Volume 398 Issue 6722, 4 March 1999

Opinion

Dangers of Euro-relevance

The European Commission has clarified aspects of its next Framework programme of research. An insistence on quick delivery of socio-economic benefits threatens the programme's success.

Opinion 04 Mar 1999

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Where next on misconduct?

Tackling scientific fraud has generated its own problems, while others remain unaddressed.

Opinion 04 Mar 1999

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News

Anomalies in French blood inquiry over ‘misleading’ report

paris
Documents from the mid-1980s reveal that the French agency that later carried out investigations into the 'contaminated blood' affair was aware at the time that blood products were contaminated with HIV.

Declan Butler
News 04 Mar 1999
British drive for more women in science

london
Britain's science minister has launched a project that aims to see the same proportion of women in academic appointments as those recruited as undergraduates.

Natasha Loder
News 04 Mar 1999
Indian budget boost targets innovation, vaccines and genetics

new delhi
Funding for Indian science is to be increased next year to a total $2.44 billion under budget proposals submitted by the Bharatiya Janata Party government to parliament last week.

K. S. Jayaraman
News 04 Mar 1999
US aid to Russian weapons labs defended

washington
The US Department of Energy is defending its ‘lab-to-lab’ collaborations with Russian weapons scientists against criticism in a report from the General Accounting Office.

Colin Macilwain
News 04 Mar 1999
Japanese institutes face greater autonomy

tokyo
Prominent basic research institutes in Japan are set to be transformed into semi-autonomous ‘agencies’ with enhanced managerial independence.

Asako Saegusa
News 04 Mar 1999
Collapse of talks on safety of GMO trade

london
Nine days of talks on regulating international trade in genetically modified organisms broke down last week, even though at one point agreement appeared within sight.

Ehsan Masood
News 04 Mar 1999
NASA plans two-stage Hubble repair to keep the data flowing

washington
The US space agency NASA may bring forward a scheduled repair of the Hubble Space Telescope prevent putting a temporary halt to scientific observations.

Tony Reichhardt
News 04 Mar 1999
Germany aims for competitive equality

bonn
Biotechnology researchers, east German scientists, women and young scientists are to be the main beneficiaries of the future growth in the German research budget.

Alison Abbott
News 04 Mar 1999
Head of German particle physics lab dies

munich
Björn Wiik, director of DESY, Germany's national research centre for particle physics, in Hamburg, died last week after an accident at home.

Alison Abbott
News 04 Mar 1999
South Africa stands firm on AIDS drug ⃛

cape town
South Afruca's Minister of Health, Nkosazana Zuma, has refused to alter her decision not to pay for a pilot programme administering AZT to HIV-positive pregnant mothers.

Michael Cherry
News 04 Mar 1999
⃛while forecasting benefits from NASA funds

cape town
The US space agency NASA has agreed to locate its first satellite laser ranging system (SLRS) on the African continent in South Africa.

Michael Cherry
News 04 Mar 1999
Canadians protest over rare species bill

montreal
More than 600 Canadian scientists have written to the prime minister demanding that planned legislation to protect endangered species be based on scientific principles.

David Spurgeon
News 04 Mar 1999
Varmus wish list guides senators in fight for biomedical funding

washington
A key US senator has indicated that he will push for considerably more money for the National Institutes of Health next year than the 2.1 per cent increase propose by President Clinton.

Meredith Wadman
News 04 Mar 1999

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News in Brief

News in Brief

News in Brief 04 Mar 1999

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Briefing

Science comes to terms with the lessons of fraud

Although the incidence of proven scientific fraud remains low, several high-profile cases have convinced the research community of the need for effective action, in particular by enforcing codes of good laboratory practice.

