Volume 392 Issue 6678, 23 April 1998

sydney

After a long battle, the future of Australia's Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) appears to have been secured.

london

Scientists on the Caribbean island of Montserrat lost credibility in the eyes of the island's inhabitants by wrongly predicting when its volcano would erupt.

washington

Research universities in the United States are to get access to a new and immensely powerful Internet upgrade, enabling them to by-pass congestion on existing computer networks.

munich

Nuclear physicists in Europe need a common research strategy in order to answer the next big questions in their fields, according to an expert report.

paris

France's national research agency is to try to clarify what to do about researchers who actively promote 'revisionist' arguments — such as denying the existence of the Nazi gas chambers.

washington

A joint initiative between the US government and the automobile industry to develop more economical cars is putting too much effort into costly, high maintenance vehicles, according to the National Research Council.

washington

Research universities in the United States consistently ignore the needs of their undergraduate students, according to a report released this week.

london

Britain's leading biotechnology company has sacked its director of clinical research for allegedly disclosing confidential information to one of the company's investors.

washington

Psychiatrists have defended their use of the drug fenfluramine in a trial examining aggression in poor, non-white inner city boys.

moscow

Police in President Boris Yeltsin's home town of Ekaterinburg last week attacked local university students protesting against proposed educational reforms.

london

More of Britain's publicly-funded Earth sciences research should be relevant to the needs of people and policy-makers, according to a former head of Britain's Natural Environment Research Council.

tokyo

Research into the effects of endocrine disrupters, the man-made chemicals suspected of disrupting human reproductive functions, is likely to receive a significant boost in Japan.

washington

Software problems will delay the long-awaited launch of the first major satellite in NASA's Earth Observing System.

munich

Germany's minister of the interior has approved the introduction of a central DNA database for sex offenders, convicted murderers and other serious criminals.

How do the correct maternal and paternal chromosomes find one another during sexual reproduction? New data from fission yeast indicate that the search for the right partner is simplified by pre-alignment of the chromosomes through clustering of their ends.

A cloud of dust fills the inner Solar System, produced mainly by comets and colliding asteroids. Tiny samples of this dust are collected by aircraft flying in the Earth's stratosphere, and used as a probe of extraterrestrial chemistry. What has been missing is a knowledge of the specific parent body of a given dust grain. But one sample of interplanetary dust, collected in June and July 1991, has now been traced to a particular comet, called Schwassmann-Wachmann 3. The detective-work used, if proved sound, will also allow other comets to be sampled.

How can a fly manoeuvre so artistically? Part of the answer lies in its halteres — 'gyroscopic' sense organs that tell the fly about its rotations in space. A study of these halteres now reveals that they are controlled in an unexpected way. The muscles that control the halteres are similar to those that control movement of the wings. Moreover, at least two of these muscles receive inputs from the visual system, and this may help to explain how the fly performs visually guided movements.

Earth's climate is getting warmer — why? The difficulty for climatologists is discriminating between human-induced changes, principally through the release of 'greenhouse gases' such as carbon dioxide, and natural climate fluctuations. A new approach to this issue employs a variety of indicators to provide annual temperature anomaly patterns over much of the world back to the year AD 1400. For all the uncertainties of such a reconstruction, when these results are compared with external influences on climate it does seem that the main effect on global temperature in the twentieth century has been from increases in greenhouse gases.

Why do women undergo the menopause? Much has been made of recent claims that non-reproducing females help their daughters to rear their grandchildren, but a new report indicates that this is not the case. By studying olive baboons and lions, one group has found that the presence of a non-reproducing mother makes no difference to the size of a female's litter or the survival of her offspring. The authors suggest that menopause is, in fact, non-adaptive, and that it occurs owing to senescence.

The study of protein folding is both a theoretical and an experimental discipline. But whereas experimentalists generally study specific proteins, theoreticians often use models that apply only to generic proteins. Can the two be reconciled? One study goes some way towards this through a statistical analysis of measured folding rates and theoretical determinants. The authors conclude that, for one group of proteins, the speed of folding depends on the number of local versus non-local contacts between amino-acid residues in the protein.

Exposure to infectious prions does not always lead to clinical disease, but a new report indicates that prions can nonetheless persist in the brain. Hamster prions were injected into mice and, although the mice did not develop symptoms, the prions were present for almost the entire life of the mice. What's more, when brain extracts from these mice were injected back into hamsters, the hamsters showed clinical symptoms. These findings could have public-health implications — for example, pigs and poultry, which do not develop disease after eating bovine prions, may be acting as reservoirs for the infectious agent.

How can one tell when a person is lying? It is claimed that certain voice frequencies are affected by deceit, and so audio analysers are sold for use during telephone conversations. As normal conversation has large visual component, Daedalus plans a more sophisticated analyser for video tape. Many subjects will be filmed, and expert opinions on their honesty will be correlated with a full spatial Fourier analysis of their movements. Using the general principles derived in this way, the 'Lying Eye' program will hugely simplify the process of law.

Mario Merz seeks to take art beyond the aesthetic and into the realms of experimentation. A favourite subject of his has been the mathematics of growing populations.

This edition offers information on affinity chromatography media, a wedge-shaped column, instrument control software, and a variety of hyphenated systems for separation and analysis.