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A newly elected parliament and executive provides opportunities for Scotland not only to imitate the best of Westminster, but also to do better in its handling of Scottish research and public controversies.
Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre in California have started an experiment to search for evidence of short-lived subatomic particles known as B-mesons.
European scientists must be prepared to publicize the importance of their work if they want to be as successful in attracting funding as their colleagues in the United States.
Astronomers around the world are lamenting the loss of Abrixas, a small German-built X-ray satellite whose batteries failed two days after a successful Russian launch.
Trade unions representing French scientists are claiming victory in their opposition to planned research reforms before a national consultation is completed in July.
University departments whose ‘structures’ do not match those followed by Britain's research assessment exercise, appear to get systematically lower research ratings.
Programme officers at the US National Science Foundation have been told to stop using their considerable clout with principal investigators to negotiate down the size of research grants.
Representatives of national space agencies involved in a long-delayed X-ray astronomy mission will meet in Moscow next week to discuss the prospects for the project, now due for launch in 2001.
Bristol-Myers Squibb, a leading maker of AIDS drugs will give $100 million over the next five years to a programme of clinical research, physician training and AIDS education, prevention and treatment in southern Africa.
With the arrival of devolved governments in Scotland and Wales, British science has an opportunity to build on past experience and experiment with new ways of implementing science advice.
The role of the new Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST) is to "blow the whistle", according to the commission's director-general.
British supporters of Unesco remain at loggerheads with the government over the extent to which it is prepared to support national efforts to exploit Britain's membership of the UN agency.
The US National Academy of Sciences is planning to help set up an Inter-Academy Centre, run by a multinational board, as a mechanism for setting up and running special panels of top-level scientific, engineering and health experts.
A three-dimensional record of dinosaur feet and movement comes from 200-million-year-old footprints made in wet mud. Comparisons of these prints with the tracks made by living birds clear up some of the mysteries about dinosaur toes and the tracks that they left.
Researchers working around a reservoir in the French Alps find that changes in certain phenomena, such as emissions of radon gas from the ground in the vicinity, follow variations in the reservoir's water level. The water level reflects the amount of stress being applied to the underlying Earth's crust. So this approach may provide clues as to geophysical signals evident when crust deforms in the build up to an earthquake.
The first near-infrared image of a dust ring around a young nearby star has been taken by an instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. The image was made possible by blocking out the star's glare, and the narrowness of the revealed ring implies that it is being gravitationally confined by companion bodies.
When calcium enters the cell it regulates a host of intracellular signalling processes, including activity of the channels that transported it in there. These voltage-gated Ca2+ channels can be either inactivated or stimulated by Ca2+, and it now turns out that both of these functions are modulated by the same molecule — the classical Ca2+receptor protein calmodulin.
The mechanical properties of carbonitrides — materials containing carbon or nitrogen, together with a transition metal — can be tested empirically, revealing that carbonitrides are nearly as hard as diamonds. Computer simulations have now linked these experimental observations to the underlying electronic structure of the material.
How can several plant species coexist when they are all competing for the same resources — nutrients, light and carbon, for instance? It seems that they survive by tapping these resources in a different way, and an example of this is now described in transient aquatic ecosystems. The variety of photosynthetic processes used illustrates how these plants have adapted to life in the same pond.
The neurotransmitter glutamate binds to the NMDA and AMPA receptors, which have distinct functions and are also thought to differ in their requirement for glutamate. Whereas AMPA receptors may not necessarily be saturated by a single glutamate release event, saturation of NMDA receptors is predicted to be almost complete. But new data indicate that NMDA receptors are, in fact, far from saturated by a single release event.
This week's scheme involves growing diamonds through crystallization. The C2radical is used as the source of extra carbon to grow, and shape, larger diamonds from seed specimens. Jewellery and cutting-tool businesses will be transformed.
Smaller (volumes for fluorescence spectroscopy), faster (mRNA assays) and bigger (inventories of antibodies) — more new and refurbished products for molecular and other biologists vie for your attention. Compiled in the Nature office from information provided by the manufacturers.
Any researcher who leaves the academic world to start their own company will face a steep learning curve when it comes to the financial and business aspects. Nature's writers offer practical advice in this eight-page feature.
