Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Volume 395 Issue 6704, 22 October 1998

Opinion

Top of page ⤴

News

  • washington

    The US Congress passed a bill removing controversial proposals to assign sweeping copyright protection to commercial online databases.

    • Tony Reichhardt
    News
  • washington

    The National Bioethics Advisory Commission is expected to endorse a final report on the protection of mentally disabled research subjects that is likely to be slightly less restrictive than a draft version circulated in July.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News
  • munich

    Space scientists in Europe are trying to convince member states of the European Space Agency to lift a three-year funding ‘cap’ on the agency's science programme.

    • Alison Abbott
    News
  • munich

    British space scientists are making an urgent appeal to private funders to support a small equipment package to land on the surface of the planet Mars as part of the Mars Express mission.

    • Alison Abbott
    News
  • munich

    The Social Democrat Edelgard Buhlmahn, 47, is now almost certain to become research minister in Germany's new Social Democrat (SPD)-Green Party coalition government.

    • Alison Abbott
    News
  • munich

    Germany's Greens have failed to persuade the Social Democrats to take a strongly critical stand on a new research reactor at the Technical University of Munich. But the parties have agreed to phase out the use of nuclear power.

    • Quirin Schiermeier
    News
  • washington

    US biomedical research is set to receive an unprecedented infusion of cash, after President Clinton and the US Congress agreed to increase the budget of the National Institutes of Health by $2 billion.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News
  • barcelona

    The Spanish Society of Cardiology is planning to make a formal protest about last week's decision to exclude researcher Salvador Moncada from this year's Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.

    • Xavier Bosch
    News
Top of page ⤴

News Analysis

  • The tenth anniversary of the Caribbean Academy of Sciences has highlighted both the case for greater regional collaboration on science-related issues, and the political and economic obstacles that can stand in the way.

    • David Dickson
    News Analysis
Top of page ⤴

News in Brief

Top of page ⤴

Correspondence

Top of page ⤴

Commentary

Top of page ⤴

News & Views

  • Large areas of east Africa are and have been highly active geologically, but the underlying processes are debated. New modelling work may shed light on those processes and also illustrates the growing maturity of such studies.

    • Geoff Davies
    News & Views
  • Most ecological systems are highly complex. But the issue of whether greater complexity means greater stability, or otherwise, has been long debated. New mathematical modelling now seems to bring theory closer into line with what one would intuitively imagine to be the case — that complexity tends to stabilize an ecosystem by, for instance, dampening population fluctuations.

    • Gary A. Polis
    News & Views
  • A conference in Germany earlier this month looked forward to chemistry in the next millennium. One of the science's main goals will be to control the structure of giant molecules, clusters and even macroscopic objects to atomic precision.

    • Philip Ball
    News & Views
  • At sales in London (11 November) and New York (29 October), some significant scientific items will be on offer. Lots at the London event include works of art by renowned natural history illustrators of the past, as well as a signed photograph of Charles Darwin. The New York auction is of the only remaining copy, dating to the tenth century, of the text on which accounts of Archimedes' ideas are based.

    • Tim Lincoln
    News & Views
  • Since the 1930s, palaeontologists have thought that four-legged land vertebrates (or tetrapods) evolved from a group of lobe-finned fishes called osteolepiforms. This is now confirmed by an analysis of the osteolepiforms, which concludes that they are actually an ensemble of primitive tetrapodomorphs. This is a large group that, as expected, also includes the tetrapods.

    • Philippe Janvier
    News & Views
  • Both the Voyager and Galileo space missions have told us a great deal about Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, the moons of Jupiter. There has been previous evidence for water on these moons. But the best yet, indicating the existence of subsurface oceans on Europa and Callisto, comes from the Galileo magnetometer experiment. The interiors of these two bodies are electrically conducting, and the most obvious explanation is that water with electrolytic conductivity is present.

    • Fritz Neubauer
    News & Views
  • Those trying to explain the evolution of adaptations broadly fall into two camps. Whereas Darwin suggested that small variations accumulate gradually, early geneticists believed that adaptations evolved through major mutations. A new study adds fuel to this debate by showing that adaptation may be based on larger factors than previously supposed.

    • Nick Barton
    News & Views
  • Many machines — diesel engines, air-conditioning units, washing machines — are noisy because of the undamped vibration of their metal surfaces. To tackle this bane of life, Daedalus plans to use organic ring molecules as dampening agents, introducing them into the bulk metals used in engineering. The result will be acoustically dead yet tough and ductile machine parts.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
Top of page ⤴

Science and Image

  • The size and elaborate staging of the great dioramas, such as Carl Akeley's gorillas, can still impress. Their cost upset museum authorities, but they aided conservation by promoting the idea of wildlife in its natural habitat.

    • Martin Kemp
    Science and Image
Top of page ⤴

Scientific Correspondence

Top of page ⤴

Book Review

Top of page ⤴

Review Article

Top of page ⤴

Article

Top of page ⤴

Letter

Top of page ⤴

New on the Market

  • This roundup includes bioinformatics, image analysis and frame grabbing tools, bibliographic and reference management systems and a package that turns a variety of common programs into data acquisition systems. compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers.

    New on the Market
Top of page ⤴
Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Quick links