Volume 394 Issue 6690, 16 July 1998

The significant boost in funds for UK science is a triumph, above all, for the Wellcome Trust.

london

Britain's Labour government has made good on pre-election signals by agreeing to inject an extra £700 million (US$1.14 billion) into the country's science base over the next three years.

london

British users of synchrotron radiation have welcomed the news that the Wellcome Trust is to provide £100 million towards the costs of a new synchrotron facility.

washington

New nuclear research facilities in both the United States and France will violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and could open the way for the development of ‘pure fusion’ nuclear weapons, according to a study published this week.

washington

Agricultural researchers at US universities claim that they are getting a raw deal from politicians in Washington compared to their colleagues in the biomedical sciences.

washington

The US life sciences company Monsanto is linking up with a charitable trust to create a $150 million international centre of excellence for interdisciplinary plant research in St. Louis, Missouri.

london

British opponents of genetically modified (GM) food suffered a setback to their campaign for a moratorium on commercial GM crops last week when a farmer failed to halt a trial of GM maize.

london

The British government appears set to press ahead with introducing some form of private management of its defence research agency, against the advice of a parliamentary select committee.

washington

An Earth-viewing satellite that few Earth scientists want may ultimately turn out be of more use to space physicists stunned by the recent apparent loss of the solar-observing SOHO satellite.

washington

A panel of US biologists has called for an end to protein crystallography experiments in space — one of the highest-profile research activities planned for the international space station.

jerusalem

Leading officials in the Israeli government are reacting cautiously to a bill protecting genetic privacy that was passed last week by the science committee of Israel's parliament.

munich

The Swiss-Prot protein sequence databank, one of the world's most widely-used reference sources on proteins, is to charge for access, although academics will still be able to use it for free.

When were the stars born? A new type of detector has seen powerful emission from dusty distant galaxies, indicating that the most fertile period of star formation occurred when the Universe was only about an eighth of its current age.

The Rho protein is a small GTPase that, among its many functions, helps another small GTPase called Ras to transform cells to an oncogenic state. But which of Rho's functions is needed for this transformation? It turns out that Rho helps Ras by inhibiting another protein p21^Waf1/Cip1. This protein normally inhibits the cell cycle, so, by preventing it from doing this, Rho enables Ras to carry out its function — driving cells into the cell cycle.

In July 1994, fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 made their dramatic plunge into Jupiter. Ever since then, planetary scientists have been especially alive to the prospect of identifying chains of terrestrial impact craters — the remnants of similar sequential impacts on Earth. A reappraisal of one such putative chain in the midwestern United States concludes that the craters were in fact caused by volcanic activity; they could, however, be of mixed origins.

There is plenty of evidence that prehistoric peoples did not necessarily live in total harmony with their environment, but rather despoiled it in various ways. But it seems that in one instance at least steps were taken to alleviate the damage. The place was the central Peruvian Andes; the time was the early part of this millennium; and the clues are pollen strata, which on one interpretation show that during a certain period the Incas planted alder trees to prevent soil erosion on the terraces used for crops.

The paperless office has been predicted as a result of electronic information systems, but now paper is fighting back. A cheap electronic ink has been developed that can be printed on flexible substrates, including paper. It can be changed from white to black simply by applying an electric field, and so it could be used to make paper that can print on itself or show moving pictures.

The Coxsackie B virus has been linked to autoimmune diabetes, and there are two main theories to account for this. The first (molecular mimicry) predicts that pathogen-encoded antigens are similar to self-proteins, priming the immune system to attack self-tissues. The second (bystander activation) holds that the pathogen simply disrupts the equilibrium of self-tolerance, causing self-tissues that would otherwise have been ignored to be attacked. A new study comes down firmly in favour of the bystander-activation theory — for Coxsackie-virus-induced diabetes at least.

In some parts of the ocean, the subtropical gyre at mid-latitudes for instance, phytoplankton primary production is greater than would be expected from the known availability of nutrients. So extra nutrients must be coming from somewhere. New studies implicate energetic ocean eddies, on a horizontal scale of tens to hundreds of kilometres, as the source that provides them.

What factors contribute to extinction of a species? Conventional wisdom has it that those species that have many members (high abundance) spread over a large geographical range have a greater chance of survival than less abundant, clustered populations. But it turns out that this is not all. A study of Australian marsupials now reveals that species of a relatively recent evolutionary origin show a positive relationship between local abundance and geographical spread, whereas more ancient species show a negative relationship. Presumably, this is because the relatives of ancient species who showed low abundance and small ranges have already become extinct.

These days we have personal everything — personal stereos and computers to name but a few. But what if they were truly personal, programmed to operate only for their recognized owner? This is just what Daedalus plans to develop. The personalized computer would recognize its owners keyboard ‘fist’ and mouse style, and would be almost impossible to hijack or misuse.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a diagram can be worth many lines of complicated algebraic formulas. Feynman diagrams are also powerful tools of explanation and prediction.