Volume 441 Issue 7096, 22 June 2006

Energy problems demand a coherent solution, not a quick fix.

Hollywood warms to science, but fears technology.

Drug company link could hit biobank plans.

Remote island hosts global seed bank.

Financial analysis reveals reliance on philanthropy.

NIH may have to insist on submission to online archive.

Government risks undermining basic research, say critics.

US companies are planning to profit from lie-detection technology that uses brain scans, but the move to commercialize a little-tested method is ringing ethical and scientific alarm bells. Helen Pearson reports.

There's more to science at the movies than Lex Luthor's attempts to synthesize kryptonite. In the first of two features on film, John Whitfield looks at how a cinematographic technique can provide insights into the perception of reality. In the second, Alison Abbott meets Ben Heisenberg, a director whose first film is a taut moral fable of laboratory life.

There's more to science at the movies than Lex Luthor's attempts to synthesize kryptonite. In the first of two features on film, John Whitfield looks at how a cinematographic technique can provide insights into the perception of reality. In the second, Alison Abbott meets Ben Heisenberg, a director whose first film is a taut moral fable of laboratory life.

Tigers are teetering on the verge of extinction and human contact in their habitat could be their greatest threat. Erika Check investigates whether local people can live alongside India's big cats.

Eastern Germany is landing major electronics industry investments — but needs to build up its own innovative capacity, reports Ned Stafford.

How malaria affected, and was controlled in, Italy in the past century has important messages for today.

A mutually beneficial interaction between two species of fish turns out to involve the careful appraisal of one by the other — and the appropriately virtuous behaviour by the former while being watched.

Disks of hot gas drawn onto a central star or black hole are the best energy-producing machines in the Universe. So how do these accretion disks work? The answer, it seems, is blowing in their winds.

The Golgi apparatus of the cell has long baffled biologists, mainly because it is unclear how proteins are conveyed through it on their way to the cell surface. Some innovative microscopy may resolve the issue.

Rubisco is said to be both the most important enzyme on Earth and surprisingly inefficient. Yet an understanding of the reaction by which it fixes CO₂ suggests that evolution has made the best of a bad job.

Relaxor ferroelectrics are fascinating and useful materials, but they seem to be heterogeneous, hopeless messes. Observing what they do under electric fields reveals critical behaviour that helps to make sense of them.

Each organ develops at its own time — usually in the embryo. The discovery of progenitor cells that give rise to two structures in the thymus hints that this immune organ can continue to develop after birth.

An orchid that flowers in harsh conditions pollinates itself unassisted by any of the usual agents.

The ability of ferroelectric relaxors to convert electrical energy into mechanical work can be traced to the existence of critical points in the phase behaviour of these systems — a finding that might help guide the design and engineering of materials with enhanced electromechanical responses.

Phase-matched four-wave mixing can take place with high efficiency in a suitably designed silicon waveguide — this advance could allow for the implementation of dense wavelength channels for optical processing in an all-silicon photonic chip.

The Southern Ocean has central roles in carbon dioxide exchange between the oceans and the atmosphere, and in nutrient supply to the rest of the world's oceans — but these are physically separated due to the nature of ocean circulation, creating a biogeochemical divide. The area south of the divide has the most important influence on carbon dioxide exchange with the atmosphere; while the area to the north has the most significant effect on global oceanic productivity.

The age-related changes in the ability of supporting cells to proliferate is associated with levels of the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p27^Kip1 — suggesting a therapeutic avenue for regenerating damaged hair cells.

One of two papers demonstrating that there is a common progenitor for cortical and medullary tissue types in the thymus — when epithelial precursor cells are marked and then injected back into a developing thymus, both cortical and medullary tissues are derived from the marked precursor cells.

One of two papers demonstrating that there is a common progenitor for cortical and medullary tissue types in the thymus — marking of single precursor cells showed that this give rise to both tissues. Finding that a single precursor cell can derive both tissues provides hope for the viability of cell-based therapies for thymic disorders.

Fusion of cultured pluripotent embryonic stem cells with somatic cells is used to show that raising the levels of the transcription factor Nanog stimulates pluripotent gene activation from the somatic cell genome. Thus Nanog plays a dominant role in controlling pluripotent gene expression or chromatin remodeling.

One of two papers that has developed four-dimensional imaging of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and have now shown that Golgi cisternae mature in a dynamic manner.

One of two papers that has developed four-dimensional imaging of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and have now shown that Golgi cisternae mature in a dynamic manner.

Demonstration of the intrinsic variability in gene expression in cells freshly isolated from the mouse heart. The fact that this variability increases with age indicates that stochastic changes in gene expression are a possible cause of ageing.

Defective TGF-βsignalling in epithelial cells of the intestine can lead to cancer — a selective defect in this pathway in T cells also promotes the formation of gastrointestinal tumours, due to aberrant cytokine production.

Regulatory affairs is a young profession that's already making its mark in the world of drug development, where one false move can bring years of research to an unwelcome end. If your skills include communication and leadership, it may be for you, says Hannah Hoag.

Paul Gilna moves on to tackle ocean microbes.

A trip to Africa inspires future graduate study.

Manuscript writing presents challenges.

Paralysis of the senses, temporarily.

An in-depth look at how the oceans take up carbon dioxide.