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Volume 394 Issue 6693, 6 August 1998

Opinion

  • Broad sanctions that could isolate Indian and Pakistani scientists from the West are a counter-productive response to the two nations' unwelcome arrival in the nuclear club. Sanctions should be used with care.

    Opinion

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News

  • london

    Lord Sainsbury, formerly chairman and chief executive of the supermarket chain that bears his family's name, is widely expected to be named as Britain's new science minister.

    • David Dickson
    News
  • sydney

    After 11 years of sustained growth, business expenditure on research and development has fallen sharply in Australia, according to two independent surveys by business and government.

    • Peter Pockley
    News
  • london

    Scientists will meet in London to discuss the results of studies that are likely to send mixed signals on the safety of animal to human transplants.

    • Ehsan Masood
    News
  • munich

    The Italian Ministry of Health, forced by public pressure to conduct clinical trials of the controversial ‘Di Bella’ cancer treatment, has announced that patients with the types of cancer tested in the trials will no longer be reimbursed for such treatment.

    • Alison Abbott
    News
  • washington

    A California pesticide company said that it had paid for a study at the University of California, Davis, of human volunteers who were exposed to methyl isothiocyanate, the active ingredient in metam sodium, a potent soil fumigant.

    • Meredith Wadman
    News
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News in Brief

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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • The Galileo spacecraft has measured the temperature of lava flows on Jupiter's moon Io. At 1,700 to 2,000 K, they are far hotter than all previous estimates, implying that they are metal rich and therefore dense. It is difficult for dense lavas to erupt through a light crust, so perhaps Io has undergone relatively little heating and differentiation in the past, and still has a dense crust.

    • Lionel Wilson
    News & Views
  • 'Green beard' genes are theoretical constructs that cause their bearer to display a distinctive trait, fancifully named a green beard. Bearers of the gene can recognize other individuals with it and, in keeping with selfish-gene thinking, act accordingly. Now it seems that such a gene has been found in the red fire ant. In this case, if queen ants lack the gene they are executed by workers that carry it.

    • Alan Grafen
    News & Views
  • Isotopes of the uranium decay series can be used to explore geological processes that have taken place on and in the Earth. Such an analysis has now been applied to find out more about a slab of oceanic plate being subducted under southwestern Chile — in effect, this work provides an image of the plate at depth, and helps to relate plate melting to volcanic activity at the surface.

    • Julie D. Morris
    News & Views
  • The galaxy NGC 2207 has small spiral structures within about thousand light years of its centre — too close to be formed by the conventional mechanism for making spiral arms. An intriguing hypothesis is that they are sound waves.

    • Stephen Battersby
    News & Views
  • Plants under attack from pathogens can activate a series of cellular defence responses, including the production of reactive oxygen species (ROIs). One puzzle has been that the levels of these ROIs don't seem to be high enough to kill the pathogens, and two groups have now found out why. It turns out that the ROIs collaborate with nitric oxide, to form a binary switch that fine tunes the defence-response pathway.

    • Jeff Dangl
    News & Views
  • Proteases and their inhibitors were the subject of a meeting held in June in Nyborg, Denmark. These proteins are responsible for many aspects of cancer progression — they help tumour cells to enter the blood stream and spread around the body, and are also involved in the formation of new blood vessels to nourish the tumour. By understanding how they do this, the aim is to develop new anticancer treatments.

    • Dylan R. Edwards
    • Gillian Murphy
    News & Views
  • Daedalus has designs on the nicotine trade. According to a recent report, nicotine is oxidized in the liver to cotinine, and people whose livers perform this function badly are much less likely to become addicted to smoking. In this, Daedalus sees three possible ways to divorce the addictive nature of nicotine from the pleasure.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Science and Image

  • Electricity seemed new and magical, its limits not yetknown: could it really arouse the dead? The Frankenstein storyexpressed an era's trepidation at the prospect of discoveringthe secret of life.

    • Martin Kemp
    Science and Image
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Scientific Correspondence

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Book Review

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Article

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Letter

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Careers and Recruitment

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