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Volume 401 Issue 6756, 28 October 1999

Opinion

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  • A debate on the prospects for women in science reveals some pessimism as well as constructive ideas of wider relevance.

    Opinion
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News

  • San Francisco

    Public opposition to agricultural biotechnology in the industrial world could rob developing countries of the fruits of genetic research vital to their survival says the president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

    • Sally Lehrman
    News
  • Tokyo

    Japanese pharmaceutical companies announced they are linking up with The World Health Organization and Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare to launch a new initiative aimed at discovering drugs against malaria.

    • Asako Saegusa
    News
  • Munich

    A pilot study systematically to characterize 21 commonly used inbred strains of mice has been launched by scientists in a number of US laboratories.

    • Alison Abbott
    News
  • London

    Koichiro Matsuura, Japan's ambassador to France, is expected to be officially appointed next month as the new director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

    • David Dickson
    • Peter Pockley
    News
  • San Diego

    A series of meetings between US and Chinese scientific leaders was marred when a powerful US Congressman pulled out of a seminar citing allegations of Chinese spying and illegal technology uses.

    • Rex Dalton
    News
  • Munich

    Leading European molecular biologists are to launch a new initiative to present to politicians a united view on the needs of the basic research community in Europe.

    • Alison Abbott
    News
  • London

    The Ukrainian Security Service has arrested a prominent marine biologist, Sergei Piontkovski of the Institute of Biology of Southern Seas (IBSS) in Sebastopol, on charges of transferring secret information abroad and handling hard currency illegally.

    • Natasha Loder
    • Carl Levitin
    News
  • New Delhi

    India's coalition government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party since this month's general election, has stirred controversy with plans to create a broad ministry for information technology (IT), to be headed by a non-technical person.

    • K. S. Jayaraman
    News
  • Boston

    Computers that can sense human emotions are likely to be developed in the relatively near future a symposium heard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory.

    • Steve Nadis
    News
  • London

    The Irish government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are close to a deal which would create a $ 200 million research and teaching centre for information technology in Dublin.

    • Natasha Loder
    News
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News Profile

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News in Brief

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Correction

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Correspondence

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Commentary

  • If the multinational Human Genome Project is to continue its successful start, sequencing strategies must be changed.

    • Jared C. Roach
    • Andrew F. Siegel
    • Leroy Hood
    Commentary
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Autumn Books

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Millennium Essay

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News & Views

  • From time to time the Earth's magnetic field reverses in polarity, and the record of such reversals is preserved in rocks magnetized at the time of their formation. The cause of reversals has usually been sought in the behaviour of the Earth's core, where the geomagnetic field is generated. But new simulations, which provide a good fit with part of the rock record, implicate mantle events in reversals.

    • Bruce Buffett
    News & Views
  • The neurotrophins were named after their ability to regulate the survival and differentiation of nerve cells. But they are also thought to be involved in the processes that underlie neuronal plasticity, and a new report indicates that their function goes even further than this -- they not only modulate chemical transmission, but, like the more classical neurotransmitters, they mediate it.

    • Benedikt Berninger
    • Mu-ming Poo
    News & Views
  • The Laplace operator has had a central place in the development of large areas of the physical sciences, and remains a subject of investigation. The so-called 'hotspots conjecture' is important in the theory underlying the Laplace operator: applied to heat diffusion, it states that the hottest and coldest regions eventually lie on the boundary of any planar domain. This expected answer, however, is it seems wrong.

    • Ian Stewart
    News & Views
  • The decline of growth rate with increasing size and lifespan is one of the few universal laws in ecology. Now, a theoretical growth law for trees has been combined with field measurements to show that rainforest species with different ecological strategies can still attain the same optimal use of energy.

    • Robert J. Whittaker
    News & Views
  • Although many mutations are harmful, some can help a population to adapt to environmental changes and enhance its chances of survival. Mutations have always been thought to be random, chance events, but the discovery of a set of enzymes known as mutases indicates that cells have mechanisms for generating them. The process needs to be tightly regulated, though, and is switched on only when the cell is under stress.

    • Miroslav Radman
    News & Views
  • Cyclotrons are well known as the first useful particle accelerators. Less familiar is their use for high-precision measurements of fundamental constants, such as the electron magnetic moment. An experiment that records the fundamental quantum limit of a cyclotron opens the way to even better measurements of the electron magnetic moment.

    • P. Meystre
    News & Views
  • The most intensively studied element of the immune system is the major histocompatibility complex, to which various gene families contribute. Two papers which provide complete nucleotide sequences of these complexes in the human and chicken allow more thorough comparison of them than ever before.

    • Peter Parham
    News & Views
  • One way to counter global warming would be to increase cloud cover, and so reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth. Daedalus plans to do this with a save-the-planet diesel fuel which emits huge numbers of particles to act as cloud-condensation nuclei. The downside, in cold, humid conditions, will be appalling fog on the motorways.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
  • Arthur Cain -- naturalist and doughty Darwinian, who did seminal work in ecological genetics and was a standard bearer for the view that most evolutionary changes are not neutral in terms of natural selection.

    • Bryan Clarke
    News & Views
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Brief Communication

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Review Article

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Article

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Letter

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