Volume 399 Issue 6737, 17 June 1999

Congress should seize a welcome opportunity to strengthen dilapidated university laboratories.

washington

A US senator is to introduce a bill authorizing the National Institutes of Health to spend $750 million over the next two years on research infrastructure.

washington

John Sedat, a biochemistry professor at the University of California, San Francisco, shares his laboratory with seven researchers, a technician, two software developers, 17 computers, three optical microscopes and three six-feet-high vats of liquid nitrogen.

livermore, ca.

The British government is to invest more than $100 million in the world's largest laser currently under construction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

munich

Germany's university funding agency has urged the government to double its investment in genomic research over the next five years if it wants to keep up with Britain and France.

dortmund, germany

Hubert Markl, the president of the Max Planck Society (MPS), has warned Germany's federal and regional governments to expect fierce protests if they try to back down on a promise to increase the organization's budget for 2000 by five per cent.

paris

A physicist at Florida State University has resigned as a referee for a nuclear physics journal published by Elsevier Science in protest at inflation in the price of the company's journals.

tokyo

Japan has announced plans to set up an inter-ministerial committee to explore ways of giving university researchers more freedom to work in collaboration with industry.

cape town

South Africa's health minister remains lukewarm about an offer from the US pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb to donate $100 million towards tackling AIDS in southern Africa

washington

The US House of Representatives has unanimously approved a 60-day moratorium on visits to US nuclear weapons laboratories from nationals of ‘sensitive countries’.

livermore, ca.

The US energy secretary has begun a morale-boosting tour of national laboratories to reassure Asian-American scientists that the recent Chinese spy scandal has not placed them under suspicion.

paris

A European patent granted to a US biotechnology company on the use of stored stem cells from umbilical cord blood has been sucessfully challenged by researchers on the grounds of a lack of novelty.

london

A provocative patent application on techniques for creating human/animal hybrids — or chimaera — filed by two prominent biotechnology critics has been rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

washington

The US Civilian Research and Development Foundation, set up to aid scientists in the former Soviet Union, may be able to sponsor basic, investigator-initiated research if a hefty increase in funds proposed by the Clinton administration is approved by Congress.

london

After a decade at the helm of one of the world's best known botanic gardens, Sir Ghillean Prance, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in southwest London, is calling it a day.

sydney

Australia's delegation to the World Conference on Science in Budapest is expected to call on Unesco to make access to knowledge for developing countries a priority issue for the agency.

budapest

Scientists need to find a solution to the issue of protecting public access to knowledge without deterring private investment in research, according to Federico Mayor, the director general of Unesco.

london

150 non governmental organizations have been invited to attend the World Conference on Science in Budapest later this month.

Scientific societies in the developing world must take a stake in their countries' future. They should be proactive in fostering a culture supportive of economic development driven by science and technology.

The chimpanzee keeps inching closer to humanity. After decades of patiently gathering information, the heads of seven field-sites pool their knowledge to report an astonishing variation in tool technology and social customs in chimpanzees across Africa.

The industrial application of certain enzymes such as cytochrome P450 monooxygenases has been limited by the need for cofactors. An improved way of bypassing the cofactor system has been discovered by ‘directed evolution’, a process which mimics enzyme evolution in the laboratory.

By coating micrometre-sized glass spheres with thin layers of metallic compounds, the spheres can be made responsive to electric or magnetic fields and so packed into different configurations. Such tunable crystal structures might offer new ways to make photonic materials.

Our DNA is constantly under attack, and most cells try to repair any damage before they replicate their DNA. But some cells simply bypass the damaged sites. Such bypass — known as translesion synthesis — does not work properly in a rare, inherited, cancer-prone syndrome called xeroderma pigmentosum ‘variant’. The defective protein involved has now been identified as DNA polymeraseη, the seventh mammalian DNA polymerase to be identified.

When comet Hale-Bopp is twice as far from the Sun as is the Earth it releases water and carbon monoxide (CO). As it passed very close to the Sun last year, even more CO was produced in the cometary atmosphere known as the coma. The fact that this extra source of CO switched on and off at a certain distance from the Sun suggests that a thermal production process may be involved.

Neurons that respond to lines of a particular orientation form vertical orientation columns, which span the whole depth of the primary visual cortex. These columns are connected by horizontal neurons which, according to a new study, could be used to analyse angular visual features — such as corners or T junctions — that were not previously thought to be analysed at such an early stage of visual processing.

Free sugars in solution exist mainly in cyclic forms, with the open-chain aldehyde form making up less than 0.01%. So the discovery of a new type of open-chain sugar-sugar linkage in the cell wall of bacteria comes as something of a surprise. The synthesis of this open-chain linkage must also require a new class of enzymes.

Thereelermutant mouse has been used as a model of abnormal brain development for over 50 years. These mice lack a protein called Reelin, and they show a series of developmental abnormalities. Mice lacking two other proteins — the very low density lipoprotein receptor, and the apolipoprotein E receptor-2 — have now been found to show the same abnormalities, indicating that these molecules are involved in the Reelin signalling pathway.

Studying the information content in living brains is too daunting, thinks Daedalus, so he plans to work with dead ones. The idea involves producing both a synaptic wiring diagram and a chemical map of a brain. The mass of data produced in this way will however be incomprehensible, and making sense of it will be a task for future generations.

Paul Hoffman's book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers was announced as this year's winner of the Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books at a dinner at London's Science Museum last week. Hoffman was one of six finalists:

New biochemicals, the latest catalogues and (where would reagents be without it?) laboratory quality water constitute this ‘biochemicals and reagents’ collection. These notes are compiled in the Nature office from information provided by the manufacturers. For more details, fill in the reader service card.