Volume 401 Issue 6755, 21 October 1999

London

Britain's Wellcome Trust is to provide up to £10 million ($16.5 million) to build up a database of genome sequence information directly linked to human cancers.

paris

The jury is still out on Craig Venter, head of of Celera Genomics Systems, whose stated ambition is to sequence and piece together the entire human genome by 2001.

London

The medical journal The Lancet has drawn criticism from Britain's Royal Society for publishing a paper on genetically modified potatoes by a controversial author.

Tokyo

The Japanese Patent Office has released its first guidelines on human gene patents.

Montreal

The Canadian federal government is to fund 2000 new research chairs at Canadian universities - 1200 over the next three years.

Paris

The number of students studying sciences in French universities and high schools has fallen for the fourth years in a row.

Washington

Final regulations were published in Washington last week on access to university researchers' data under the Freedom of Information Act.

Washington

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences will appear on PubMed Central, the US National Institutes of Health's new research archive, one month after the publication of the journal.

Munich

A major mission to determine the Earth's gravity field at high resolution has been recommended by Earth scientists as top priority.

London

Researchers have shown for the first time that the search for human genes can be substantially narrowed using maps of small variations in the genome, and shown that the density of variations needed is much lower than previously suggested.

Washington

Nasa last week gave the go-ahead to launch two new medium-class Explorer spacecraft in the next five years.

Munich

A major mission to determine the Earth's gravity field at high resolution has been recommended by Earth scientists as top priority.

Researchers presented data that supports signing the test ban treaty, but they found that most politicians had already made up their minds.

Most people assume that a wave, being central to all the phenomena we observe, has a uniform definition. But defining this basic concept isn't so easy.

The seeds of our understanding of global warming were sown by early heroes.

Hertz's work on electromagnetism started as many arguments as it settled.

To form the connections of the nervous system, axons must connect up with the areas that will be their final target. Intermediate targets are thought to act as signposts along the way, sending out guidance molecules that tell the axons which way to go. But a new study shows that these intermediate targets do much more than this, and that they are required to keep the migrating neurons alive.

Biochemical reactions are extremely rapid, yet the techniques for imaging the enzymes that catalyse them can be very slow. To get around this problem, structures can be determined at roughly the temperature of liquid nitrogen -- literally freezing an enzyme's movements in time. This has now been done for a protein called bacteriorhodopsin.

The development of methods for slowing and trapping gaseous species has led to a renaissance in atomic physics, which is now also progressing into molecular/chemical physics. The latest advances come from two groups who have devised techniques that, in principle, provide new approaches for trapping molecules and spectroscopically studying them.

Benzodiazepine drugs -- such as Valium -- induce relaxation, but they also have unwelcome side effects. These drugs work by binding to the GABA_A receptor on nerve cells and damping down the electrical activity of these cells. Depending on where in the brain they are found, GABA_Areceptors have different actions, so the aim is to develop drugs that target only those receptors that produce the desired effects.

The rapidity and amount of carbon being released through human agency have been thought to be unprecedented. Not so, it emerges. From the evidence of anomalies in the ratios of carbon isotopes in an ocean core, it seems that, around 55 million years ago, there was an equivalently swift and massive blast of carbon into the ocean and atmosphere. The source was probably methane hydrates that are usually locked up in huge deposits on continental shelves.

Mammals and flies both stave off pathogens using the innate immune response. In the fruit fly this involves cell-surface receptors belonging to the Toll family, which mediate separate anti-bacterial and anti-fungal responses in the same type of cell. Studies of two mammalian Toll-like receptors, TLR2 and TLR4, indicate that this system is also used in the innate immune responses of higher animals.

Hot springs on the sea floor pump out a potent cocktail of chemicals. Now mercury has been added to the mix, discovered at hydrothermal vents off the coast of New Zealand.

New insights continue to emerge into fluid mixing -- a complex process that remains poorly understood. The latest progress comes from experimental investigations of a type of low-speed mixing called chaotic advection, which show that surprisingly stable spatial patterns can arise.

How do you stick your tongue into an ant's nest? The giant anteater does it by opening its mouth using the muscles that other mammals employ for the reverse operation.

Since the discipline of space biology was launched over 40 years ago there have been many developments, some of which were reviewed and discussed at a workshop last month. The workshop was unusual in that it focused on the effects of microgravity above the cellular level -- in contrast to much of contemporary biology, which is concerned more with molecules.

The focus of drugs for treating HIV-1 infection has switched from protease and reverse-transcriptase inhibitors to compounds that prevent fusion of the virus with human cells. The target protein in this pathway is known as gp41, and, last year, a pocket was identified in gp41 that could act as the binding site for a fusion inhibitor. Peptide inhibitors that specifically bind this pocket have now been identified.

What are the 'features' or 'parts' that our brains use to tell one thing from another? Several algorithms exist for learning object parts, and the development of the latest -- known as non-negative matrix factorization -- is now reported. This algorithm seems to decompose sets of faces into 'basis functions' that are different, and more part-like, than those found by conventional algorithms.

Hoxd genes are needed for the formation of sphincters to subdivide the developing gut.

Antibodies feature strongly in a selection aimed at neuroscientists.