Volume 397 Issue 6716, 21 January 1999

The choice of the new head of Japan's education ministry and Science and Technology Agency is to be applauded.

san francisco

Officials of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are now focusing on the possibility of insider trading related to bioscience companies.

washington

The US government has issued a legal opinion saying that research on human embryonic stem cells does not fall under a ban on federal funding for human embryo research.

washington

NASA space station managers are bracing for a 30 per cent cut in funds for research on the station to protect against a possible Russian default on delivering key elements of the station.

london

Britain's higher-education funding councils have removed the biochemistry panel from the list of groups that will carry out its forthcoming Research Assessment Exercise.

paris

French researchers working for public research agencies and universities are to be offered up to six years sabbatical leave to set up their own companies.

washington

Genome researcher and baseball fan Philip Ozersky has sold a record-making baseball, which he caught off Mark McGwire of the St Louis Cardinals, last summer for more than $3 million.

new delhi

The Indian government has announced that it will encourage the use of genetically modified seeds in agriculture and give high priority to transgenic crop research.

tokyo

Physicist Akito Arima, the former president of Tokyo University and currently Japan's minister of education, is also to become director-general of the Science and Technology Agency.

munich

Russian prosecutors are hoping that the arrest of a German fossil dealer may help them trace those they suspect of being involved in the theft of fossils from Russian museums.

munich

Germany's Social Democrats have blocked a move by the federal environment minister, Jürgen Trittin, to stop the licensing of new research reactors.

montreal

Tax incentives and other measures appear to be turning Quebec into Canada's the most attractive province for locating high-technology companies that carry out research and development.

london

Local authorities in the east of England are preparing to defend controversial plans to restrict the numbers of new high technology companies setting up near the city of Cambridge.

san francisco

US biotechnology companies are said to be bracing for continued financial problems in 1999 as the public markets look to industries that can provide quicker, more reliable returns.

The Internet revolution is injecting more competition into publishing and giving power back to scientists and learned societies. It presents new challenges to the guardians of the archives and could yet spell the end for many print titles.

Seismic tomography, a technique for imaging Earth's deep interior, is becoming ever more refined. The latest work tracks the subduction of a lithospheric slab below Siberia down to 2,800 km beneath the Earth's surface and back to Jurassic times.

When taking a long journey, you may use a train to cover most of the distance then a bus to complete the trip. In the same way, vesicles may be carried around the cell mainly by microtubules, then finish their journey on actin filaments. For the first time, these two processes are shown to link directly by the interaction of a kinesin motor with a myosin motor.

The giant white clams of Sagami Bay, Japan, live at depths of more than 1,100 metres. Their spawning has been recorded on video and, remarkably, has been subject to experiment, which seems to show that the timing of spawning is controlled by slight increases in water temperature.

Physicists have actively manipulated the shape of a quantum wavefunction, demonstrating an unprecedented amount of control over the quantum state. In an experiment last year, researchers used a variant of quantum holography to measure the wavefunction of an atomic electron. Now they have applied this technique to produce any desired wavefunction of the atomic electron via a feedback loop.

A cell's response to stress is often linked to protein synthesis and folding. These responses must have been conserved through evolution — otherwise, how would multicellular organisms ever have arisen? An evolutionary link has now been found in the form of a newly cloned mammalian stress-response protein called PERK. This protein has features of two gene products that are involved in the stress response in yeast.

The social instincts of a colourful coral reef fish, known as the Moorish idol, are the subject of a posthumous paper by Konrad Lorenz. It describes Lorenz's observations between 1976 and 1978 of how Moorish idols develop from typical antisocial teenagers into fully integrated members of aquarium society.

Three recent papers have demonstrated the existence of ‘ferroelectric’ ice, in which some of the dipolar water molecules are aligned. The evidence came from experiments with normal ice, either grown on a substrate or doped with impurities, and although it resolves the debate about whether such ice exists, it reopens the thermodynamic question of whether nature prefers order at low temperatures.

Telomeres, the ends of chromosomes, present cells with a problem -- they can trigger DNA-damage responses and may become degraded or fuse with one another. To prevent this, telomeres are complexed with proteins. One such protein -- the Oxytricha telomere end-binding protein -- has now been crystallized, and the structure shows how it is exquisitely tailored for its job.

Hydrogenases are bacterial enzymes that catalyse the production or consumption of hydrogen. They come in two forms, one of which — iron-only hydrogenase -- has defied structure determination until now. Two groups however have cracked the problem and have produced structures of the enzyme from two different bacteria.

During development, some neurons can change their sensitivity to neurotransmitters such as GABA. At birth, these neurons contain high concentrations of Cl⁻ ions, which means that GABA excites them. But just a week after birth, they contain much less intracellular Cl⁻, and GABA is inhibitory. The protein responsible for this switch has now been identified, and is shown to be a K⁺/Cl⁻co-transporter called KCC2.

Exploration of the 'brain pan', a layer of cultured brain cells in a petri dish, is this week taken further. Daedalus reckons he has now invented the ultimate neural net computer, which can be educated, and in more sophisticated forms equipped with sound and vision inputs, and hydraulic outputs.

A selection of new products aimed at the DNA amplification market features PCR kits, and the paraphernalia needed to make use of them. compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers. c b B H f i p b t m