News & Views in 2001

The social behaviour of many animals relies on their ability to use odour cues to distinguish among individuals. Studies of mice highlight the importance of urinary proteins in this complex signalling system.

Astronomers have now imaged a stellar microlens as it speeds across the sky. A similar effect will soon allow them to measure the mass of a lens, whether dark or luminous.

Sunlight can be harnessed by semiconductors to generate a fuel, hydrogen gas, from water. This approach will be impracticable until certain materials-related constraints are overcome: photochemists are on the case.

During development, many messenger RNAs are spread asymmetrically within cells. Surprisingly, in fruitflies the RNA signals and machinery used for distribution seem to be conserved in different developmental stages.

The evolution of an extended childhood had implications for human society and culture. New analyses of dental development in fossil hominins suggest that our lengthy growth processes arose quite late in evolution.

High-speed book copying could one day be achieved by piling closed books on top of a copier and pulsing an infrared laser beam at the pages.

The extreme environment surrounding a black hole provides an ideal test bed for the predictions of general relativity. New observations of a spinning black hole push current theories to their limits.

Marine bacteria can respond to organic particles in sea water, creating hotspots of bacterial growth and carbon cycling. This microscale behaviour should be included in models of the oceanic carbon cycle.

Cell division relies on the properly timed activation and destruction of certain regulatory proteins. New work shows that many rounds of phosphorylation can help to establish the timing of protein destruction.

The protein that is mutated in a human disorder of the kidney and ear turns out to be an accessory subunit for a chloride ion channel. The discovery explains the symptoms of the disease.

Membranes that get fatter when they are stretched are considered counterintuitive, but may be more common than we think. They might even turn up in human tissue.

North Atlantic right whales once faced extinction and are still under threat today. But the population decline could be halted if the lives of just a few females were spared each year.

Ultrashort laser pulses allow physicists and chemists to watch fast molecular motion as it happens. But many fundamental atomic processes are even faster and require the shortest pulses ever created.

If the chemistry of deep seawater makes it corrosive, it may explain the failure of underwater cables and the lack of organic matter on the seafloor.

Theories of how the Universe developed structure assume a similar distribution of matter in small and large structures. But observations of gas densities in galaxy clusters suggest that this is not the case.

Some plants have evolved delicious fruits to entice animals and birds into dispersing their seeds. But the seeds' dormancy and germinability are affected by which bird they pass through.

A technique for injecting electrons into the surface layers of materials has now been applied to the most mysterious of superconducting compounds — the copper oxides.

Energy metabolism is an essential function of life. Yet a resourceful parasite with a minimalist genome has discarded much of its metabolism, developing a unique alternative in the process.