Volume 396 Issue 6709, 26 November 1998

san diego

Grass roots efforts to control the copyright of research articles are springing up across the United States as researchers seek to increase their direct involvement in electronic publishing.

munich

Germany's new coalition government is to make a 5 per cent increase to the 1999 budgets of the Max Planck Society, and the university research grants agency.

munich

Germany's new coalition government is to make a 5 per cent increase to the 1999 budgets of the Max Planck Society, and the university research grants agency.

munich

The Nuclear programme and the Joint Research Centre have suffered heavy cuts in the latest round of FP5 budgets.

london

The British government has responded cautiously to a new report on school science that suggests pupils should spend less time memorizing facts and more time pursuing original research ideas.

london

The launch of the Nuffield report on the future of science education was partly overshadowed by a lively exchange between two panelists on getting more women to take careers in science.

washington

The US National Science Board is under fire for allegedly failing to adhere to 'sunshine laws' that are supposed to guarantee the transparency of the US government machinery.

washington

Rita Colwell, the new director of the National Science Foundation, has said that many good scientists "feel cut out" by the agency because they are unfamiliar with its grant procedures.

paris

French researchers are warning that efforts by the government to tighten up the implementation of a law on the ordering of materials by public institutions could bring public research in the country to a halt.

paris

The 'Universal declaration on the human genome and human rights', adopted by Unesco last year, is set to be adopted by the United Nations itself at its 53rd general assembly on 10 December.

cape town

The top government official in South Africa's arts and science ministry has resigned following concern that his minister was using the department to advance the political interests of the Inkatha Freedom Party.

sÃo paulo

The Brazilian government has cushioned the severity of cuts being imposed on science, which are part of an overall austerity programme in response to the country's economic crisis.

paris

A global 'science summit' in Hungary next June is expected to be the most important international meeting on the relationship between science and politics for 20 years.

new delhi

Scientists have reacted angrily to an Indian government's decision to limit the promotion of scientists not working in 'strategic' departments of space, atomic energy, and defence.

Concern about the growing interest of foreign companies and research institutes in China's wealth of genetic resources has helped the country's geneticists to cement political support for their own research efforts. In the process of doing so, the country appears to have successfully cast off the anti-Mendelian beliefs of its early communist era.

Darwinian evolution is often thought of as incremental and progressive, although the fossil record indicates step-wise change in morphological characteristics. An analysis of mutant fruitflies now provides a mechanism for rapid morphological change, with implications for evolutionary theory.

Researchers are for ever looking for ways to increase the resolution achieved by electron microscopes. Tricks used in imaging a silicon crystal by transmission electron microscopy avoid the worst effects of lens aberrations, a limiting factor in achieving better results, and take resolution to the subångström level.

Volcanologists take an especial interest in geysers because in some respects they can act as proxies for the processes going on in volcanoes. Research into tremor (ground vibration) at Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park has however revealed no evidence of acoustic organ-pipe resonance in the geyser's water column, thereby casting doubt on the importance accorded to resonance in most models of volcanic tremor.

Why can some people consume a huge amount of alcohol with little effect, while others are drunk after just one glass? The answer lies in a molecule found in the brain, called neuropeptide Y (NPY), and a new study shows that mice lacking NPY consume twice as much alcohol as their normal counterparts, and are much less susceptible to its effects.

After swimming many miles from its marine habitat to inland rivers, a salmon spawns and then dies. But this is not the end of the story — it seems that significant levels of certain elements, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, are exported to the surrounding riverbank and terrestrial ecosystems from the salmon carcasses.

The main element of the Earth's magnetic field is an axial dipole aligned with the Earth's rotation axis. But has that always been so? Analysis of a global palaeomagnetic database going back beyond 250 million years ago and deep into the Precambrian provides evidence that, among other possibilities, the field may then have had significant octupole and quadrupole components.

Length changes in muscle result from the relative sliding of filaments composed of myosin and actin; the heads of the myosin molecules attach to the actin, exert force and then detach. Several papers provide further evidence for the view that the myosin head acts as a lever arm in this process, rather than tilting as a whole, and for the extent of lever-arm movement.

Daedalus believes that fat, especially for women, represents a vicious cycle. Fat women are perceived in many cultures as being less sexually desirable than their thinner counterparts, yet they are more likely to desire sex themselves because fat is a source of oestrogen. So, DREADCO chemists are seeking a drug that dissolves in fat but stimulates rather than sabotages its biochemistry, boosting the production of both oestrogen and leptin.

When a flash of inspiration strikes an inventor or a scientist pondering a theory, they scramble for a scrap of paper on which to capture the thought. When these jottings are drawings they become a form of graphic art.

New products covered here include a cDNA selection kit, dye-polymerase and high-efficiency polymerase formulations, separation systems for DNA synthesis, single-tube PCR and RT-PCR amplification systems. These compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers. For more details, fill in the reader service card bound inside the journal.