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Researchers who devote themselves to sequencing genomes often lack the time to interpret their results. Others don't. The tensions that can result reflect the need for a rethink of sequencers' priorities or a change in approach to collaboration.
. A cease-fire appears to have been struck in the war of words between rival teams that has characterized recent progress toward sequencing the human genome.
. One of China's leading AIDS researchers has warned that if the country does not take effective measures, it could soon find itself with the highest number of AIDS patients in the world.
. A new era has opened for Canadian health science researchers with the launch of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, linking together researchers in institutions across the country
. Researchers at Ohio State University (OSU) are assembling a novel radio array of 64 tiny antennas that may soon offer unprecedented capabilities for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
. A working group set up by the National Institutes of Health has urged that its Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee play a greater role in determining whether gene therapy trials proceed.
. The recent reorganization of oversight of gene therapy trials in the United States seem to have had little impact on attitudes to such trials on the other side of the Atlantic.
Hubert Markl, president of Germany's Max Planck Society, wants to make the organization work as a coherent whole. As the society prepared for its annual meeting in Munich, he explained his vision to Alison Abbott.
The science of the incredibly small is shedding its sci-fi image. An anticipated influx of US government funds is nurturing a new wave of interdisciplinary nanoscale research, says Colin Macilwain.
The view that much of the energy of ocean tides is dissipated in deep water, rather than in shallow coastal seas, now finds observational support. Curiously, the results bear upon our understanding of climate change.
Life expectancy at birth is increasing in most of the industrialized nations. But a new analysis shows that the rate of ‘mortality decline’ in the G7 countries is faster than predicted by national governments, with implications for planning future health care and pensions.
Water-repellent layers on the surface of leaves keep plants healthy, but also make it difficult to spray crops effectively with pesticides. Adding a low level of flexible polymers in the solution may be the answer, by stopping the drops from bouncing off.
The ability to repair damaged human nerve tissue would be highly beneficial. A promising ‘biomaterial’ for this purpose consists of a peptide scaffold that acts as a substrate for the attachment and growth of neurons. But the system will require much more development before it can be considered clinically viable.
Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's last theorem by providing a partial proof of another difficult problem, the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture. Four mathematicians have completed the full proof, which connects very different areas of mathematics.
Cdc42 is a small GTPase that interacts with various downstream targets to regulate many cellular processes. The latest target to be identified is a subunit of a complex involved in vesicle formation. Surprisingly, this subunit may be required for Cdc42 to induce cells to switch to malignant growth.
Mushrooms are the fruit bodies of certain fungi and usually develop from two compatible colonies. A study of one such fungus, however, shows that during a particular period the mushrooms were mosaics — that is, they formed from several genetically distinct populations of cells. The reasons remain mysterious.
All current methods of identifying individual people have their flaws. Daedalus has a new idea — use of the red-eye effect in photography to reveal a person's individual blood spectrum. The resulting database will transform a state's surveillance of its citizens.
The completion of entire genome sequences of many experimental organisms, and the promise that the human genome will be completed in the next year, find biology suddenly awash in genome-based data. Scientists are scrambling to develop new technologies that exploit genome data to ask entirely new kinds of questions about the complex nature of living cells.
The past decade has witnessed astounding technological advances in genome sequencing. The next step in this biological revolution - 'functional genomics' - is the subject of this Nature Insight. Functional genomics is not simply the assignation of function to identified genes, but the organization and control of genetic pathways that make up cells and organisms. Leading figures in genomics assess here the challenges arising from the avalanche of sequence data.