomal autoantigen EEA1 contains a domain called FYVE that can bind, specifically and directly, to PtdIns(P)3. What's more, EEA1 can also bind to Rab5, a protein involved in endocytosis.

In the body, secretory granules can store a physiological agent (histamine, for instance) and on stimulation can release it in the right place at the right time. Following that example, a group of researchers has devised an artificial mimic of nature's handiwork using a polymer gel coated with a lipid bilayer. There are endless possibilities for refining the system, but the important hurdle to be overcome is to see if the basic concept worksin vivo.

According to Daedalus, legal verdicts are nothing more than probabilities. What's to say, for example, that people who claim to have been made ill by tobacco wouldn't have become ill anyway? To address such questions, he proposes a scientific court in which cases would be decided by openly statistical verdicts, and there would be differing degrees of guilt or innocence.

A vision of a dome led to the naming of buckminsterfullerene. This carbon cluster has become an icon for chemistry, thanks to the media-friendly appeal it shares with co-discoverer Sir Harry Kroto.

This assortment of products includes laser beam attenuators, motorized steppers and translators, laser confocal microscopy systems, beam analysers, as well as infrared and diode laser bars and systems.