Volume 399 Issue 6738, 24 June 1999

A year-long ‘stand-off’ between French researchers and the science ministry signals the need for change.

london

A proposal from the French presidents Jacques Chirac to set up an international council of scientists to validate new foods was rejected at last weekend's G8 summit in Cologne.

washington

US Vice President Al Gore's campaign for the presidency has became tangled in a controversy over his opposition to a South African law aimed at providing low-cost AIDS drugs.

washington

A federal court is to hear arguments next year in a lawsuit filed against the US Environmental Protection Agency that may play a key role in determining not only how the agency assesses cancer risks, but how it weighs scientific evidence in crafting regulations.

london

The Wellcome Trust, Britain's largest medical research charity, is to increase the salaries of some of its UK-based research staff to 30 per cent above the basic university pay scale.

tokyo

Japan is to tighten its safety regulations on genetically modified crops following research published last month suggesting that pollen from Btcorn could harm the larvae of monarch butterflies.

washington

A critical report on security at US nuclear weapons laboratories has prompted the Department of Energy and the labs' congressional allies to hold urgent talks.

washington

Harold Varmus, the director of the US National Institutes of Health, has rebuffed criticisms of E-Biomed, his plan to integrate biomedical literature into a global website.

paris

The American Institute of Biological Sciences has announced plans to combine up to 200 of the journals published by its member societies within a single, searchable website.

london

'Terminator', the controversial technology in which seeds are genetically modified to become sterile after one season's planting, could give way to a more farmer-friendly alternative.

london

Representatives of science academies from developed and developing countries will meet in London next month to discuss a possible joint study on genetic modification in world agriculture.

paris

A proposal for an international research centre in the Middle East built around a synchrotron to be donated by Germany was officially launched at a meeting in Paris last week.

jerusalem

A senior Israeli government scientist says the law on research and development needs to be revised in line with changes in intellectual property rights and technology exports.

san diego

The University of California at San Francisco is suspending an internationally known anesthesiology researcher who diverted millions of dollars from drug company grants to a nonprofit foundation that he directed.

london

Astronomers have begun to receive pictures from one of twin infrared telescopes based at Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

london

Suggestions by the World Conference on Science on developing policies for science should be complemented by attention to the parallel task of building science into policies, according to Sir Robert May, Britain's chief scientific adviser.

london

The ethical dimensions of developments in science, environmental issues, and concerns about poverty have emerged as priorities that readers of Nature's website would like to see addressed at next week's World Conference on Science.

london

Nature's news writers will be providing daily electronic coverage from the World Conference on Science from Saturday 26 June, the first day of the meeting, up to Friday 2 July, the day after the closing session.

Computer chips continue to shrink. But the discovery that a layer of silicon dioxide must be at least four to five atoms thick to function as an insulator suggests that silicon-based microchips will reach the physical limits of miniaturization early next century.

The Hox genes, which are found in all multicellular animals, can be studied to determine evolutionary relationships. There's an argument that, the more Hox genes an organism possesses, the more sophisticated its body plan can be. Minimal estimates for the number of Hox genes at key points in evolution now suggest that Hox-gene expansion occurred early in the evolution of bilaterally symmetrical animals, well before they diverged into protostomes and deuterostomes.

The Hawaiian islands are the surface manifestation of a so-called mantle plume. According to one idea, these plumes are recycled slabs of material that was originally created at mid-ocean ridges and then subducted deep into the mantle. An analysis of osmium isotope ratios in Hawaiian lavas not only supports the idea but — contentiously — concludes that the slab material is little distorted despite having undergone a billion years of mantle convection.

Paintings of the Grand Canyon by David Hockney are among the highlights of the Royal Academy's summer exhibition in London.

The'guardian of the genome', p53, is the best-known tumour-suppressor gene. Two other proteins — p63 and p73 — have similar sequences and properties to p53. But p53 is the only one to be induced by DNA damage. Or at least it was. A new study shows that, in fact, p73 is also induced by DNA damage via the non-receptor tyrosine kinase c-Abl.

The Glomales are asexual mycorrhizal fungi that have a long evolutionary history. Molecular genetic analyses seem to show that individuals of one species of these fungi contain highly divergent nuclei, which, in the absence of genetic recombination, will have been subject to the accumulation of harmful mutations. Questions are about how these fungi have coped with such mutations, and whether it is valid to apply conventional phylogenetic techniques to them.

Analyses of images taken by the Clementine spacecraft have provided striking maps of solar illumination at the lunar south pole. Crater edges at the pole may be sunlit up to 80% of the time, while crater floors may be in permanent shadow. Both conditions have implications for the possibility of building bases on the Moon — the first for the positioning of solar arrays, the second for the availability of water.

A defining characteristic of certain neurodegenerative diseases is the formation of filamentous deposits of a microtubule-associated protein called tau, in an abnormal hyperphosphorylated form. New work shows that this form of tau can bind to a prolyl isomerase called Pin1, and that this interaction restores the biological activity of phosphorylated tau. This discovery could open the way to developing therapeutic compounds that reduce the pool of functionally impaired tau.

Rusting iron absorbs oxygen and gives out heat. By controlling this reaction in a flask of pressurized water, Daedalus hopes to develop a'ferrous compost heap' that can be made to produce heat and a range of handy fuels such as hydrogen.

The best career prospects for scientists in the Benelux countries are in industry or administration. But the outlook in universities is improving too, with more postdoc jobs in Belgium, and many Dutch professors nearing retirement.

Thrombolysis has become established as an acute treatment for human stroke. But despite multiple clinical trials, neuroprotective strategies have yet to be proved effective in humans. Here we discuss intrinsic tissue mechanisms of ischaemic brain injury, and present a perspective that broadening of therapeutic targeting beyond excitotoxicity and neuronal calcium overload will be desirable for developing the most effective neuroprotective therapies.

Epilepsies are a diverse collection of brain disorders that affect 1–2% of the population. Current therapies are unsatisfactory as they provide only symptomatic relief, are effective in only a subset of affected individuals, and are often accompanied by persistent toxic effects. It is hoped that insight into the cellular and molecular mechanisms of epileptogenesis will lead to new therapies, prevention, or even a cure. Emerging insights point to alterations of synaptic function and intrinsic properties of neurons as common mechanisms underlying the hyperexcitability in diverse forms of epilepsy.

The degeneration of forebrain dopamine systems in Parkinson's disease has been an effective target for pharmaceutical research over the past four decades. However, although dopamine replacement may alleviate the symptoms of the disease, it does not halt the underlying neuronal degeneration. The past decade has seen major advances in identifying discrete genetic and molecular causes of parkinsonism and mapping the events involved in nigral cell death. This new understanding of the pathogenesis of the disease now offers novel prospects for therapy based on targeted neuroprotection of vulnerable neurons and effective strategies for their replacement.

The progress that has been made in the last decades in understanding the biology of the nervous system is extraordinary, and nowhere is this more immediately relevant than in the understanding and treatment of neurological disorders. Thus, we believe that this supplement is both timely and important to our readership.