Volume 393 Issue 6682, 21 May 1998

new delhi

India has been secretly designing a whole range of nuclear weapons for the past 25 years.

new delhi

Five nuclear tests beginning on Budda's birthday in the land of Mahatma Gandhi have blasted a large hole in India's image as a spiritual, non violent nation.

canberra

Research gained a small increase in the New Zealand government's budget delivered last week.

washington

The United States is on the brink of shipping its first-ever consignment of radioactive waste to a permanent storage facility at a site in New Mexico.

washington

President Clinton has failed to accelerate AIDS vaccine development despite an earlier pledge to develop a vaccine within a decade.

tokyo

Japan's proposed legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is being criticized for lacking the necessary measures to ensure compliance by industry.

munich

The European Patent Office moratorium on the patenting of plants and animals is likely to be lifted.

washington

The US Patent and Trademark Office claims it can stop a proposed patent on human-animal chimaeras on moral grounds alone.

washington

The leaders of the Human Genome Project have firmly rejected arguments that a new private initiative makes their efforts redundant.

london

Britain's Wellcome Trust has received widespread support in the academic community for its decision to double its support for sequencing the human genome.

london

Countries belonging to the United Nations biodiversity convention have agreed on a compromise over whether the convention should be provided with independent scientific advice.

tokyo

Japan's earthquake research programme could be refocused from predicting an imminent earthquake to longer range forecasts.

paris

France has launched a multi-billion franc package of measures intended to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship.

paris

An inquiry by the French research ministry into the activities of a laboratory of INSERM, the national biomedical has taken a new turn.

Dendrites are projections that typically originate from the cell body of neurons and are the main site for incoming synaptic inputs. Their function is largely unknown. But there is now clear-cut evidence that, in the auditory brain stem, dendrites enrich the computational power of neurons.

What will happen to the increasing amounts of carbon being emitted into the atmosphere in the form of CO₂? The question is a pressing one, both politically and economically, given the international endeavour to reduce emissions of CO₂and minimize the consequent predicted warming. Models of the effects of environmental change on carbon balance in the oceans and on land, running into the middle of the next century, provide new estimates of the CO₂flux in both cases. Not only do these modelled fluxes differ from those used as base cases at present, but the approaches used highlight the differences, and respective shortcomings, in models of marine and terrestrial processes.

Reverse pharmacology is a way of identifying biologically active molecules by starting with the receptors to which they bind and, literally, working backwards. One group has gone even further back than this — first they cloned an ‘orphan’ receptor and then they set about looking for its ligand. They identified two peptides that bind this receptor, and have found that these promote the release of prolactin — the hormone that is responsible for lactation.

Bulk matter melts and freezes in a predictable manner. Not so clusters of atoms in their tens, hundreds or thousands, which have very different properties. They have no fixed melting temperature at a given pressure, but instead have melting ranges of temperature in which solid and liquid coexist. New work provides the first quantitative demonstration of how the melting temperature of such clusters depends on their size. But the pattern that emerges is highly irregular, and the challenge of finding its physical basis remains.

Pity the poor reed warbler parents that have a cuckoo egg laid in their nest. Not only does the cuckoo fledgling eject the reed warblers' young, but it then persuades its hosts to feed it at a rate equivalent to feeding an entire brood of its own nestlings. Some ingenious field and laboratory experiments have exposed the cues concerned. It turns out that the cuckoo chick's begging call, a continuous and rapid ‘si, si, si, si’ is quite unlike that of an individual reed warbler chick, but closely resembles that of an entire brood of them. Vocal trickery, then, seems to be the explanation for why the reed warbler parents are fooled into the accelerated provisioning rate.

Soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs) are a rare class of astronomical object that are associated with young neutron stars born in supernova explosions. There is indirect evidence that SGR neutron stars have very strong magnetic fields — hence their designation as so-called ‘magnetars’. New observations of the X-ray flux from one of these objects now provide a stronger case for massive magnetism (10¹⁴gauss or more) and that the source of the gamma-ray bursts is sudden fracture of the star's rigid crust.

What is the mental computation that's involved in getting from one place to another? To study this, one group used positron emission tomography to map the areas of the brain that were activated as people navigated their way around a familiar, yet complex, virtual-reality town. By doing this, the authors have been able to construct a map of the regions of the brain that support navigation in humans.

Certain types of human papillomavirus (HPV) are involved in the development of cervical and other perianal cancers, and a new study takes us a step closer to working out how. An HPV-encoded oncoprotein known as E6 can interact with the human tumour suppressor p53, inactivating it and preventing it from carrying out its normal functions. The authors have found that people can carry either an arginine or a proline residue at a specific position in p53, and that E6 binds best to the arginine form. What's more, they've found that people with two copies of the p53 gene that specifies the arginine residue have a seven-fold higher risk of developing cervical cancer than those without.

Most enzyme-catalysed reactions involve the conversion of a substrate molecule — which fits neatly into the enzyme's active site — into product. The product is usually of a different shape, and springs off the surface of the enzyme. Most of the energy of this reaction is liberated as molecular velocity in a specific direction, and Daedalus wants to apply this principle to combustion. He envisages producing aircraft coated with an appropriate catalytic substance — the products of combustion would be ejected directionally, downwards and backwards, providing lift and thrust.

Pioneer inchimie douce

Can you tell a criminal from the look of his face? The “downright detestable” appearance of Robert Louis Stevenson's evil Mr Hyde stands in the same tradition as the images used by Darwin in his work on pathognomics.

The E6 oncoprotein derived from tumour-associated human papillomaviruses (HPVs) binds to and induces the degradation of the cellular tumour-suppressor protein p53. A common polymorphism that occurs in the p53 amino-acid sequence results in the presence of either a proline or an arginine at position 72. The effect of this polymorphism on the susceptibility of p53 to E6-mediated degradation has been investigated and the arginine form of p53 was found to be significantly more susceptible than the proline form. Moreover, allelic analysis of patients with HPV-associated tumours revealed a striking overrepresentation of homozygous arginine-72 p53 compared with the normal population, which indicated that individuals homozygous for arginine 72 are about seven times more susceptible to HPV-associated tumorigenesis than heterozygotes. The arginine-encoding allele therefore represents a significant risk factor in the development of HPV-associated cancers.