Volume 447 Issue 7145, 7 June 2007

China won't achieve a tenable drug regulation policy by hanging public officials.

Introducing three free-access websites for research networking and outreach.

Technique removes need for eggs or embryos.

President's call for global goal fails to impress.

Will it be possible to service the James Webb Space Telescope?

Ancient Polynesians may have brought birds to the Americas.

Irregularities highlight political interference in Endangered Species Act.

Race to discover disease-linked genes reaches fever pitch.

Deal may be in sight for hospital workers on death row.

Radical environmental activists are put behind bars.

Establishments clash over funding.

The US Congress is well-known for tucking special provisions for favoured projects into budget bills. David Goldston explains why 'earmarks' for research and development have risen so dramatically in recent years.

Support for copycat versions of biotechnology drugs is growing quickly in the US Congress. Meredith Wadman reports.

Long a symbol of East German pride, the Charité medical school is flourishing in the twenty-first-century shake-up of German universities. Alison Abbott reports.

Brought up in the Congo basin, Jonas Eriksson has worked through a war and battled poachers to help reveal the secrets of bonobo societies. Carl Gierstorfer reports.

Even though our view of the physical world has shifted from that of determinism to randomness, randomness itself can now be exploited to retrieve a system's deterministic response.

In a tour-de-force demonstration of feasibility, a consortium of 50 research teams uses 500,000 genetic markers from each of 17,000 individuals to identify 24 genetic risk factors for 7 common human diseases.

A technique known as magic-angle spinning has helped make nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy as sensitive for solids as it is for solutions. Inductive thinking leads to even better signal detection.

The frequency of severe hurricanes in the North Atlantic has increased during the past decade. Scrutiny of the prehistoric record left by such storms helps to assess the factors contributing to hurricane activity.

Using human eggs in the quest to make donor-specific embryonic stem cells is controversial. A method developed in mice, if applicable to humans, could eliminate the need to obtain eggs for this purpose.

Cosmic gravitational waves could provide unprecedented information on the early Universe. The effects that are of interest are small, but experiments are gradually achieving a sensitivity that will test cosmological models.

A continent-wide analysis suggests that West Nile virus has severely affected bird populations associated with human habitats in North America. The declines parallel patterns of human disease caused by the virus.

Maker of the first laser.

What constitutes replication of a genotype–phenotype association, and how best can it be achieved?

An exciting genome-wide association study in the British population for seven common diseases. This analysis confirms previously identified loci and provides strong evidence for many novel disease susceptibility loci.

It is generally believed that unfertilized oocytes are required for successful somatic cell nuclear transfer, but this paper demonstrates that reprogramming activities persist after fertilization. These findings have important implications for understanding the nature of the nuclear reprogramming activities, the biology of cloned animals and the ongoing efforts to derive patient specific human embryonic stem cell lines.

This study provides direct experimental evidence for an important hypothesized mechanism of ageing, showing that the maintenance of adult haematopoietic stem cell function during ageing and haematopoietic stem cell transplantation is critically dependent on DNA repair by the non-homologous end-joining pathway.

The smallest known transiting planet, HD 149026b, has an 8-µm brightness temperature of 2300 ± 200 K. The planet's predicted temperature for uniform, spherical, blackbody emission and zero albedo (unprecedented for planets) is 1,741 K. The measurement matches the prediction for a planet on which each patch of surface area instantaneously re-emits all absorbed light as a black body.

Inductive coupling allows wireless transmission of probe pulses and wireless reception of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals. The method increases the signals obtained for small samples of organic powders and biological tissue by almost one order of magnitude, and is expected to prove particularly useful for high-throughput chemical and biomedical analysis.

Proxy records from corals and marine sediment core that reflect changes in vertical wind shear and sea surface temperature (the two main parameters that influence hurricane activity) are used to reconstruct the frequency of major hurricanes over the Atlantic since 1730. The results indicate that the frequency of major hurricanes was anomalously low during the 1970s and 1980s compared to the past 270 years.

Analysis of isotope data from the Azores Islands provides evidence for deep recycling of material that had undergone fractionation near the Earth's surface. It is though that this component is from melt- and fluid-depleted lithospheric mantle and is 2.5 billion years old, whereas other Azores basalts have been estimated to contain from ∼3 billion-year-old melt-enriched basalt.

Nectar spurs in Aquilegia have evolved in an ever-increasing 'co-evolutionary race' fashion, but due to a predictable series of adaptations to unrelated pollinators, concentrated during speciation events. These findings show how evolutionary history and ecological setting can drive predictable changes in morphology.

The medaka fish (Oryzias latipes) has long been a popular pet in Japan and more recently a laboratory model organism; it now has its genome sequenced and analysed by a Japanese consortium.

The role of Dscam2 (an immunoglobin superfamily protein) in regulating formation of precise patterns of synaptic connections in the Drosophila visual system is described, and shows for the first time that Dscam2 limits connections through a tiling mechanism that involves homotypic repulsion.

DNA damage does not significantly impact in the establishment, maintenance or expansion of long-term reconstituting haematopoietic stem cells (LT-HSC), it is instead a physiological mechanism of stem cell ageing that may underlie the diminished capacity of aged tissues to return to homeostasis after exposure to acute stress or injury.

DNA damage leads to transient repression of ribosomal gene transcription by RNA polymerase I in a pathway mediated by ATM kinase activity and the DNA repair factors Nbs1 and MDC1

In Arabidopsis chromatin, histone H2B is found to be monoubiquitinated, and the ubiquitin protease SUP32/UBP26 is implicated in deubiquitinating H2B to establish heterochromatic histone modification patterns.

Proteomics is hungry for well-validated antibodies. Nathan Blow looks at the options and sees how researchers are redefining the way to generate an antibody.

Ethical quandaries aside, stem-cell science is attracting researchers worldwide. Ricki Lewis reports.

You may have got the job, but making sure it is the right fit is important for both employer and employee.

A genome screen reveals how stem cells age.