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Volume 393 Issue 6683, 28 May 1998

Opinion

  • India's recent nuclear tests are a reminder that, despite recent progress in arms control, nuclear weapons remain a threat to humanity. Helping to prevent their use requires redoubled effort by the scientific community.

    Opinion

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  • British Biotech's problems underline the need for scientific literacy in the stock market.

    Opinion
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News

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News in Brief

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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • New results imply that we may be in for a surprise about how argon, krypton and xenon behave in the Earth's mantle. Laboratory experiments show that these noble gases, which are used as geochemical tracers, do not act as expected under high pressure.

    • Minoru Ozima
    News & Views

  • The signals that pass between cells to coordinate the construction of our bodies during development are surprisingly simple and few. One of the main signalling pathways involves a protein called Notch. A puzzle for those working on this protein is how it relays signals from the surface of the cell —where it is bound into the membrane —to the nucleus. Three groups have now found the solution, using different approaches. It turns out that on activation by its ligand, Delta, the Notch protein is cleaved, and only the intracellular domain goes on to the nucleus.

    • Julian Lewis
    News & Views

  • The nine species of land crab in Jamaica are adapted extraordinarily well to terrestrial life. They vary considerably, however, according to their particular habitat. A phylogenetic analysis of sequences from two mitochondrial genes now shows that all the species had a common marine ancestor. Moreover, in evolutionary terms, it seems that the current diversity has arisen very quickly —that is, within the past four million years or so.

    • Amanda Tromans
    News & Views

  • Rich and subtle phase behaviour has emerged from new work with colloidal systems. Depending on experimental conditions, mixtures of colloidal rods and spheres may separate into rod-rich or rod-poor phases, or alternating layers of rods and spheres. One might infer that the particle interactions concerned are highly complex, but in fact the rods and spheres simply interact as ‘hard’ particles. Counterintuitively, it seems that entropy is the ordering force.

    • Henk N. W. Lekkerkerker
    • Alain Stroobants
    News & Views

  • The symptoms, causes and even existence of Gulf War syndrome have led to much controversy —veterans suspect that chemicals are to blame, whereas the US government maintains that it is a type of post-traumatic stress disorder. But they could both be right. According to a new study, both stress and acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (which were used as a preventative treatment against nerve gas) increase production of acetylcholine in synapses. But eventually this leads to a long-lasting decrease in levels of acetylcholine, decreased neuronal excitability and impaired cognition.

    • Robert M. Sapolsky
    News & Views

  • What determines the structure of silk fibres? This question is of particular interest in the quest to make synthetic silk. It has usually been assumed that the amino acid sequence of the silk protein determines the fibre's crystalline structure; but by using natural silk proteins and drawing them into fibres artificially, new experiments hint that processing may be more important than sequence.

    • Paul Calvert
    News & Views

  • Females have two copies of the X chromosome, yet the genes on only one copy are active. Genes on the other copy are turned off by cytosine methylation. For the first time, a link has been found between this methylation process and acetylation of histones —the protein balls around which the DNA in chromosomes is wrapped. A protein called MeCP2, which binds only to methylated DNA sequences, exists in a complex with histone deacetylase, which removes acetyl groups from the histones, causing them to condense and become transcriptionally inactive.

    • Timothy H. Bestor
    News & Views

  • After decades of research, our understanding of the aurora is disturbingly incomplete. One long-held belief, that aurorae are much more common following each peak in the 11-year solar cycle, has now been overturned. It is also becoming more certain that discrete aurorae occur more often above dark regions of the atmosphere than above sunlit regions. Both of these discoveries support the idea that aurorae are discharge phenomena, but make it hard to explain what sort of electrical generator could be responsible.

    • Joseph E. Borovsky
    News & Views

  • Daedalus is adapting his idea of directional combustion catalysts, turning it to electricity generation. His crystalline catalysts have highly regular surfaces that cause the combustion products to spring off in a specific direction. DREADCO chemists are developing a catalytic battery based on catalysts for which the product is an electron: butane and air impinge in the surface, and a stream of electrons emerges, driving a current far more efficiently than conventional batteries.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Science and Image

  • Models of molecular structures are not just useful aids in visualization and education for our understanding of the engineering of materials, but also reflect the styles of the dominant modes of design of their period.

    • Martin Kemp
    Science and Image
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Scientific Correspondence

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Book Review

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Review Article

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Article

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Letter

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Retraction

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Corrigendum

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Erratum

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