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Volume 395 Issue 6701, 1 October 1998

Opinion

  • In celebration of Nature's new website and its benefits for our personal subscribers.

    Opinion

    Advertisement

  • Economists and ecologists are increasingly working together. Such cooperation is both desirable and necessary.

    Opinion
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News

  • moscow

    A research vessel belonging to a cash-starved institute of the Russian academy of sciences has embarked on a new career delivering tourists to site of the sunken liner Titanic.

    • Carl Levitin
    News
  • washington

    The US Department of Energy was told last week that it has not responded quickly enough to a report, which scathingly criticized the efficiency of its huge network of research laboratories.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News
  • washington & munich

    Expeeriments on the international space station will be delayed by several months following proposed changes to the stationís construction schedule.

    • Tony Reichhardt
    • Alison Abbott
    News
  • tokyo

    Japan's National Space Development Agency (NASDA) has decided to build a new space centre on Christmas Island in the South Pacific, part of the Republic of Kiribati.

    • Asako Saegusa
    News
  • washington

    The National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration are planning to repair a ‘flaw’ in the year-old system under which gene therapy experiments are approved.

    • Meredith Wadman
    News
  • washington

    The US National Institutes of Health has opened a discussion on the desirability of embarking on in utero gene therapy in a move which critics argue is a ‘slippery slope to eugenics'.

    • Meredith Wadman
    News
  • montreal

    Canada's three major research funding agencies have published what they claim is the first comprehensive ethical policy statement produced by any country for research involving humans.

    • David Spurgeon
    News
  • washington

    The US Congress should generously fund scientific research, with fundamental research its priority, and ‘resist concentrating funds in a particular area’, according to a science policy document prepared for Newt Gingrich, chairman of the House of Representatives.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News
  • washington

    Bill Richardson, the US energy secretary, is set to allow the United States to continue work on designing the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor until next July.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News
  • london

    High quality, ambitious, and imaginative schemes for research infrastructure are sought for a new £600 million fund being jointly funded by the British government and the Wellcome Trust.

    • Ehsan Masood
    News
  • sydney

    The director of the National Institutes of Health has turned to 25 individuals, from an Illinois farm wife to a former African ambassador, for advice on how to establish a new ‘Directorís Council of Public Representatives'.

    • Peter Pockley
    News
  • washington

    A tightly fought election in Australia has featured a push by the Opposition Labor Party to propose initiatives for R&D costing about A$600 million (US$348 million) over three years.

    • Meredith Wadman
    News
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News in Brief

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Briefing

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Correspondence

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Commentary

  • Economists and ecologists misunderstand each other about the environment. Improving interdisciplinary communication should enable natural scientists to take economic analysis and prescriptions more seriously.

    • Don Fullerton
    • Robert Stavins
    Commentary
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News & Views

  • One of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics appears to have been settled. On 9 August, Thomas C. Hales announced that he had proved Kepler's assertion of 1611 that no packing of spheres can be denser than a face-centred-cubic lattice.

    • Neil J. A. Sloane
    News & Views
  • By comparing the segments that make up the head structures of different arthropods, we can work out how related the classes of arthropod are. Until now it has been difficult to equate head structures of crustaceans and insects with those of the chelicerates (spiders and crabs, for example). But two studies based on the expression of developmental genes allow this to be done for the first time.

    • Michalis Averof
    News & Views
  • The oceanic hydrothermal vents found along mid-ocean ridges continue Indian ridge — which, according to predictions that vent frequency correlates with the spreading rate of ridges, should have a very low incidence of vents. The new study finds that incidence to be three times higher than expected.

    • Cindy Lee Van Dover
    News & Views
  • How are proteins imported into the mitochondria and chloroplasts? The answer is through pores, and new studies on these organelles indicate similarities in structure. In the latest work, the Tom40 protein has been purified and then incorporated, asymmetrically, into liposomes. The resulting pore has a diameter of 22-26 Å, and it is selective for cations.

    • Gottfried Schatz
    News & Views
  • What creates the high-speed jets of material that emerge from quasars, radio galaxies and other active galactic nuclei? A subtle feature in the radio emission from one quasar is evidence that these jets are mostly made of electron-positron pairs, with only a small number of protons. This lightweight plasma should be easier to accelerate than a heavy mix of electrons and protons.

    • Tom Jones
    News & Views
  • Over 90% of human beings live, for all of their lives, in peaceful equilibrium with Epstein-Barr virus, which infects the immune system's B cells in particular. The proliferation of infected cells is kept under control by T cells, but sometimes this control breaks down and leads to diseases such as X-linked immunoproliferative syndrome. The cause, it turns out, is mutation of a small protein involved in T-cell regulation.

    • George Klein
    • Eva Klein
    News & Views
  • How do motor proteins such as myosin convert chemical force to mechanical force? The crystal structure of myosin's motor domain should give us some clues, allowing us to see, for the first time, the muscle's power stroke. The structure supports the theory that myosin has a ‘lever arm’, which rotates when ATP binds and is hydrolysed.

    • Maxine Clarke
    News & Views
  • To reach out and pick up a glass of beer, we need to know not only where the glass is, but also its shape, orientation and size. How is such object and space-related information integrated in the brain? A new study indicates that shapes may be represented by two neural pathways, and the authors speculate about what the contribution of each might be.

    • Nikos K. Logothetis
    News & Views
  • Taking a fresh look at the ‘many worlds’ view of quantum mechanics, Daedalus wonders whether quantally mixed ghostly worlds may exist along with real parallel worlds.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Science and Image

  • The now-familiar concept of drawing lines of descent as trees seems harmless enough. But it led Ernst Haeckel (who bent the evidence to prove his Darwinian theories) into believing in the evolution of a Germanic super-race.

    • 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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Letter

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Erratum

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Collection

  • The 40th anniversary of the Kitt Peak National Observatory seems an appropriate time to reflect on how far we have come, and where the future of astronomy might lie.

    Collection
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