Volume 396 Issue 6708, 19 November 1998

Ageing astronauts should be more honest about their motivations for wishing to return to space.

washington

An ambitious plan for ten regional ‘collaboratories’, each equipped with powerful nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers, has been proposed by an informal group of US scientists.

london

The fourth conference of the United Nations climate convention ended with agreement on a 2000 deadline to finalize mechanisms for implementing the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

stockholm

The traditional [subject-wise] organization of research institutions is stifling interdisciplinary research, scientists and research administrators were told at a symposium last week.

stockholm

Interdisciplinary researchers have found a strong ally in Rita Colwell, the new director of the US National Science Foundation.

washington

The US National Institutes of Health is set to provide equipment and technical staff to biologists working at five synchrotron light sources operated by the Department of Energy.

munich

The Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) in France, has bowed to US pressure and abandoned plans to use bomb-grade Highly Enriched Uranium as fuel for its research reactor.

berlin

The Free University in Berlin is preparing to close the book on its liberal teaching and research regime introduced after the student protests of 1968.

berlin

Berlin's Free University has its eye on a 50th birthday present next month, a military barracks which served as the US army headquarters until the end of the cold war.

tokyo

Science and technology in Japan are among the beneficiaries of the government's largest-ever economic stimulus package, unveiled this week.

tokyo

Allegations of corruption involving a former university professor and executives of a major drug company are casting a shadow over Japan's efforts to promote industry/academic collaboration.

london

Clinical trials of the medical effects of cannabis could be in jeopardy because of legal restrictions on the use of the drug.

new delhi

The Clinton administration has named 340 organizations in India and Pakistan that face technology export restrictions.

Farmers and chemical manufacturers are bracing themselves for a bitter fight with environmentalists in the coming months over new pesticide regulations. Both sides claim that science is on their side.

In comparison with conventional, high-intensity agricultural methods, ‘organic’ alternatives can improve soil fertility and have fewer detrimental effects on the environment. These alternatives can also produce equivalent crop yields to conventional methods.

Oceanic islands such as Iceland and Hawaii are thought to be the result of upwelling plumes of material from within the Earth's mantle. But at what depth do such plumes originate? New seismological analyses place the source as far down as the core-mantle boundary, 2,900 km beneath the Earth's surface.

This year's Nobel prize for physiology or medicine went to three scientists who showed that nitric oxide is the so-called ‘endothelium-derived relaxing factor’ discovered by Robert Furchgott. Now, another endothelium-derived factor that causes hyperpolarization has been identified, and it seems to be an even simpler molecule — the potassium ion.

There has been a long-standing debate over what can be inferred from a mass of biogeographical data on the distribution of bird species on the islands around New Guinea. One theory, which has it that some species are excluded from some islands because of the competitive influence of other species, now finds support in a statistical analysis using a recursive algorithm called the knight's tour.

Work involving a new tool in optics, a pulse shaper, shows how atoms can be made to absorb light readily, or not at all, simply by controlling the phase of light shone at them. The method can be added to a growing list of techniques for manipulating the internal quantum dynamics of atoms and molecules using the coherence properties of light.

The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is part of the immune system, which usually operates outside the blood-brain barrier. That's why the discovery of a possible role for class I MHC molecules in remodelling of nervous connections during development of the optic system is very surprising. Moreover, this discovery may have implications for the study of human conditions such as dyslexia.

Most of the membrane proteins that have been crystallized to date have been those involved in membrane-transport processes, because such proteins need to have a rigid structure. However, the plant photosystem II protein has proved refractory to crystallization, so its structure has now been solved by another method — electron crystallography. The structure has many similarities with bacterial reaction centres, and provides striking evidence that they have a common evolutionary origin.

[Ship tracks] are lines of perturbed regions in the marine atmosphere resembling bright bands of cloud. They are caused by the emissions from diesel ships, and can be imaged from space, and provide a promising setting for studying the correlation between anthropogenic pollutants and cloud perturbation.

How will societies of the future know how we lived in the 1990s? Magnetic and optical tapes and disks will have delaminated and embrittled; paper and film will have bleached and crumbled. To preserve such information, DREADCO chemists are trying to fossilize books, CDs and so on, by immersing them in pressurized carbonated or silicated water. Telling our descendants how to read these fossils may be more tricky.

Nurtured from an early age in the art of still-life painting and naturalistic illustration, the courageous seventeenth-century artist Maria Sibylla Merian allied her vision and her skills to convey the complex life-cycles of insects.

New products that use antibodies and help to study of the immune system include a consolidated staining system, an integrated microplate imaging system and software for microscopic image analysis of enzyme-linked immunospots. compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers.