Volume 393 Issue 6687, 25 June 1998

Despite pressures to the contrary, debate on the scientific dimension of policy decisions must take place openly.

washington

A coalition of North American university libraries is planning to launch a bid to reduce the power of commercial scholarly publishers.

washington

President Bill Clinton has nominated Bill Richardson, the US ambassador to the United Nations and a former congressman from New Mexico, as the next secretary of energy.

london

Panels of overseas scientists will for the first time help to assess the quality of Britain's best university research.

london

Britain's top scientific adviser has urged that the full range of scientific advice to governments should be made public — not just the consensus view.

new delhi

The Indian government is to allow private companies to become more closely involved in defence research, as well as in the production of military hardware.

moscow

Researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences held a mass protest march and demonstration in Moscow to complain about the continued deterioration in their working conditions.

munich

Budget cuts are threatening Sweden's membership of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.

washington

US funding for the Human Genome Project is expected to remain unaffected by a private plan to sequence the entire human genome in only three years.

munich

The European Patent Office is to recruit a further 250 patent examiners next year to keep up with the rapidly growing number of applications.

paris

France's national research agency wants to reinforce the input of independent advice on scientific strategy at every level of its management.

london

The full recovery of the Earth's ozone shield is expected to occur by the middle of the next century, according to the latest scientific assessment.

tokyo

Japanese universities are being urged to introduce a system to evaluate and certify engineering and technology departments if they are to produce internationally competitive engineers.

cape town

Various South African researchers were involved in a sinister but bizarre effort to develop biological and chemical weapons under the previous government.

The east German city of Magdeburg, long known for its neuroscience research, went through a difficult period in the years after the Berlin Wall came down. But its scientific efforts received a boost last week with the opening of the Centre for Neuroscience Innovation and Technology.

Birds were once thought to have a large number of features exclusive to the group. One by one those features have also been identified in fossils of certain theropod dinosaurs. Now feathers join the list.

Buckminsterfullerene, C₆₀, was first synthesized in bulk quantities in 1990, but there is still no detailed appreciation of the mechanism by which the fullerenes and related structures are formed in this process. The newly announced synthesis of C₃₆, which will probably be C₆₀'s smallest cousin, gives some clues — it points towards the so-called ‘fullerene road’, rather than the ‘pentagon road’, as the likely route of fullerene growth.

Bioluminescence is the remarkable ability of living organisms — such as luminous dinoflagellates — to produce visible light. The dinoflagellates act as unique flow markers because they light up only when particular levels of shear stress are present. In a new study, they have been used to monitor the flow dynamics around swimming dolphins. By integrating information from field studies with image-intensified videos of bioluminescence, the authors have interpreted some of the characteristics of water flow over these animals.

In certain parts of the open ocean known as ‘high nitrate, low chlorophyll’ provinces, phytoplankton productivity is limited by the iron supply. Two sets of research results now show that productivity in a region of coastal upwelling is likewise limited, and bring silica (an important constituent of diatom skeletons) into the story. Iron-limited diatoms grow thicker silica shells — which, among other things, has implications for understanding past patterns of productivity as judged by the opaline deposits on the sea floor to which dead diatoms contribute.

Many species of insect have highly complex male genitalia — but why? There are two theories. First, the ‘lock-and-key’ hypothesis predicts that the complex genitals may serve as barriers to insemination of a different species, which would result in the production of low-quality hybrids. The ‘sexual selection’ hypothesis, however, predicts that the complex genitalia provide a signal of mate quality to the female, allowing her to store and use the sperm from the best quality mate. A new study weighs in heavily on the side of the sexual selection theory.

Two chemicals must be mixed much faster than the reaction rate for that rate to be measured. Rapid enough mixing is difficult, especially for the many important liquid-phase and biological reactions with millisecond or shorter-timescale dynamics. But a tiny silicon device, built using the fabrication techniques of microelectronics, can reduce the mixing timescale to less than 10 ms by focusing the flow of one chemical into a thread only nanometres across.

Members of the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) family, which signal through SMAD proteins, are involved in many developmental processes. Inactivation of the genes encoding two of the SMAD proteins, Smads 2 and 4, shows that both are required to lay down some of the primary layers of the animal body. Smad2 also seems to act in anterior-posterior patterning and the development of left-right asymmetry.

Patients with Williams syndrome have defects in visuo-spatial cognition (a failure to integrate parts into a whole) that are linked to deletion of the gene that encodes LIM kinase-1 (LIMK-1). The reasons for this are becoming clearer with the identification of a molecular target for LIMK-1. It turns out that this enzyme phosphorylates cofilin, which is essential for the turnover of actin filaments. Such turnover may be implicated in axon guidance, and could explain why high levels of LIMK-1 are found in neurons.

Noise reduction is this week's project for DREADCO, whose scientists plan to tackle it by developing the sound-absorbing qualities of burning gas. They hope to perfect a gas burner, the reaction regime of which over-reacts to sound and absorbs it perfectly, and then extend the principles to a surface that rusts or tarnishes while deadening sound completely.

The invention of the microscope opened up a new world of scientific discovery. It also presented perceptual and philosophical challenges — which were brought into sharp focus by the seminal work of Robert Hooke.

Tools for genetic research covered in this feature include a hand-held laboratory ‘assistant’, high-grade nucleotides for PCR, a probe for murine telomeres, a catalogue for antisense oligonucleotides and new gel loading pipette tips.