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A proposal to set up a body analogous to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has much to commend it. But it raises questions that should critically influence the allocation of responsibility.
A permanent international forum should be set up to assess both the science and the social implications of genetically modified foods, say scientists at a meeting organized by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The new director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation has given a damning report on the organisation in his first diagnosis since taking office three months ago.
Space experiments in protein crystal growth have yielded no important results to date, says a report released last week by the US National Research Council.
The chief of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Francis Collins, has warned against a move to require human geneticists to obtain informed consent from family members, not just primary subjects, when they solicit family histories from subjects.
The health minister has confirmed her department is setting up a panel of experts to explore all appropriate aspects of developing prevention and treatment strategies for HIV/AIDS.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week announced the creation of an institute for studying the human brain — the centrepiece of a new neuroscience complex.
Secret talks between rival teams racing to complete the sequencing of the human genome have failed, dashing hopes of collaboration and leaving a trail of recriminations.
The peak in recovery of biodiversity seems to lag the peak of anextinction by about ten million years. This pattern is independent of theseverity of extinction, implying that recoveries create new ecological opportunities.
There is a fundamental difference between quantum and classical ignorance. We take it for granted that we can erase classical information, but deletion of unknown quantum states is not possible. This result complements the ‘no-cloning’ rule that says it is impossible to copy an unknown quantum state perfectly.
What happens in the brain when we pay attention to one stimulus — say tactile or visual — and ignore the others that are bombarding our senses? Individual neurons can fire at different rates, and thereby convey information to other neurons. But the degree of synchrony in the firing of groups of neurons may also matter, and this principle is implicated in the process of attention.
Melting is a familiar process not expected to show surprises: the melting of ice in a cocktail is expected to produce cooling not heating. Yet just such an effect — inverse melting — has been seen during a study of phase transitions in a polymeric system. As a result the crystalline phase appears to be more disordered than the glassy phase.
Certain white blood cells home in on pathogens attacking the body by following gradients of chemoattractant to their targets. Cell movement in this chemotactic process requires extension of the cell's leading edge. That, it now emerges, stems from generation of lipid signals by an enzyme called phosphoinositide-3-OH kinase. The result is a highly polarized signalling cascade which leads to directed movement.
The use of molecules in electronic devices is expected to play a role in the future miniaturization of electronics. A device that uses molecular layers (rather than individual molecules) to control electrical behaviour represents a new approach to ‘molecular electronics’, because control is achieved indirectly without any electrons passing through the molecules.
Male long-tailed dance flies (Rhamphomyia longicauda) prefer to mate with females with swollen abdomens, possibly because they relate large abdomen size to egg maturity. But the females cheat the males into picking them for mating: they puff up their abdomens with air, presumably making the males think that their eggs are more mature than they really are.
There are two parts to Antarctica, East and West. A central question in reconstructing global plate-tectonic history has been what amount of movement there has been between them in the past 80 million years or so. New data from geophysical surveys allows firm bounds to be put upon the extent of motion, and thereby more rigorous estimates to be incorporated into the ‘plate-motion circuit’ used to calculate the Earth's tectonic history.
This week Daedalus extends his idea of teleomere-depleted ova, which produce pets with predictable life spans, to animal husbandry. He sees the humane possibilities of meat production which uses such animals — instead of having to be slaughtered, they will drop dead at a predetermined time.
