Volume 400 Issue 6739, 1 July 1999

Introducing a series of essays celebrating quirks and little-known milestones of the past.

munich/stockholm

The Swedish Medical Research Council has published Europe's fullest set of ethical guidelines on the use and control of biobanks. The move follows the founding of a private gene-broking company UmanGenomics, which has exclusive commercial rights to generate and sell genetic information from blood samples stored in unique 15-year old population-based medical bank.

london

The British government is taking more time and advise before it decides whether to allow cloning techniques to be used on human embryos.

washington

The Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) of the National Institutes of Health, the body which debates new gene-therapy protocols, is proposing to expand its mandate to take into account of new technologies based on RNA or synthetic DNA.

paris

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has approved plans to create the world's largest biodiversity database. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility will be launched later this year.

washington

Scientists have accused the US congress of ignoring solid data on climate change and wasting time that should be used to counter the effects of human-generated greenhouse gases. They say that Congress should not be distracted by ‘contrarian’ views of a handful of scientists who dispute the mainstream scientific consensus on climate change.

san diego

The transfer of scientific technology from the US Department of Energy's three national laboratories to private company is being threatened by a Congressional proposal for resolving disputes over patent rights. Scientists fear that the proposal could leave the national laboratories vulnerable to huge damage awards in patent disputes.

tokyo

Japan is to launch a national programme to identify and map single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Japanese population. It will create a public SNP database which scientists hope will contribute to international efforts.

munich

Germany's controversial new FRMII research reactor being built to run on weapons-grade highly enriched uranium, could be converted to use low enriched uranium as fuel without debilitating increases in cost or loss of scientific integrity, according to a new report.

paris

Regulations on the environmental release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been tightened by ministers of the European Union. This could mean an effective moratorium on authorization of deliberate release in Europe.

A call for a ban on the patenting of all "agricultural life forms" was endorsed by The Council of the Third World Academy of Sciences.

Science and education ministers of the Organization of Islamic Countries sanctioned a draft strategy for developing science in the Muslim world including a controversial recommendation that governments allocate at least one per cent of their gross domestic product for scientific and technological development.

The Africa group of countries has agreed on what could be the conference's most innovative proposal so far: creating a science fund for poor countries from the debt relief that was agreed last month by the G8 nations for the 40 least developed countries.

Researchers should aware of both new knowledge and society needs according to Neal Lane, science adviser to US President Bill Clinton.

M. S. Swaminathan, an architect of the Green Revolution, calling for the eradication of poverty to be given the highest priority by national governments and international organizations says that science has a crucial role to play in poverty eradication.

Young scientists have called on Unesco to create a body to represent their views.

There is urgent need for the development and use of agricultural biotechnology in Africa to help to counter famine, environmental degradation and poverty. Africa must enthusiastically join the biotechnology revolution.

Why does a tomato taste the way it does? How do chemicals in foods interact with our taste (and olfactory) receptors to create the sensation of flavour? Scientists and chefs came together at a recent meeting to debate and investigate the science of the kitchen. Among other things, they found that the flavour of a raw tomato ‘evolves’ over time, as various chemicals are released by the action of chewing.

Metallic mixtures of iron and nickel that do not change volume when heated were discovered more than a century ago. These ‘invar’ alloys have found many uses in heat-sensitive devices. A new quantum mechanical explanation of their behaviour describes the changing nature of magnetically ordered states in the alloy.

During cell division, each chromosome replicates to form a pair of sister chromosomes that move apart to opposite poles of the cell. It's important that these sisters are linked during the early stages of division, and that this linkage is dissolved later on. The events responsible for dissolving the sister-chromosome linkage have now been worked out, and they revolve around cleavage of a protein called Scc1.

It is widely understood that protons and neutrons are made up of quarks. Now, experiments in high-energy accelerators are allowing physicists to resolve in greater detail what is happening inside protons. They are discovering that short-lived gluons are more important than originally thought.

The Yixian Formation in China's Liaoning Province has yielded many spectacular fossils — notably, several remarkably complete feathered dinosaurs. Yet its age has been controversial. Accurate radiometric dating now shows unambiguously that these beds are from the Early Cretaceous, providing a new temporal calibration for assessing the evolution of animal and plant life from that period.

Microrganisms often achieve a delicate balance with the human immune system — they suppress it enough to allow their own survival, without suppressing it so much that the host dies. But this seems to go wrong in malaria, which kills over 1.5 million children alone each year. It turns out that the malaria parasite suppresses the immune system by preventing maturation of an essential component — the dendritic cells.

During the breeding season, birds face a tricky decision. Lay too many eggs and you many not find enough resources to support them; lay too few and it's a wasted reproductive opportunity. To gauge the reproductive competition, some birds gather in vast flocks, each trying to make the most noise. This is a nuisance in cities, and Daedalus plans to use huge concave mirrors to trick the birds into thinking they are more overpopulated than they really are.

Infrared analysers are flavour of the month in the food and pharmaceuticals industries, and a recent patent seeks to replace the familiar test tube. All this and alcohol too. Compiled in the C i t Nature office from information provided by the manufacturers.