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Volume 396 Issue 6707, 12 November 1998

Opinion

  • Increasingly tough conditions being attached to the transfer of experimental tools between researchers are threatening science's tradition of open communication. Agreement on optimal terms would help all sides.

    Opinion

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News

  • munich

    Italian scientists have removed samples from the sarcophagus of Emperor Frederick the Second, the thirteenth century King of Sicily and Germany, in an attempt to establish his lineage, his cause of death, and why his body has remained so well preserved.

    • Alison Abbott
    News

  • london

    The British government has announced a series of measures designed to help universities overcome the barriers to commercializing the results of their scientific research.

    • Ehsan Masood
    News

  • washington

    Privately-run observatories in the United States have come up with a new plan to persuade the National Science Foundation to help pay for instrumentation.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News

  • tokyo

    Japan's veterinary colleges are to be drastically reorganized in a bid to reverse falling standards in university veterinary education.

    • Asako Saegusa
    News

  • munich

    An Italian medical research charity that raises money through an annual television show is to fund senior research positions in the first major challenge to the centralized selection of Italian academics.

    • Alison Abbott
    News

  • new delhi

    India has belatedly decided to join global efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine and will offer one or more sites for an international vaccine trial.

    • K. S. Jayaraman
    News

  • washington

    NASA should look more to universities and industry to develop advanced technologies for space missions, according to a report from the US National Academy of Sciences.

    • Tony Reichhardt
    News

  • london

    A media-savvy British scientist has taken on the daunting task of ‘modernizing’ the Royal Institution, one of Britain's most distinguished centres for research and science communication.

    • Ehsan Masood
    News

  • london

    The United Nations climate convention secretariat in Bonn has been heavily criticized for failing to follow standard UN procedures for managing its financial and administrative affairs.

    • Ehsan Masood
    News

  • paris

    A leading scientist is applying to the US National Institutes of Health for funds to challenge the ban on federal funding for research into the culturing and differentiation of human embryonic stem cells.

    • Declan Butler
    News

  • paris

    Biomedical researchers are expressing concerns about the constraints that will be imposed on access to the technology used in the recent breakthrough in the culturing of human embryonic stem cells.

    • Declan Butler
    News

  • paris

    Europe is contemplating banning joint funding through the European Commission of any research involving the destruction of human embryos.

    • Declan Butler
    News

  • zurich

    Switzerland is to conduct a national referendum on the banning of all assisted reproduction techniques, including in-vitro fertilization (IVF).

    • Ulrich Bahnsen
    News
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News in Brief

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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • The genome sequence ofRickettsia prowazekii, the agent that causes typhus, has been determined. What emerges is a snapshot of genome re-tailoring in a parasitic bacterium, and a new look at the evolutionary connection between Rickettsiaand mitochondria.

    • Michael W. Gray
    News & Views

  • Superconductors usually exclude magnetic fields. But in granular form, they sometimes do the opposite, attracting and reinforcing an external magnetic field. Two different mechanisms for this paramagnetic Meissner effect have been identified in two tiny experimental devices.

    • Manfred Sigrist
    News & Views

  • The signal peptide is a small extension at one end of a newly synthesized protein chain. It directs the transport of that protein across membranes, and is then cleaved off by a signal peptidase. The structure of a bacterial signal peptidase is now reported, and it reveals features that tell us how this unusual enzyme works.

    • Gunnar von Heijne
    News & Views

  • Hidden in the machinery of the Gregorian Calendar is a bias towards certain days of the week landing on certain dates in the month: the 13th is more likely to be a Friday than any other day, for example. The full pattern is easily revealed using a computer.

    • Stephen Battersby
    News & Views

  • Many important phenomena in the solar atmosphere are thought to occur on length scales smaller than the 0.2 arcsecond (140 km) resolution limit of current solar telescopes. So the search is on for ways to improve resolution, and topic was debated at a recent meeting of solar physicists.

    • John H. Thomas
    News & Views

  • In many species, females have two X chromosomes whereas males have only one. To compensate for this difference, genes on the female X chromosomes are switched off. But how does an organism count how many chromosomes it has? A study in the nematode worm has just identified a protein called SEX-1, which represses a gene,xol-1, that is involved in both dosage compensation and sex determination.

    • Amanda Swain
    • Robin Lovell-Badge
    News & Views

  • This week Daedalus plans to revolutionize information technology by developing a read-only high-volume storage system with no moving parts. Known as the Fibre Read-Only Memory (or FROM), it will form the basis of libraries and archives and, unlike tapes or disks, it cannot deteriorate or go wrong.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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News and Views Feature

  • The ability to commit suicide is a fundamental property of animal cells. This overview considers recent progress in understanding the nature of the suicide process and how it is controlled.

    • Martin Raff
    News and Views Feature
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Science and Image

  • The structure of viruses was for a long time an enigma. It took an amalgam of techniques, especially the rapidly burgeoning field of electron microscopy, to reveal the quasi-symmetrical nature of viral architecture.

    • 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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