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Volume 405 Issue 6788, 15 June 2000

Opinion

  • 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.

    Opinion

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News

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News in Brief

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News Feature

  • 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.

    • Alison Abbott
    News Feature
  • 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.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Book Review

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Millennium Essay

  • The Nazis showed that ‘politically responsible’ science risks losing its soul.

    • Ute Deichmann
    Millennium Essay
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Futures

  • There's more to industrial waste than chimneys and slag heaps.

    • Henry Wessells
    Futures
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News & Views

  • 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.

    • Carl Wunsch
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Shiro Horiuchi
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Jacob Klein
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Melitta Schachner
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Ivar Ekeland
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Channing J. Der
    • William E. Balch
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Nicholas P. Money
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Erratum

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Brief Communication

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Erratum

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Article

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Letter

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Introduction

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Overview

  • 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.

    • Ognjenka Goga Vukmirovic
    • Shirley M. Tilghman
    Overview
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Progress

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Review Article

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Corporate Support

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New on the Market

  • Windows but no pain, doors but no entry, Watson but with Crick.

    New on the Market
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Insight

  • 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.

    Insight
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