Volume 388 Issue 6640, 24 July 1997

The US Senate should be applauded for rejecting the administration's caution on plant genome sequencing.

paris

Catherine Bréchignac, a physicist, has become the first woman director general of the French national research agency, the CNRS.

london

Mounting public concern over the increasing use of animals in genetics research is fuelling calls for a national expert commission to investigate the welfare of transgenic animals.

washington

A $40 million-a-year initiative by the National Science Foundation to sequence a plant genome has been proposed by a key Senate budget committee.

san francisco

The US National Bioethics Advisory Board has decided to examine setting up a single, independent body to protect human subjects in all federally funded research.

san diego

A former star student at the Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health has been denied his doctorate and barred from federally funded research for four years in one of the United States' biggest cases of scientific misconduct.

munich

A resolution is in sight for a long-running dilemma at the European Patent Office over whether it is legally entitled to grant patents on transgenic animals and plants.

munich

A referendum next summer calling for a ban on the use of transgenic animals will seriously harm biomedical research, Swiss scientists are warning.

moscow

Vladimir Bulgak, Russia's cabinet minister for science and high technology appears determined to continue the stalled restructuring of Russian science started by former science minister Boris Saltykov

tokyo

Japan's Prime minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, has called on senior government ministers to sort out the country's muddled policy on greenhouse gas emissions within two weeks.

sydney

Australia is making a belated attempt to join the competition for a new generation of microsatellites following government support for a new satellite systems research centre.

washington

The National Institutes of Health has been awarded a 6 per cent increase in its budget next year to $13.5 billion – $400 million more than was requested by President Bill Clinton.

paris

Prospects for adding a verification regime to an existing worldwide ban on the production, possession and use of biological weapons edged a step closer last wee

paris

Mounting concern over the spectre of ‘designer’ biological weapons is proving a major obstacle to efforts to strengthen the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention.

It is poor science to use inappropriate strains of rodents in badly designed and inefficient experiments for testing the safety of chemicals. It is also costly and unethical because greater numbers of laboratory animals are needed.

Obsolescent — such was once the view of the innate immune system. That view is itself out of date. But a fresh angle of attack on the ways in which innate immunity is essential to the function of acquired immunity comes from study of the ancient defence systems of invertebrates.

The Sun's outer layers rotate gradually more slowly as they lose angular momentum to the solar wind. It had been assumed that the Sun's core carried on regardless, being almost uncoupled to the outer, convective zone. But helioseismology – the study of oscillations of the Sun — has shown that in fact the core rotates at about the same speed as the convective zone. What couples them? It could be gravity waves, similar to the subsurface waves in the Earth's oceans.

Some time between the late Oligocene and early Miocene, 28-22 million years ago, the initial evolutionary radiation which led to the living Old World primates took place. The discovery of the oldest known Old World monkey skull, which is some 15 million years old, provides further fuel for debate about this event, which eventually resulted in the evolution of Old World monkeys on the one hand, and the great and lesser apes, and humans, on the other.

In the United States, part of the policy for conservation of aquatic ecosystems is to encourage the restoration and protection of stream and riverside forests. A new study of various forested and grassed reaches along a creek in Wisconsin, however, implies that grassy banks are subject to less erosion, at least in some circumstances, and may therefore be more desirable. So many interacting variables are involved in such systems that it is difficult to formulate general management policies. Perhaps it is best simply to let Nature take its course and let bankside vegetation develop naturally

In prokaryotes, the polypeptide chains in which proteins are synthesized only tend to fold into their final, operational form when the chain is complete. In eukaryotes, by contrast, individual domains of a single protein can fold sequentially and independently. This striking finding can help to resolve the puzzle of why prokaryotes tend to rely much more heavily on chaperonin- assisted protein folding than do eukaryotes, but the molecular mechanisms underlying the different treatment of nascent polypeptide chains remain to be defined.

The Popigai impact structure is a remnant of a huge crater in Siberia, 100 km across. It was formed when a comet or asteroid hit the Earth, some time between 5 and 65 million years ago — no one could be more precise than that. But now it has been dated to about 35.5 million years ago, almost the same time as the Chesapeake Bay crater off the coast of North America. Could these two impacts together have caused the mass extinction of the late Eocene?

An ideal homogeneous catalyst for dioxygen (O2) oxidations would be selective, useful for tackling a variety of substrates and chemical structures, reasonably fast, and stable. Considerable progress towards this ideal is realized in a new catalyst containing two sterically protected ruthenium atoms, which can facilitate direct O2 activation and substrate oxidation without generating nonselective radicals.

The body's central-heating system is flawed, in that in chilly climates people need to wear clothes or use fires for extra warmth. A plan to improve on the system involves identifying a glucose-oxidizing enzyme which works well in the cold but becomes reversibly denatured at 37 °C — human body temperature. When immobilized on microspheres and injected into the blood, the enzyme will become activated on reaching the cold outer extremities of the body. There it will burn glucose, warming the skin and acting as a perfect distributed body thermostat.

Inventor, film-maker and ocean explorer.

With the objective of reviewing recent releases in the field of microscopy, this feature looks at a variety of optical and confocal microscopes, instruments for SPM, SEM, AMF and TEM, as well as accessories and software.