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Volume 429 Issue 6988, 13 May 2004

Brief Communications Arising

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Editorial

  • Advocates of therapeutic uses of the drug ecstasy have won the right to research its performance, but opponents continue to snipe. Both sides need to look more deeply into their research agendas.

    Editorial
  • The recent appointment of research minister Mosibudi Mangena bodes well for science, provided that people listen to him.

    Editorial
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News

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News in Brief

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News Feature

  • Geologists have come to an international agreement about the timeline of Earth's history. But the results are not quite set in stone, as John Whitfield discovers.

    • John Whitefield
    News Feature
  • The clubbers' drug is now being studied as a treatment for anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Erika Check charts its rocky road from the psychedelic underground to the psychiatric clinic.

    • Erika Check
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Books & Arts

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Turning Points

  • How a visit to the home of structural biology inspired a young scientist.

    • Mitsuhiro Yanagida
    Turning Points
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News & Views

  • The hunt has been on for a source of extra power to account for the dynamo that generates the Earth's magnetic field. A synthesis of computation and experiment now suggests that the search may not be necessary after all.

    • Richard Holme
    News & Views
  • Cellular signalling pathways depend on the proper activation and inactivation of mediators. New structural information reveals an unusual mechanism by which one such mediator, Rap1, is switched off.

    • Holger Rehmann
    • Johannes L. Bos
    News & Views
  • Entangled photons conspire to create interference patterns that would normally be associated with a wavelength much smaller than that of the individual photons — beating the diffraction limit.

    • Dirk Bouwmeester
    News & Views
  • Traffic flow between cellular compartments is controlled by recruitment of cytoplasmic proteins. New work exemplifies a dual-key mechanism, involving membrane lipids and proteins, that coordinates this control.

    • Toshiki Itoh
    • Pietro De Camilli
    News & Views
  • There are myriad G-protein-coupled receptor proteins in living organisms, but the functions of many are unknown. Two of them are now shown to provide a link between metabolism and blood pressure.

    • Steven C. Hebert
    News & Views
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News and Views Feature

  • What determines how long we will live? Studies of simple organisms, single cells and mammals hint that certain shared principles underlie ageing, and raise the possibility of devising ways to extend life — if we want to.

    • Shino Nemoto
    • Toren Finkel
    News and Views Feature
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Brief Communication

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Corrigendum

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Letter

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Corrigendum

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Japan

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Prospects

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Careers and Recruitment

  • Makers of beer, wine and cheese need microbiologists to keep fermented products at their peak. Kendall Powell gets a taste of the career offerings.

    • Kendall Powell
    Careers and Recruitment
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Career View

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Nature Outlook

  • Japan is changing. The cynic might say that this can't be so - that Japanese policy-makers always talk about change but that nothing ever happens. It is indeed true that new policies in Japan often end up having little ultimate effect, that new systems are trumped by conventional ways of doing things. The latest policy initiative - the reorganization of the universities into administratively independent organizations - might seem to be just another in a long line.

    Nature Outlook
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