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US astronomers are getting better at forming a collective view of priorities. Their latest wish list is worth fighting for, but it is the process used to generate it that gives the community the best chance of attracting the necessary funds.
Keen to promote a single European astronomy organization, Britain is opening negotiations about possible membership of the European Southern Observatory.
The idea that most of the primary scientific literature should be available for free in electronic form has gained some heavyweight support from 10 leading biomedical researchers.
Frustrated advocates of action to alleviate global warming won a valuable new ally last week when US Senator John McCain held a hearing highlighting warnings that human activities play a significant role in global warming.
France's biomedical research agency, INSERM, has clashed with some of its research staff over an ambitious proposal to build a multi-million dollar centre for physiology research outside Paris.
Robert Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore, Maryland, last week unveiled plans to test a novel AIDS vaccine within the next two years.
Australian researchers have been upset to learn they are being expected to help the government make hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘savings’ through a cut in funding to research grant recipients.
North America is about to come under intense geophysical scrutiny. Rex Dalton explains how the four projects known as EarthScope will advance our understanding of volcanoes, fault systems and earthquakes.
The snowball Earth hypothesis posits an ice-covered planet. New climate simulations of ‘snowball’ conditions allow ice-free equatorial oceans that may be crucial for a theory about early animal evolution.
ATM and NBS1 are genes that are mutated in two different human diseases. Cells from patients with these diseases show similarities, including increased chromosome breakage, so ATM and NBS1 might work together in DNA repair. Indeed, ATM phosphorylates NBS1 in several places — events needed for the cellular response to DNA breaks.
To the eye, most stars seem to be single, like our Sun, but in fact about half are binary or multiple systems. Now a newly accepted theory of star formation — fragmentation — that explains the formation of binary systems makes it unlikely that single stars will harbour planets. Binary stars may be more hospitable.
Imprinted genes, such as the closely linked genesH19 and Igf2, are expressed from either the maternal or the paternal chromosome, but not both. A newly discovered mechanism for ‘silencing’ the Igf2 gene on the maternal chromosome involves an ‘insulator’ region found upstream of H19.
The degree of rotation of the Earth's inner core relative to the mantle has been under study for several years, the techniques concerned becoming ever more refined. The best resolution yet comes from a method involving seismic waves scattered by the core: the answer it gives is 0.15° per year.
Over the past decade there has been a surge of studies on ocean biogeochemistry, and the carbon cycle in particular. The results were the central topic of a meeting in April, one message being that it is the biological aspects of the oceanic carbon cycle that are the trickiest to quantify.
Carefully engineered systems sometimes fail catastrophically despite the best intentions of their designers. A new theory called ‘highly optimized tolerance’ attempts to explain how this happens.
The regulation of synaptic plasticity by neuronal activity is thought to underlie learning and memory. A new way of altering synaptic properties in response to activity involves changes in the composition and function of AMPA-type receptors for the neurotransmitter glutamate.
The use of photons for information transmission in part depends on creating the appropriate circuitry. Photonic crystals for the control and routing of optical signals could be used as one component of such circuits. An innovative way of fabricating these crystals involving artificial opal and silicon provides a promising route forward.
Cockayne syndrome is a rare, inherited human disease that can arise from mutations in any one of five genes, involved in different aspects of DNA repair. New results have now led to a model for how all of these different mutations result in the same disease.
Underwater creatures have devised several ways for working out how deep they are. Daedalus reckons one unexplored method may be the unfolding of proteins at increased pressures, or depths. Such ‘barometric enzymes’ may throw light on the problem of protein folding.
