Volume 396 Issue 6713, 24 December 1998

A series that ends this week should inspire not only appreciation of images but also a desire to communicate.

washington

The World Bank, private foundations and governments are planning a global chain of centres of scientific excellence in developing countries.

munich

Declassified documents relating to Germany's nuclear programme during World War II have been permanently moved to Munich's Deutsches Museum.

barcelona

The University of Salamanca in Spain is being taken to court by an astrophysicist claiming he was passed over for promotion in favour of a lesser qualified internal candidate.

madrid

The Spanish government plans to introduce a new contract-based university position, which will carry the same responsibilities - and salaries - as existing full-time tenured positions.

munich

The European Molecular Biology Organization is to launch a series of young investigator awards aimed at propelling bright young scientists into permanent jobs in laboratories across Europe.

tokyo

A South Korean research team has come under fire for refusing to disclose the evidence to back up its claim of cloning a human embryo.

london

Scientists and senior ministers gathered around the Cabinet table in Downing Street last week to brief the Prime Minister, Tony Blair on why science matters.

london

The British government has pledged to put the commercialization of scientific knowledge at the heart of its industrial policy.

london

The British government has launched the second phase of its Foresight exercise aimed at encouraging dialogue between science and business.

montreal

The Medical Research Council of Canada is to attempt to broaden its code of ethics for research involving humans.

Experiments with fruitflies have shown that those with fewer offspring generally live longer. Twelve-hundred years of genealogical data from British aristocrats now suggests that this relationship extends to humans.

The deep ocean is stirred; if it wasn't, the dense, cold and salty waters that sink at high latitudes would fill up the ocean basins from underneath. The energies required for such stirring, and the mechanisms involved, have been subject to a provocative analysis in which the prime movers implicated are tidal dissipation, largely driven by the Moon, and wind driving.

When you listen to music through headphones, the sound seems to come from inside your head. But there is an illusion known as ‘virtual auditory space’ which makes such sounds seem to originate outside the head. This virtual sound is now closer to reality thanks to a study showing that the parameters that need to be measured to create this effect are not as complicated as first thought.

At present, attempts to harness the energy released by nuclear fusion centre on the so-called first-generation fuel, a deuterium-tritium plasma. This combination has the considerable drawback of intense neutron emission, which damages the plasma-confining structures. Hence the interest in investigating second- and third-generation fuels which emit few or no neutrons. But many hurdles remain to be surmounted if such fuels are to prove viable.

Despite its bad press, smoking is socially almost harmless - users do not become abusive or turn to crime because of it. In fact, the only antisocial aspect is the smoky smell that lingers, owing mainly to the fact that free nicotine reacts with oxygen. Daedalus now plans to rid smokers of such smells by delivering their nicotine fix to them together with another widely used drug — alcohol.

Nineteenth-century museum sculptures depicting great moments in prehistory might seem kitsch to modern eyes. But, in their time, they were a key way for the latest scientific ideas to be communicated to the public.