Earthquake tragedy in India spares nuclear power station
India's most severe earthquake in 50 years killed tens of thousands and left many more homeless in Gujarat last week. But the region's atomic power station and space installations were left unscathed.
Ahmedabad, the state's second largest city, is home to the Space Applications Centre, which builds all the payloads for Indian satellites — including the one scheduled to be launched in February — and the Physical Research Laboratory, which does basic studies in space science. "Our structures did not develop even a crack, although high-rise buildings in the immediate neighbourhood collapsed," a spokesman for the space department told Nature.
Authorities said that the atomic power station at Kakrapar 150 km southeast of Ahmedabad also suffered no damage. On the one-to-five scale into which India has been divided, Ahmedabad and Kakrapar are in seismic zone three, whereas Bhuj, which was at the epicentre of last week's quake, is in zone five.
Along with the tragedy, the Bhuj quake has raised some difficult questions for seismologists. The area is in the northern fringe of the stable continental region, and last experienced such a powerful quake in 1819. The recurrence cycle for a quake of this size in this area is expected to be a few thousand years.
Bill Gates provides funding boost to AIDS vaccine
The prospect of developing an affordable AIDS vaccine received a boost last weekend with the news that the charitable foundation set up by Microsoft founder Bill Gates is donating $100 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).
The latest gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, means that the IAVI has now secured $230 million. It needs $550 million to meet its goal of propelling at least six vaccine candidates into efficacy trials by 2007. The Internet company Yahoo! also pledged a further $5 million to the initiative.
"This is a marker for the future," says Andrew McMichael of the University of Oxford, who is working on a vaccine with backing from the IAVI. McMichael's vaccine, being developed with colleagues in Kenya, consists of a DNA vaccine plus the same sequences expressed in a weakened Vaccinia virus.
Cassini sends back snaps of Jupiter
NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
Forget Stanley Kubrick — this is how Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io really looked at the dawn of 2001, as photographed by the outbound Cassini spacecraft on 1 January. Along with a boost in velocity, the Jupiter fly-by gave the $3.4 billion spacecraft a chance to show its capabilities before arriving at Saturn in 2004 for a four-year tour.
Cassini's cameras, spectrometers, radio antennas and other instruments have not disappointed. By the time the Jupiter photography session ends in March, the spacecraft will have returned 25,000 pictures of the planet, most of them focused on its stormy atmosphere. Even though it flew past at a relatively distant 9.7 million kilometres, Cassini's time-lapse pictures will be invaluable to researchers studying the dynamics of Jupiter's weather. The onboard cameras, which improve on those of the Galileo spacecraft in terms of image size and sharpness, also resolved the small moon Himalia for the first time.
And a new kind of sensor, called the magnetospheric imaging instrument, took synthetic pictures of the gigantic field of energetic particles surrounding the planet.
NASA head breaks records in Bush administration
NASA's charismatic administrator, Dan Goldin, who was appointed by George Bush the elder nearly nine years ago, has been asked by Vice-President Dick Chaney to stay on in the job temporarily, until a successor can be found. This gives Goldin the unique distinction of being the first NASA chief in the agency's 43-year history to serve in three different administrations.
Anonymous donors back biotech research
It has been a week of anonymous philanthropy. The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore has received $58.5 million to launch a cell engineering institute. This donation could provide an alternative to federal funding for stem-cell research. Although the US National Institutes of Health last year said it would support stem-cell research projects, President George W. Bush's office has sent signals that he may reverse this decision. The Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering will focus on selecting, modifying and reprogramming human cells as potential therapeutic transplants.
Meanwhile, in New York, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has said it will build a new biotechnology facility with $70 million of a recent anonymous $130 million gift, one of the largest ever given to a US academic institution.
Geneticists unstick Tokyo's favourite snack
Researchers at Japan's Applied Bacteriology Laboratory, part of the National Food Research Institute, have found the gene that makes the fermented soybeans known as natto sticky. Natto is a staple part of the diet for many in the greater Tokyo area — but it usually offends the uninitiated with both its texture and pungent smell.
The researchers randomly disrupted genes in Bacillus subtilis, the fermentation bacterium that makes the polyglutamate which coats the beans with their sticky film. They identified a regulatory gene that is essential for polyglutamate production.
Along with possible medical applications related to polyglutamate's calcium-absorbing properties, the researchers think it might someday be possible to adjust natto stickiness to specific tastes.
Notice of erratum
In response to many queries, this is to give notice that a formal erratum will appear next week concerning the paper "The protein-protein interaction map of Helicobacter pylori" (Nature 409, 211–215; 2001). This paper conforms to our policy of data access: Supplementary Information on Nature's website contains the set of protein interactions reported and analysed in the paper (see http://www.nature.com). Owing to a proof-reading oversight in the Nature office, this statement and link were not included in the published paper.
