Volume 390 Issue 6656, 13 November 1997

Governments need to do more to curb pollution of astronomically essential radio bands.

new delhi

India's radioastronomers are upset about the likely impact of emissions from a new mobile telephone satellite network on the US$17-million world's most sensitive radiotelescope near Pune.

geneva

Radioastronomers are facing a new battle in their long-running dispute with mobile telephone companies over the use of radio signals at low frequencies.

washington

Committees organized by the US National Academy of Sciences would be more open to public scrutiny under legislation being hurriedly drafted in Congress.

tokyo

Two Japanese ministries are considering setting up ‘technology liaison offices’ to help improve collaboration between universities and industry.

paris

. The British government has launched a study into the risk that the agent that causes the new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) might be transmitted by blood.

tokyo & london

Two days of talks between environment ministers indeveloped and developing countries failed to break the stalemate on legally binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions.

moscow

The Russian parliament has ratified the United Nations convention on chemical weapons, originally signed in Paris in January 1993.

washington

The US Department of Defense should support a collaborative programme with Russia on dangerous pathogens, says a committee of the National Academy of Sciences.

london

The Malaysian government has justified a ban on scientists at public institutions talking to the press about the haze from Indonesian forest fires.

london

The theory that men who have been exposed to radiation father children with a higher than average risk of contracting childhood leukaemia has been questioned by a new study, the largest of its kind.

washington

. The US National Institutes of Health has been forced to defend its peer-review system in Congress against charges of bias against ‘mind body medicine’.

new delhi

The Indian government is planning tough legislation that will severely restrict access by foreign researchers and pharmaceutical companies to the country's biological resources.

sydney

The first comprehensive review of Australia's research in Antarctica in the 50 years aims to divert funds to support more science if savings can be made in infrastructure costs.

sydney

International sensitivities about the exploitation of Antarctica's resources surfaced at a meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.

A pair of forming galaxies are now the most distant known objects. Their knotty, irregular structure — visible with the help of an intervening gravitational lens — gives a close-up view of star formation in the early Universe.

The balance between cell survival and programmed cell death (apoptosis) is important in animal growth and development. Several new reports now unravel the intricate set of instructions of one pathway that promotes cell survival. The central players are an enzyme called Akt, a protein called Bad, which (as its name suggests) tells cells to die, and Bcl-x_L, a cell survival factor. Activated Akt adds a phosphate group to Bad, which then dissociates from its complex with Bcl-x_L. The latter is now free to halt the activity of a group of enzymes called caspases, which are the cells' executioners.

For the past 9,000 years or so the world has experienced an interglacial period, with (in terms of geological time) an anomalously warm and stable climate. But how stable are interglacials, and what processes might bring them to a sudden close? Evidence from a 53-metre-long sediment core, retrieved from the Bermuda Rise in the western North Atlantic, now gives us the most detailed picture yet of events during the previous interglacial. The results date the period concerned to between 129,000 and 119,000 years ago. Most notably, however, its termination seems to have been marked by a sudden reduction in the ocean 'conveyor' circulation which today carries ocean heat north from the tropics and warms much of Europe.

The evolutionary history of the fungi is something of an enigma, but molecular approaches to the question are bringing some answers. The two main constituents of a group known as the homobasidiomycetes are the gilled and puffball fungi, and sequence analyis of genes encoding ribosomal RNA reveals, for instance, that gills arose independently at least six times. Another conclusion to be drawn from the study is that some homobasidiomycetes such as the bird's nest fungus evolved separately from the two main subgroups.

New molecular markers have provided a wealth of information about the evolution of modern humans, which occurred somewhere between 250,000 and 150,000 years ago. A meeting held last month discussed how short repeated sequences in DNA (Alu inserts and microsatellites) can be used to pinpoint more accurately when modern humans first appeared and when they first emigrated from Africa. It seems that the split between African and non-African populations occurred about 140,000 years ago and that the first 'out of Africa' diaspora may have arrived in Southeast Asia.

Tin-100 is an ideal testing ground for certain types of nuclear shell structure. It has an equal number of neutrons and protons, which tends to exaggerate shell structure; and because the number (50 of each) is also a 'magic number', corresponding to a just-filled shell, tin-100 is much less unstable than other symmetrical nuclei of a similar size. Gamma-ray decays from neighbouring, related nuclei hint at a surprising asymmetry between the nuclear shell structure for neutrons and for protons.

Phospholipids are important components of cellular signalling pathways and of cell membranes. Two papers in this issue now suggest that phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphosphate, a key player in phospholipid synthesis, can be produced by an alternative pathway that involves an enzyme identified nearly a decade ago and a novel lipid substrate. Another newly discovered inositol lipid in this pathway, phosphatidylinositol-3,5-bisphosphate, appears to be involved in the response to osmotic stress in yeast and in mammalian cells.

In certain types of periodic structure, light can be trapped. Such structures are called photonic bandgap materials or photonic crystals, and promise to be as important to the progress of optical devices as semiconductors were to the development of electronic devices. Now the smallest photon trap ever, with a volume of 0.055 μ;m3, has been built in a silicon waveguide. Such devices can accelerate the emission from atoms inside them, promising brighter lasers and faster optical communication.

This week marks the 500th contribution in News and Views by Daedalus. To celebrate the occasion, this week's item is not his usual column but an interview with Daedalus himself.

Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca plotted perspective so meticulously and consistently that he was able to make the divine, with its miraculous lack of optical logic, shine out in contrast to the rest of the picture.

In every country examined, there are far fewer women in senior positions in science than the number who begin a career in research — and those who do achieve success are paid less than their male colleagues. Irrespective of gender, the distribution of grants for scientific research is grossly skewed in favour of the few at the expense of the many. And members of some ethnic minority groups tend not even to begin careers in research. Why are these discriminatory practices tolerated, and what (if anything) is being done to change this state of affairs?