Volume 392 Issue 6679, 30 April 1998

Research ministers met for a seminar in London this week to discuss how to improve the handling of European-level research. The solution lies in steady and targeted reforms to practices in Brussels.

london

The European Commission has proposed a set of new measures designed to meet criticism that its research programmes should be managed more effectively.

washington

The governing council of the American Physical Society (APS) has rejected the first draft of a statement defining science for the public.

munich

Britain has accepted 5.1 kg of nuclear fuel from the site of a disused research reactor near Tbilisi, Georgia, temporarily waiving an agreement that reprocessed fuel be returned to its country of origin.

munich

A US nuclear watchdog has called for the construction of a research reactor in Munich to be suspended following safety concerns over its highly enriched uranium reactor fuel.

washington

Senior officials from the National Insitutes of Health met publicly for the first time with Jewish leaders on the increasingly sensitive issue of the meaning of genetics research for Jews.

washington

US space officials hope to approve a second flight in September of the Neurolab space shuttle mission to let researchers collect more data on the nervous system's adaptation to spaceflight.

london

The biotechnology company British Biotech is to be investigated by the London Stock Exchange following further revelations of controversial share transactions by its directors.

la leguna, tenerife

The Spanish government has pledged to fully fund Spain's proposed ten-metre optical infra-red telescope even if no international partners are found.

beijing

The Chinese capital, one of the world's most polluted cities, is to clean up its air following moves to release data on air pollution levels.

washington

The New York research institute under fire for using the controversial drug fenfluramine on poor, non-white boys has revealed that the drug has been used in separate psychiatric tests with adolescents.

paris

The United Nations science organization Unesco is expected to resolve the lingering uncertainty over the future of its International Bioethics Committee.

canberra

A plan to expose Australia's 37 universities to market forces have triggered controversy in the run up to the country's election campaign.

A tough time lies ahead for the US administration in its push to achieve the two-thirds Senate majority needed to ratify the treaty banning atomic weapons testing. Republican senators are digging in with a complicated set of conditions and will prove hard to shift.

Unregulated forensic science practices have led to a spate of wrongful convictions. There are too many ‘cowboy’ practitioners whose services can be bought at a price.

Clinical experiments aimed at reducing bone loss in jaws raise a raft of interdisciplinary issues. Those investigating biomineralization, early evolutionary history and biological signal transduction might take an interest.

High-temperature superconductors could be a boon to the power industry, carrying large currents with virtually no energy loss. Unfortunately, these brittle materials are difficult to make into wires, so in practice they are powdered and encased in silver strips, and drawn out to align the powder crystallites. But the current capacity of these tapes is still severely limited. That is probably due to misalignment of the crystallites, according to new magnet-optical imaging studies. So for commercial applications, slightly different processing strategies may be needed — or an entirely different type of tape.

Many cellular events are triggered by sustained increases in the concentration of free Ca²⁺ in the cytosol. But cells can also respond to oscillations in the concentration of cytosolic Ca²⁺, and, to investigate the events that are triggered by these oscillations, two groups have developed clever ways to generate them and monitor their effects. In both studies, the oscillations cause activation of transcription factors more efficiently than do steady increases in the concentration of Ca²⁺. Moreover, the frequency of these oscillations can confer specificity to the Ca²⁺signalling.

From research on agricultural systems in temperate regions, it is known that use of nitrogen fertilizers and animal manure results in release of nitrous (N₂O) and nitric (NO) oxides to the atmosphere. The reason for caring about this phenomenon is the effect these gases may have on both global warming and atmospheric chemistry. From studies in the tropics, it now seems that releases of (N₂O) and NO are much higher from tropical agricultural systems. Given the projected large increase in use of nitrogen fertilizer in such areas in the coming years, that conclusion warrants further attention.

To the human eye, the sexes of the blue titParus caeruleusare virtually indistinguishable. The results of two different groups now show that there are in fact differences in the colouring of male and female tits, but that they fall in the ultraviolet part of the colour spectrum — which the birds can see but we and other mammals cannot. Why this signalling system should have arisen and endured poses some thought-provoking questions for evolutionary biologists.

The symptoms of premenstrual syndrome include depressed mood and anxiety, and the molecular mechanisms behind this are now becoming clear. During menstruation, levels of progesterone fall, and, as a result, so do levels of the progesterone metabolite allopregnanolone. Using a rat model, the authors have found that when production of allopregnanolone is blocked, increased levels of the α4 subunit of the GABA_Areceptor are produced. This changes the sensitivity of the receptor to endogenous ligands, resulting in the symptoms associated with premenstrual syndrome.

Daedalus hopes that his lying eye — the video-analysis computer system for telling whether a speaker is lying — could be used to good effect for many other purposes. These include psychiatry, counselling and exposure of many current emotional fashions (such as compassion towards socially approved underdogs).

What has emerged in this series, despite the core of commonalities linking old masters, classic modernists and living artists, is a clear change in shape for the relationships between art and science across the three areas.

Molecular biology is the subject and the objects of attention include a gel electrophoresis comet assay, an adenovirus expression kit, proof-reading polymerases, and a large-scale mouse cDNA expression array. compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers.

This supplement offers a series of Review Articles from Natureaddressing advances in drug delivery, xenotransplantation and cell and gene therapy.