Volume 390 Issue 6660, 11 December 1997

london

Nine life science institutes supported by Britain's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have formed themselves into a consortium known as the Bioscience Network.

washington

The US National Science Foundation, acting under instructions from Congress to launch a plant genome research programme, has succeeded in framing the initiative in scientifically-rigorous terms.

london

The fate of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Cambridge will be determined tomorrow (Friday) when Britain's main astronomy research funding agency decides whether to throw the centre a lifeline.

paris

Footdragging by the British government is exposing haemophiliacs to the risk of becoming infected with the new variant of Creutzfeld Jakob disease by contaminated blood products.

paris

Repeated assurances by the UK government that British meat is now safe to eat came to an abrupt end last week when it banned the sale of all cuts of beef on the bone.

sydney

A geologist who fought a five-year court battle against a Christian preacher's claims to have found ‘scientific’ evidence for Noah's Ark in Turkey has failed to overturn a judgement made against him last June.

munich

British scientists working at the Joint European Torus fusion facility in Oxfordshire, England, have overwhelmingly rejected a proposed settlement which could have resolved a 15-year labour dispute.

washington

The US National Science Board has strongly criticized the way that science policy is currently established within the US government, and has asked for a new approach to setting priorities.

washington

The United States and the European Union have signed a collaborative agreement allowing US scientists to participate in Europe's Framework research programme.

tokyo

A network of life scientists in the Asia-Pacific region that aims to boost biomedical research and biotechnology in the region has begun to take shape.

tokyo

Taiwanese astronomers have won approval for a small but ambitious international project to carry out the first survey of the outer regions of the solar system looking directly for comets and small objects.

canberra

The Australian government has lifted a threat of closure hanging over its Cooperative Research Centres, and withdraw a demand that national research agencies and universities substantially increase their external earnings.

kyoto

Prospects for a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions edged a step closer as the 10-day United Nations climate conference in Kyoto moved towards its climax.

washington

US and European officials have signed a formal agreement under which the United States will contribute $531 million towards the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

Quantum teleportation is a way of transferring the state of one particle to a second, effectively teleporting the initial particle. This technique has only existed as a thought experiment — until now.

Hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP) has long been suspected to be involved in learning and memory, but definitive proof has been hard to come by. Two groups now report, however, that fear conditioning (which is a form of pavlovian conditioning) causes an increase in the strength of synapses in a region of the brain that is associated with learning and memory. Animals were trained to associate a tone with a foot shock, eliciting a response of ‘fear’. After training, this response occurred when the tone was given but the foot shock was not.

The latest genome to be sequenced is that of the parasite responsible for Lyme disease —Borrelia burgdorferi. Why should this sequence be of interest? First, because Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne disease in Europe, the United States and parts of Asia, so the more we know about the parasite that causes it, the closer we should be to possible treatments. Second, because this is the first spirochaete genome to be sequenced, and the first prokaryotic genome to contain several genetic elements.

Eta Carinae is a spectacular star. With a mass perhaps 100 times that of the Sun, it is very luminous, and barely stable. Even though it is 8,000 light years away, it became one of the brightest stars in the sky during an outburst about 150 years ago. Periodic but intensifying emission of X-rays from the star probably herald another outburst in January (although it is unlikely to be as violent). Observations of the coming outburst should, however, help us to determine whether Eta Carinae is a binary, and what causes it to emit X-rays.

Different species of a genus of starfish found on Australia's temperate east coast vary widely in their mode of reproduction. Some produce tiny eggs that develop into free-swimming larvae before becoming tiny, bottom-dwelling starfish; others have larger eggs that develop directly into starfish. Some have brood care; others cast their eggs into the sea. A study of some of these starfish, and members of a closely related genus, involved constructing a phylogeny based on mitochondrial DNA sequences, and tracing on it the different reproductive modes. The upshot gives a snapshot of how development is moulded by evolution, in the form of a kind of Hertzsprung-Russell diagram for biological stars.

Why is the combination of aspirin and opioids more analgesic than the summed effect of each drug given separately? The answer lies in the specific inhibition of neurotransmitter release by non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory analgesics. Activation of the μ opioid receptor leads to the production of arachidonic acid, which can be metabolized through three enzymatic pathways, leading to the release of neurotransmitter. But researchers now have found that two of the pathways can be blocked by analgesics, so neurotransmitter release (and ‘painful’ signals) are inhibited.

Because nearly half of the world's population may lose some or all ability to hear by the age of 80, finding out why this occurs is a priority. The latest findings are the isolation of two genes which, when mutated, both cause hearing problems. The first encodes a protein called diaphanous, which is involved in functioning of sensory hair cells in the cochlea. The second encodes a putative sulphate transporter protein — pendrin — that is mutated in patients with a hearing disorder called Pendred syndrome. Defects in pendrin affect the growth and development of the cochlea.

An increasing problem in cancer chemotherapy is multiple drug resistance. To fight it, medicinal chemists are continually on the lookout for new cytotoxic compounds, and from natural products they have isolated several that each promote the formation of stable bundles of microtubules, and so inhibit cell division. The newest member of this family is eleutherobin, whose isolation was announced in September. Astonishingly, that has already been followed by the compound's total synthesis.

The puritan conscience holds that pleasure is sinful and should be followed by, and maybe even preceded by, pain. Daedalus is now inventing a drug appropriate for this stern view — it is an alcohol which gives you a hangover first. The chemistry is decidedly tricky, but the delayed rewards offered by the resulting ‘Pain and Pleasure Pill’ would have decidedly interesting applications.

Jonathan Callan is a landscape artist with a difference. He is experimenting with the unpredictable by allowing his powdered medium to go with the flow, producing avalanches that create their own terrain.

Quantum teleportation — the transmission and reconstruction over arbitrary distances of the state of a quantum system — is demonstrated experimentally. During teleportation, an initial photon which carries the polarization that is to be transferred and one of a pair of entangled photons are subjected to a measurement such that the second photon of the entangled pair acquires the polarization of the initial photon. This latter photon can be arbitrarily far away from the initial one. Quantum teleportation will be a critical ingredient for quantum computation networks.

This week's section focuses on cell biology tools — items viewed include imaging and microscopy systems, an intracellular injector, media and media additives, oligosaccharide selections and systems for plant cell biology.