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Volume 397 Issue 6714, 7 January 1999

Opinion

  • The need to place scientific knowledge at the heart of economic and social policy has underlined some of the limitations of focusing on trade liberalization. Developing countries should be a prime beneficiary.

    Opinion

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News

  • jerusalem

    Israeli government officials have condemned a French-led effort to stop Israel from participating in the European Union's Fifth Framework R&D programme unless it implements the ‘Wye Plantation’ agreement reached with the Palestinian Authority last October.

    • Haim Watzman
    News

  • munich

    Central-east European countries aspiring to membership of the European Union are unlikely to fulfil earlier promises to significantly increase research spending next year.

    • Alison Abbott
    News

  • munich

    One third of biological research at institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is of international standard, according to an international evaluation committee.

    • Alison Abbott
    News

  • tokyo

    Japan has included a generous 8.1 per cent boost in funds for science and technology for the 1999 fiscal year, beginning on 1 April, with a strong emphasis on basic research.

    • Asako Saegusa
    News

  • washington

    A software glitch has meant that the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft will have to wait another 13 months before the start of a planned orbit of the asteroid Eros, which was intended to begin next week.

    • Tony Reichhardt
    News
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News Analysis

  • Nature's correspondents describe the increasing attention being paid to bridging the ‘knowledge gap’ between rich and poor countries.

    • David Dickson
    News Analysis

  • LONDON

    After five decades of helping poor countries to liberalize their economies, a new phrase has entered World Bank jargon: 'knowledge development'.

    • Ehsan Masood
    News Analysis

  • WASHINGTON

    International scientific collaboration has never been a higher priority for the United States, if public pronouncements by the leaders of the US scientific establishment are anything to go by.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News Analysis

  • MUNICH

    European donor countries are becoming more receptive to funding research in developing countries, believing it to be a fundamental component of economic success.

    • Alison Abbott
    News Analysis

  • NEW DELHI

    India has learned that science-based innovation has little role in development unless it is socially accepted and fits into the prevailing cultural system.

    • K. S. Jayaraman
    News Analysis

  • PARIS

    Despite initial pessimism, the Internet promises to help spur a renaissance of science and technology in poorer countries.

    • Declan Butler
    News Analysis
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News in Brief

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Correspondence

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Commentary

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News & Views

  • In genomic imprinting, one copy of a gene is switched off depending on whether it came from the father or mother. One explanation centres on the competing interests of the two parents. Another now brings in sex-associated differences in the offspring.

    • Mark Pagel
    News & Views

  • How strong is the bond formed between a protein and its ligand? Individual protein-ligand pairs can be pulled apart experimentally, and the force required to do so measured using atomic force microscopy. But, according to a new study, that's not the end of the story — the strength of the bond may also depend on how hard and fast you pull.

    • Patrick S. Stayton
    News & Views

  • Many plants rely on herbivores to disperse their seeds. The plants present the seeds in a bright, tasty packaging, tempting herbivores to eat them. But what happens if the herbivore is then eaten by a predator? A study of fruit-eating lizards in the Canary Islands suggests that viable seeds can be ingested by the predator and taken on to new locations.

    • Peter D. Moore
    News & Views

  • Contaminant transport in ground water is a contentious issue — especially when it comes to possible movement of radionuclides from nuclear test sites or storage facilities. Analyses carried out in Nevada now implicate colloids in the movement of plutonium from a nuclear detonation site. The case, however, has yet to be clinched, and the broader interest in this example lies in the questions it raises about identifying colloid-associated transport in general.

    • Bruce D. Honeyman
    News & Views

  • Plants have developed many mechanisms to fend off invaders, but the bugs are fighting back. In a series of reports, several groups describe how a viral protein, the helper component protease, is able to paralyse a plant defence mechanism that normally acts against viruses.

    • Ortrun Mittelsten Scheid
    News & Views

  • The life cycle of corals combines a dispersal, larval phase with a sedentary, adult phase. Larvae must find somewhere to settle down, and this process is termed recruitment. In the most comprehensive study yet, carried out on the Great Barrier Reef, one group has shown that recruitment rates vary substantially in various parts of the reef, and do not tally with adult abundances.

    • Peter F. Sale
    News & Views

  • Because one of the enzymes that is needed to make chlorophyll requires light, a seedling that is grown in the dark (and is therefore etiolated) will have problems when it finally emerges into the sunshine — it will not have enough chlorophyll to protect it from the harmful effects of too much light. However, the enzyme that presents the plant with this dilemma, protochlorophyllide oxidoreductase, also gives it the solution.

    • Robert Willows
    News & Views

  • Daedalus suggests a solution to the radio noise from telecommunication satellite systems, and the problem they create for radioastronomers. For example, the 66 satellites of the Iridium system now entering service could collectively form a ‘very long baseline interferometer’ which could be made wonderfully directional — transmitting to and receiving from just few square metres around a specific ground station. Radiotelescopes elsewhere would detect nothing.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Scientific Correspondence

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Book Review

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Progress

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Letter

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Collection

  • The aim of this Collection is to celebrate the ingenuity and diversity of physics in the twentieth-century.

    Collection
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