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Volume 395 Issue 6698, 10 September 1998

Opinion

  • A high-level report on careers in the life sciences raises often-repeated worries about employment practices afflicting graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the United States. A major rethink is required.

    Opinion

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News

  • munich

    An experimental project to retrain unemployed scientists from the former East Germany appears so successful that European Commission officials are now "looking favourably" at backing similar schemes elsewhere in Europe.

    • Quirin Schiermeier
    News

  • washington

    About 100 scientists gathered last month to begin charting a course for the next generation of low-cost Earth observation satellites.

    • Tony Reichhardt
    News

  • paris

    Arguments over EC control of public health policy mean support may not be forthcoming for the proposal being tabled in France this week to establish a European equivalent to the US Centres for Disease Control.

    • Declan Butler
    News

  • munich

    The government owned Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, has undergone one of the fastest and most radical restructuring exercises ever performed by a German research institute.

    • Alison Abbott
    News

  • washington

    The three heads of a new presidential council appear unlikely to act on a call for a single authority to be put in charge of the US government's food safety efforts.

    • Meredith Wadman
    News

  • cape town

    Malegapuru William Makgoba has been appointed president of South Africa's Medical Research Council for a five-year term from next year.

    • Michael Cherry
    News

  • new delhi

    The National Academy of Sciences of India has urged the prime minister to intervene to prevent the implementation of new rules on using animals in research.

    • K. S. Jayaraman
    News
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News in Brief

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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • Meanders are a feature of some of the world's noblest rivers, but laboratory models have failed to meander convincingly. A new experiment succeeds, promising us a refined understanding of this familiar but vexing phenomenon.

    • Gary Parker
    News & Views

  • Cyclopia — the development of a single, central eye — occurs because of a lack of, or defect in, development of the ventral (fore) brain. Three groups have studied this developmental pathway in the zebrafish, and have identified two of the genes involved. Fish that lack the cyclops (cyc) and squint (sqt) genes are cyclopic. Moreover, the authors have found that Cyclops belongs to the transforming growth factor-β family of proteins.

    • Patrick Blader
    • Uwe Strähle
    News & Views

  • Cosmic spherules form when dust particles hit the Earth, melting the upper atmosphere. Spectacularly well-preserved spherules have now been found in sandstone from Finland that is 1.4 billion years old, providing a new means of tracing long-term changes in our atmosphere, as well as changes in the Solar System's meteoroid population.

    • Don Brownlee
    News & Views

  • The relationship between the size and the number of plants in natural stands of vegetation has generally been taken to be governed by geometric considerations. On this basis, theory has it that average plant size scales as the -3/2 power of population density. If, however, energy use is taken as the determining factor, the exponent becomes -4/3 — which happens to be the exponent that applies to comparable relationships in animals.

    • John D. Damuth
    News & Views

  • Linear systems withn degrees of freedom have nfundamental modes of vibration, which can be combined to produce any possible motion. For nonlinear systems, a few periodic solutions might play a similar role, and it has now been proved that for one broad class of nonlinear system with two degrees of freedom, there must be either two periodic orbits for a given energy, or infinitely many.

    • Ivar Ekeland
    News & Views

  • It's well known that HIV infects cells bearing the CD4 receptor, but one long-standing puzzle has been how the virus induces the death of other cells — nerve cells and T cells that bear the CD8 receptor, for example. It turns out that HIV may do this by subverting newly discovered death signals from the very chemokines that normally protect the body from infection.

    • Jean Claude Ameisen
    News & Views

  • The Earth's continents can extend deep into the mantle, and these continental roots are thought to be cooler than the surrounding mantle material. So they could lower mantle temperature and even induce downwelling. But a seismological study across eastern North America finds that, there at least, these features of a continental 'coldfinger' are absent.

    • George Helffrich
    News & Views

  • Imagine making an ‘artificial fly' that could sniff out leaks in a chemical plant or eavesdrop on conversations. Daedalus believes that the key to do doing just this lies with his 'ram radiometer' — the smallest possible aero engine. Consisting of a fine grid of 10-nm wires in a duct about a millimetre across, it works like a cross between a conventional radiometer and a ramjet.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Science and Image

  • Illustrators face a choice of truths: should they draw a creature in studio detail, or in its natural surroundings half hidden by shade? John James Audubon tried to capture the nature of birds in pictures backed by passionate prose.

    • Martin Kemp
    Science and Image
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Scientific Correspondence

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New Journals

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Article

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Letter

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