Volume 396 Issue 6710, 3 December 1998

Departing directors at the top US physics laboratories leave a discipline in search of inspired leadership.

london

Critics are hoping a last-minute glitch will prevent Iceland from passing a law giving a private company exclusive rights to the entire population's health records.

munich

A proposal by heads of German universities that university professors should be paid on the basis of their performance has triggered a sharp controversy.

washington

US space engineers are working to correct minor problems with the Galileo spacecraft that have ruined some recent observations of Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

new delhi

Farmers protesting against genetically engineered food crops last week destroyed a plot where cotton produced by the US company Monsanto was undergoing field trial.

moscow

Scientists in Moscow have rejected an agreement reached with the government last month and have vowed to continue their protests at the lack of adequate funding.

washington

Physicist Burt Richter is to step down next August as director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre.

paris

French scientists are challenging the government's decision not to earmark any funds for the construction of a new synchrotron radiation facility.

munich

Italy's new government is expected to modify previous proposals for the reform of the country's National Research Council.

washington

Officials in charge of the newly recovered Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite are proposing that an extra layer of US-European management should be added.

montevideo

Reacting to pressure from the scientific community, the government of Uruguay has promised to set up a new fund to support basic research, with an initial budget of $1 million.

strasbourg

Tensions have risen between the European Science Foundation and the heads of Europe's national research councils over how much direct influence the research councils should have within the foundation.

sydney

A plan to transform the funding of basic research in Australia has raised a storm of protest following the leakage of extracts from a confidential government document.

tokyo

Plans for four new reconnaissance satellites have become a bone of contention between the Japanese government and the Liberal Democratic Party over whether technical assistance should be sought from the United States.

london

Plans for the science content of Unitred Kingdom's Millennium Dome — including a ‘mind zone’ — were revealed in London last week.

One explanation for certain patterns of glaciation in the past invokes a large and comparatively swift decline in the tilt, or obliquity, of the Earth. A provocative hypothesis provides a mechanism by which such a decline could have occurred.

During development, the precursors for eggs and sperm — the germ cells — migrate to the gonads to mature. But what attracts them there? Results from a fruitfly screen indicate that one component in this pathway is a gene calledcolumbus, which encodes HMG-CoA reductase. In humans, this enzyme is involved in cholesterol biosynthesis, raising the intriguing possibility that the attractant may be a lipid.

Results from two teams of particle physicists have provided the first direct evidence that the world is not symmetric with respect to time. The experiments concerned involved tracking the decay of particles called kaons into antikaons, and vice versa. It turns out that the probability of one process happening is greater than the other, indicating asymmetry under time reversal.

The population numbers of mice, voles and lemmings can vary greatly, and often run in cycles. Study of such cycles has the object of understanding the dynamics and regulation of natural populations, and requires data in long time series. One such data set has now come to international attention — it has been quietly accumulating since the 1920s and concerns population cycles of the voles which inhabit Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan.

There are probably not many large land mammals unknown to science. Hence the excitement five years ago at the emergence of a new species of antelope from the forests of Vietnam. The original saola was reconstructed from hunting trophies, however, and no biologist has set eyes on a living beast. Now we have a photo of one.

Does it or doesn't it? For some time there has been controversy as to whether TBP (TATA-binding protein) needs TAFs (TBP-associated factors) to do its crucial job in gene transcription. Five papers now add to this debate — they show that TAFs have a broader function in gene expression than was previously thought.

The planets in our Solar System are all in roughly the same plane and trace roughly circular orbits around the Sun. As discussed at a meeting in October, however, with especial emphasis on the terrestrial planets, numerical simulations of the formation of Earth and Venus have them with much higher orbital eccentricities and inclinations than today. Hence the circular problem, which remains to be solved.

So-called banded iron formations are a dramatic feature of some Precambrian rocks. They are generally thought to be the result of episodic oxygenation of deep oceanic waters, which resulted in the precipitation and deposition of iron. An alternative explanation has it instead that the depths of the oceans did not become aerobic until comparatively late in Earth's history, and that earlier banded iron formations stemmed from the precipitation of iron as a sulphide.

There is plenty of indirect evidence that the postsynaptic density (PSD)-95 protein is involved in the clustering and, perhaps, targeting of postsynaptic proteins. Direct evidence was lacking, but PSD-95 knockout mice have now arrived, and their properties support a clustering function. However, knocking out PSD-95 also disrupts synaptic plasticity, and this could mean that PSD-95 acts as a kind of scaffold protein.

The many members of the Ras superfamily of small guanine-nucleotide-binding (G) proteins are thought to be regulated in a broadly similar way. However, a study of the proteins that regulate one member, Rap1, shows that this regulation may be much more varied than previously thought. Not only that, but these studies have unearthed another class of direct target proteins for the second messenger cyclic AMP.

In empty space, particle-antiparticle pairs are constantly created out of nothing. Although these pairs vanish again before their energy can violate the uncertainty principle, a high-energy particle collision nearby may provide the energy to stabilize such a virtual pair — and make it real. This week, Daedalus asks what velocity such a virtual pair is born with, and devises a way to test his bold theory.

Pioneer in biological rhythms

British ‘natural magicians’ of the nineteenth century could turn two flat images into one three-dimensional form. Later, Bela Julesz believed his stereograms showed how the brain turns images from two eyes into one reality.