Briefing 04 Mar 1999
Japanese scandals raise public distrust

Briefing 04 Mar 1999
Editors debate whether to blow the whistle on suspect papers

Briefing 04 Mar 1999
US stalls on new definitions of misconduct

Briefing 04 Mar 1999
Guidelines on the web

Briefing 04 Mar 1999

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Correspondence

Papers vanish in mis-citation black hole

Janne S. Kotiaho
Correspondence 04 Mar 1999
Engineering a longer life

Nigel L. Firth
Correspondence 04 Mar 1999
Managing SOHO

Joseph B. Gurman
Correspondence 04 Mar 1999
Controversy over the cloning of mice

Karl Illmensee
Correspondence 04 Mar 1999
Forging links in an electronic paper chain

Mark Gerstein
Correspondence 04 Mar 1999
The editor as an endangered species

Gene L. Wells
Correspondence 04 Mar 1999
Space-grown crystals may prove their worth

Naomi E. Chayen
John R. Helliwell
Correspondence 04 Mar 1999

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News & Views

From rifting to drifting

Africa is splitting apart down the East African Rift. An analysis of the relative motion of the tectonic plates involved allows the rate of continental rifting to be estimated.

Fred F. Pollitz
News & Views 04 Mar 1999
An SH2 domain in disguise

Proteins inside cells that convey information from the outside often contain special signalling modules known as SH2 domains. These domains may have developed during the evolution of multicellular animals, and were typically identified by their amino-acid sequence. But now one has been discovered in a human protein called Cbl that has a quite different sequence, raising questions about the ancestral origin of these domains.

John Kuriyan
James E. Darnell Jr
News & Views 04 Mar 1999
100 and 50 years ago

News & Views 04 Mar 1999
A taste of things to come

Little is known about the molecular basis of taste perception compared with, say, vision or touch. Now, not one, but two, potential mammalian taste receptors have been discovered. Both are guanine-nucleotide-binding (G) protein-coupled receptors, with sequence homology to other known chemosensory receptors.

Alison Mitchell
News & Views 04 Mar 1999
Evolution of the cosmological constant

Supernova observations have indicated that the Universe is expanding faster than the theory of inflation predicts. Some theoretical cosmologists suggest that an exotic form of energy density called quintessence may be responsible. Quintessence began as Einstein's cosmological constant, but if it is not, in fact, constant it may explain why we appeared just when it had the same value as the density of ordinary matter.

P. J. E. Peebles
News & Views 04 Mar 1999
Accessory to murder

To flag themselves for destruction, virus-infected cells express viral peptides on their surface. It was always thought that these peptides were generated from viral peptide made inside the cell. Over the years, however, another theory has gained ground —namely that cells can also take up viral antigens. The first direct evidence to support this theory is now reported.

Ton N. M. Schumacher
News & Views 04 Mar 1999
The mystery of the sapropels

Sapropels are layers of sediment on the sea floor that are rich in organic carbon. The way in which they were formed has been a matter of intense debate, with researchers usually invoking one of two alternative explanations. Work in the Mediterranean now allows those explanations to be reconciled.

Connie Sancetta
News & Views 04 Mar 1999
DREAM on without calcium

One way of switching on certain genes to express their encoded proteins is to increase the concentration of calcium ions inside the cell nucleus, which can happen in response to an instruction from outside the cell. A new mediator of this effect has been discovered: it is a protein called DREAM, which sits tightly on the gene, preventing its expression, until it has bound four calcium ions. It then detaches itself, leaving the gene exposed for transcription.

Gail Mandel
Richard H. Goodman
News & Views 04 Mar 1999
Bugging the brain

A giant, multilayered carbon nanotube, one micrometre across and coated with slippery graphite fluoride, would be an ideal biological electrode, thinks Daedalus. In the brain, such a microdermic needle could work like a precise electroencephalograph. And a mass of needles distributed through the nervous system, and hooked up to a computer, could be used to create the very first cyborg robot.

David Jones
News & Views 04 Mar 1999

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Scientific Correspondence

Designing tie knots by random walks

Thomas M. Fink
Yong Mao
Scientific Correspondence 04 Mar 1999
Pasture damage by an Amazonian earthworm

Armand Chauvel
Michel Grimaldi
Patrick Lavelle
Scientific Correspondence 04 Mar 1999
Using hair to screen for breast cancer

Veronica James
John Kearsley
David Cookson
Scientific Correspondence 04 Mar 1999
Change-blindness as a result of ‘mudsplashes’

J. Kevin O'Regan
Ronald A. Rensink
James J. Clark
Scientific Correspondence 04 Mar 1999