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Volume 394 Issue 6695, 20 August 1998

Opinion

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News

  • san diego

    Federal authorities are investigating animal research practices at the Salk Institute, after past inhumane treatment and faulty experiments were exposed during a civil court case brought by a former employee.

    • Rex Dalton
    News

  • new delhi

    India is to join the Paris Convention of the World Intellectual Property Organization. The decision will simplify international patenting for Indian scientists and the exploitation of international patents in India.

    • K. S. Jayaraman
    News

  • tokyo

    Japan's overall industrial research spending is rising steadily despite being hit by its worst economic crisis since the Second World War.

    • Asako Saegusa
    News

  • beijing

    Scientists gathered at the International Congress of Genetics have warned against the use of genetic testing as a coercive tool of public policy.

    • David Dickson
    News

  • munich

    The Italian government has approved sweeping reforms of the national research council that will reduce its influence over government science policy but may increase the efficiency of its research environment.

    • Alison Abbott
    News

  • ottawa

    Twenty-six universities across Canada have won infrastructure grants worth Can$36 million (US$24 million) under the first competition to be held by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

    • David Spurgeon
    News

  • washington

    Increased European participation and new technical approaches are set to revitalize US plans for exploring Mars.

    • Tony Reichhardt
    News
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News in Brief

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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • What causes ice ages, and other episodes of violent climate change? One clue comes from a new study of ice cores, which, unexpectedly, seems to show rapid warming events happening first in the Southern Hemisphere.

    • James W. C. White
    • Eric J. Steig
    News & Views

  • Transposons are stretches of DNA that contain all of the elements needed to ensure their own replication, and can hop about the genome at will. The RAG1 and RAG2 proteins, which were known to mediateV(D)Jrecombination, have now been shown to be capable of catalysing a full transposition reaction, and this has implications for the evolution of the immune system.

    • Ronald Plasterk
    News & Views

  • How human were the Neanderthals? Were they shaggy, subhuman brutes, or creatures barely distinguishable from modern humans? A new study favours the second interpretation. By analysing the bone tools and ornaments at a site in France dating back 45,000 years, they have found evidence that these artefacts were not copied from those made by more modern humans, but developed independently by Neanderthal groups.

    • Paul G. Bahn
    News & Views

  • When four-legged animals want to move quickly they gallop -- a gait that was thought to have no equivalent in humans. But a new paper shows that skipping in humans is biomechanically similar to galloping. In both cases, pendulums and springs collaborate to conserve mechanical energy.

    • Claire T. Farley
    News & Views

  • Gallium nitride is a semiconducting material that has great potential for use in optical devices such as green and blue light-emitting diodes. It is also riddled with thread-like structural defects, which affect the material's properties. The defects can now be studied ‘in the open', exposed by a wet chemical etch process.

    • Karen Southwell
    News & Views

  • The Tibetan Plateau was raised by the collision of India and Asia. Scientists often speak of it as if describing a piston that has risen as a single unit 20 million years ago, but now there are signs that the relatively unexplored northeastern part of the plateau was uplifted 15 million years earlier, perhaps contributing to global cooling at the time.

    • William Ruddiman
    News & Views

  • In making any movement (say, for instance, reaching for an object) our limbs usually take a smooth trajectory. That has been taken to mean that the body's motor system minimizes jerkiness. Instead, however, smoothness may be a by-product of a more fundamental computational goal of the motor system -- that of balancing speed and accuracy when activity-dependent ‘noise' in the neural control systems is taken into account.

    • Terrence J. Sejnowski
    News & Views

  • Predictions can be made about how a given plant might be pollinated by looking at its morphology, colour, nectar and odour. But scientists are increasingly finding that these predictions aren't reliable. The latest example is that ofMicroloma sagittatum, a member of the milkweed family, which, against all expectations, has been found to be pollinated by the South African sunbird Nectarinia chalybea.

    • Jeff Ollerton
    News & Views

  • Fossils are produced when organic remains are replaced by a mineral. Daedalus wants to make these once-living creatures come back to life by doing just the opposite. His plan is to soak fossils in water saturated with a range of biological substances such as fats, sugars, proteins and DNA. The idea is that the mineral will dissolve very slowly in the water, to be replaced by the appropriate biological molecules.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Science and Image

  • If matter fills the Universe, making everything happen by its interactions, what does it all look like? René Descartes may have been over-mechanistic in his view, but his efforts to visualize the invisible created striking images.

    • 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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Erratum

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New on the Market

  • The equipment and reagents in this week's selection of new products are biased towards protein preparation and handling. Melanie II, profiBlot II and NMR X-Plor feature. These notes are compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers. For more details, fill in the order service card bound inside the journal

    New on the Market
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