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Sir John Maddox, editor of Nature for almost 23 years prior to his retirement in 1996, was last week elected the first honorary fellow of Britain's Royal Society.
European countries are expected to approve a $73 million upgrade of Europe's research Internet networks, a move likely to create the infrastructure for an advanced network of research computers.
The intensifying civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo may seriously threaten future research on bonobos — pygmy chimpanzees — the rarest and least known species of great apes.
The US National Institutes of Health has taken over responsibility of 288 chimpanzees infected with HIV and hepatitis C as a result of their involvement in research projects.
South African government officials have reacted cautiously to a deal by five major companies to slash the prices of HIV/AIDS drugs for developing nations.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was reported this week as being out of fire danger, following a blaze that burned 43 square miles of nearby forest.
In a move to bring high throughput DNA sequencing to the world of ecology and evolutionary biology, mitochondrial DNA from every family of mammals is to be sequenced.
The Government's genome science committee is about to issue a declaration calling for an open approach to the release of data in human genome research.
The European Patent Office has revoked a controversial patent for the use of antifungal agents from the Neem tree, causing celebrations among environmentalists fighting against ‘bio-piracy’.
The Indian science minister has welcomed Europe's revocation of a patent on the Neem tree but his advisers say piecemeal victories will not permanently solve the problem of ‘biopiracy’.
Pools of latent HIV, lurking in the cells of infected people, remain untouched even by powerful drug combinations. Paul Smaglik reports on how this is forcing researchers to rethink their strategies for fighting the virus.
The DNA sequence of human chromosome 21, now published, provides indications that the total number of human genes has been overestimated, and is a valuable resource for research into Down syndrome.
Detecting comets is of considerable practical interest, given the need to predict the hazards to Earth they may pose. A detection now comes from an unusual source, the SWAN system carried on a spacecraft. The comet was identified not from its emissions of visible light but from its ultraviolet Lyman-α radiation.
Growth, invasion into surrounding tissues and migration to distant organs are hallmarks of a malignant tumour. Proteins called RAGE and amphoterin have now been identified as a receptor-ligand pair that regulates all three of these characteristics.
During the Last Glacial Maximum concentrations of atmospheric CO2 were about a third lower than now. One factor might have been higher plankton productivity, and so CO2uptake, in the vast Southern Ocean. An innovative analysis of plankton nutrients shows, however, that productivity was lower than now, and invokes alternative explanations.
Aequorin is the calcium-activated photoprotein responsible for bioluminescence in certain jellyfish, and it has long been employed as a calcium sensor in laboratory work. The tertiary structure of aequorin, now published, provides insights into bioluminescence and hints as to future use of the protein in experiments.
In most animal cells, a pair of centrioles resides in the centrosome —an organelle that organizes the cell's microtubule system. It has long been thought that the two centrioles always remain at right angles to each other. It seems, however, that the 'daughter' centriole roams extensively throughout the cell.
A way of reversibly sticking together polymer sheets that are only a molecule thick allows the creation of flexible 'sandwiches' with different adhesive 'fillings'. These crystalline sandwiches may lead to the bulk production of functional materials in areas such as molecular recognition, separation and catalysis.
The liver rapidly oxidizes alcohol. So Daedalus is inventing a way of circumventing the liver, allowing dedicated drinkers to get drunk on far less alcohol. His 'Rubbing Alcohol' will consist of a fatty ester that can be absorbed by the skin and converted to alcohol once inside the body.
