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Volume 413 Issue 6852, 13 September 2001

Prospects

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Movers

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Opinion

  • A small proportion of referees are undermining the scientific process, especially in biology. Some of the problems are getting worse, partly because of changes in scientific publishing.

    Opinion
  • Debates over the administration of US astronomy funding have highlighted areas for collaboration between agencies.

    Opinion
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News

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News in Brief

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Erratum

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News Feature

  • As journal editors and scientists meet this week to discuss peer review, Rex Dalton considers what happens when competitive pressures disrupt the process, and examines measures designed to keep the system straight.

    • Rex Dalton
    News Feature
  • Massive financial endowments allow the top US universities to offer the best salaries and conditions in the academic world. David Adam asks how their British counterparts can close the gap.

    • David Adam
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Book Review

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Words

  • How can scientists use the media to give their side of the story to the public?

    • John Emsley
    Words
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Concepts

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News & Views

  • Almost 70 years after it was first proposed, an experiment shows that electrons can be diffracted by light waves. This result highlights the interchangeable roles of matter and light.

    • Philip H. Bucksbaum
    News & Views
  • The theory that haemoglobin evolved to carry oxygen around the body may need a rethink in light of another way in which molecules related to nitric oxide, released from haemoglobin, help the brain control respiration.

    • Stuart A. Lipton
    News & Views
  • Being an arthropod, with an external skeleton and jointed limbs, is a good thing in evolutionary terms. But the question of how the main groups of arthropods are related remains a subject of intense debate.

    • Mark Blaxter
    News & Views
  • Colliding a heavy projectile with an even heavier target nucleus only occasionally produces superheavy elements. Analyses of the processes that prevent fusion suggest that projectile size is one of the problems.

    • Yuri Oganessian
    News & Views
  • In times of starvation the liver turns into a glucose-producing organ, providing fuel for the brain. The hormonal signals that control this switch in glucose metabolism may converge on a single regulatory molecule.

    • Antonio Vidal-Puig
    • Stephen O'Rahilly
    News & Views
  • Extremophile bacteria found in hot springs might one day provide the basis for high-tech garden compost. Such bacterial fermentation could digest all sorts of rubbish under the right conditions.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Brief Communication

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Brief Communications Arising

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Article

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Letter

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Erratum

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Foreword

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Review Article

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Progress

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Corporate Support

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New on the Market

  • Some of the latest offerings for the burgeoning sequencing industry.

    New on the Market
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Insight

  • The transduction of environmental stimuli, such as odour, light and sound, into a cellular response is the first, crucial step in sensory processing. Many molecules involved in the different transduction pathways have been identified in the past few years. And as this Collection of reviews shows, although our senses encode a vast diversity of signals, similarities in transduction mechanisms are common.

    Insight
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