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Volume 432 Issue 7019, 16 December 2004

Editorial

  • A plan to reform appropriations committees in the US Congress — and create one devoted to science — is unlikely to come to fruition. Which is just as well.

    Editorial

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  • Those who are publicly funded to regulate harvesting of the oceans should stop barring the public from their discussions.

    Editorial
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News

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News in Brief

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News Feature

  • Western science owes much to Islam's golden age — a debt that is often forgotten. To help redress the balance, Fuat Sezgin has reconstructed a host of scientific treasures using ancient Arabic texts. Alison Abbott reports.

    • Alison Abbott
    News Feature
  • Cane toads are infamous for wreaking havoc on Australian ecosystems. But, as Peter Aldhous discovers, we're only now about to learn whether their fearsome reputation is deserved.

    • Peter Aldhous
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Commentary

  • Biological pest control can benefit the pocket, health and the environment.

    • Peter Neuenschwander
    Commentary
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Books & Arts

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Erratum

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Essay

  • Fluid dynamics: Ludwig Prandtl's ideas brought hydraulics and hydrodynamics together to found a new field.

    • Roddam Narasimha
    Essay
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News & Views

  • A single electron cloud in molecular nitrogen has been photographed. The snapshot is recorded so rapidly that it might become possible to image electron clouds as they change during fundamental molecular processes.

    • Henrik Stapelfeldt
    News & Views
  • Sheep believed to be resistant to scrapie are succumbing to atypical infections and a newly identified strain of the disease. Eradication programmes based on selective breeding should be reappraised.

    • Matthew Baylis
    • K. Marie McIntyre
    News & Views
  • Bacteria have many ways of stealing iron from the organisms they infect. But this thievery is not one-sided, and a newly discovered device in the mammalian tool kit does a good job of keeping bacteria in check.

    • Jonathan Barasch
    • Kiyoshi Mori
    News & Views
  • A thousand years ago, there was a shift in the fish diet in England from freshwater to marine species. The relevant case history, derived from picking through leftovers, has a contemporary resonance.

    • Daniel Pauly
    News & Views
  • Analyses of sediments retrieved from a drifting ice island suggest that the Arctic Ocean may have been ice free and as warm as 15 °C about 70 million years ago. Therein is a challenge for climate models.

    • Christopher J. Poulsen
    News & Views
  • Previous structural snapshots have provided insight into how proteins are imported into the cell nucleus. The structure of an export complex now completes the molecular picture of the nuclear transport cycle.

    • André Hoelz
    • Günter Blobel
    News & Views
  • The platypus' sex chromosomes are as peculiar as its appearance. Five X and five Y chromosomes form a remarkable chain-like configuration in male reproductive cells that ensures appropriate sperm formation.

    • Laura Carrel
    News & Views
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Research Highlights

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Brief Communication

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Introduction

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Review Article

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Commentary

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Article

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Letter

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Prospects

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Insight

  • "Space", as Douglas Adams famously said, "is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." Change 'space' to 'chemical space', and his statement has similar resonance: the total number of possible small organic molecules that populate 'chemical space' has been estimated to exceed 1060 - an amount so vast when compared to the number of such molecules we have made, or indeed could ever hope to make, that it might as well be infinite. So, it is not surprising that our exploration of chemical space has so far been extremely limited.

    Insight
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