Volume 388 Issue 6637, 3 July 1997

Last week's UN meeting in New York was a salutary lesson in the realities if environmental politics

tokyo

Life scientists from over 20 institutions in the Asia-Pacific region have met to discuss the formation of a network to promote regional collaboration in bioscience, biotechnology, and biomedical research.

washington

A key House subcommittee has proposed a 7 per cent funding increase for the National Science Foundation, the agency, which funds most non-biomedical university research in the United States.

tokyo

The government committee responsible for overseeing Japan's earthquake prediction programme has approved a review that clearly admits for the first time that earthquake prediction is a difficult task.

munich

German physicians hope that the numbers of organ donors will increase following a decision by the the lower house of the federal parliament to approve a bill regulating organ transplants.

washington

US President Bill Clinton's decision to approve controversial new regulations on air pollution is expected to be challenged in Congress when the rules are issued next month.

washington

A special session of the United Nations general assembly closed in New York with few tangible signs of progress towards the goals agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio.

washington

Ian Wilmut, the leader of the research team that cloned Dolly the sheep last week strongly endorsed US moves to outlaw the cloning of human beings.

paris

Europe's biotechnology industry is to set up a committee of independent experts to advise on ethical aspects of biotechnology and to draft a code of conduct for its members.

paris

France is to re-examine its commitments to international ‘big science’ projects and will assess whether its contributions can be justified on the grounds of scientific merit and cost-effectiveness.

washington

Uncertainty reigns over the future of Russia's damaged 11-year-old Mir space station hit last week by a cargo ship, but which has lasted far longer than any other Russian space station.

sydney

Australia's chief scientist has recommended a largely uncontroversial streamlining of advisory mechanisms in response to a government request to carry out a complete review of the organisation of Australian science.

Taiwan has ambitious plans to achieve international stature in science, and is investing accordingly. It is pursuing long-term national goals for technology development and to boost support for its best scientists.

Six years after the end of Communist rule in Russia, attempts to reform Russian science have produced a mixed scorecard. There have been some substantial achievements, but there is still need for further changes.

Models that link human behaviour to the way paths are formed provide excellent predictions of path geometry. In principle, such models can be extended to urban areas, and used to help understand how space affects such phenomena as crime, congestion and pollution.

Some of the proteins that are involved in membrane fusion also belong to the so-called AAA-type family of ATPases. Many of these ATPases have accessory molecules, which may act as ‘adaptors’ to mediate the binding of the ATPase to a membrane-bound receptor. Now, rat p97 — an AAA-type ATPase — has been found to have an accessory factor called p47. Moreover, it is the p97/p47 complex, rather than p97 alone, that is required for membrane assembly.

The correct position of new elements in the periodic table is not a trivial matter. We understand the periodic table in terms of the filling of electron shells — a process that would seem to be entirely predictable. But relativistic effects can make the heaviest elements behave in unexpected ways. Now chemistry has been extended to element 106 (seaborgium). Experiments on just seven atoms, each lasting a few seconds, place seaborgium firmly in group six of the periodic table, under tungsten and molybdenum, raising the question of why it behaves in such a conventional way.

At the neural level, our perception of colour is due to a group of so-called ‘colour-opponent’ neurons, which receive inputs from the three different classes of cone photoreceptors that are found in the eye. These neurons were thought to operate during the first stages of visual processing but, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they have now been shown to be active at higher levels of the visual cortex.

Cosmic rays are highly energetic charged particles that constantly hit the Earth. It is usually assumed that the flux of cosmic rays is roughly the same throughout our Galaxy, but new data appear to show bumps in the spectrum due to individual elements, implying that we are seeing the signature of a nearby source, probably a young supernova remnant.

It is known that, up to about 21,000 years ago, the primary control on types of regional vegetation has been variation in the global climate. Does the same apply over much longer timescales? Or, for instance, are local ecological factors the main determinant? A well-dated vegetation record from the northwest of the United States, extending back 125,000 years, shows that, over this period too, global climate change determines vegetation types. As this record extends back to the last interglacial, about 125,000-115,000 years ago, it may give clues as to what happens when an interglacial episode ends and a glacial begins.

A classic example of how human intervention in natural processes can have severe unforeseen side-effects comes from the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Coastal armouring structures, designed to prevent shoreline erosion, do indeed do that. But erosional forces instead become concentrated on the beaches in front of them, and the beaches no longer have the continual renewal of sandy substrate from sources locked into the shoreline. About 27 per cent of Oahu's 115 kilometres of beaches have been lost or severely affected in this way over the past 27 years.

Signalling through the transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta) requires the so-called Smad proteins, and two papers now show how the Smads work. TGF-beta binds to its receptor, which then activates Smad2 to form a transcriptionally active complex with Smad4. But the crystal structure of Smad4 shows that its carboxy-terminal domain can join up with its amino-terminal domain, to prevent the formation of a complex and, hence, to inhibit TGF-beta- mediated signalling.

The substrate problem is a big one for the optoelectronics industry. It is only possible to grow good quality material, without any of the defects that prevent light emission, if a substrate can be found with an almost identical atomic spacing to the layer grown on it. For some material systems there is no lattice-matched substrate available. But by adding a twist, a gallium arsenide substrate can be made stretchy — effectively a universal substrate.

Whether you are combing the shelves or digging in the back of the freezer, that missing reagent might just be here, such as cell-cycle antibodies, peptide controls, CO and haem oxygenases and those elusive FISH probes.