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Campaigns on behalf of women researchers are achieving a higher political profile. Recent European initiatives are welcome, but lobbying leadership is needed for them to be followed through amidst political change.
The United States Department of Agriculture are due to respond this week to a lawsuit intended to increase the protection given to mice used in laboratory experiments.
Five young biologists have been chosen as the first recipients of $1 million each by the W. M. Keck Foundation to pursue exciting ideas with no strings attached.
Leaders of Britain's biotechnology industry have decided to issue a draft code of practice in a bid to get tough with companies that issue misleading information about their products.
The current gap between France and its competitors in genome research risks further widening unless more funds are invested in the field, according to a report published last week.
A bold experiment by the California State University system to contract with a supplier of scientific journals for a ‘core’ set of electronic subscriptions is encountering mixed results.
The new president of the largest lobby group repr esenting US biomedical researchers last week joined the critics of ‘E-Biomed’, the proposed single website for biomedical literature.
A project involving Mexico and Norway has shown that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in a developing countries can be satisfactorily measured and certified for ‘trading’ purposes.
A return to the planet Mercury and a mission called ‘Deep Impact’ to excavate and study material from a comet's nucleus have been chosen by NASA as the next planetary missions.
A Spanish university is being sued by a scientists' association for advertising professorial appointments in August when many potential external applicants are on holiday.
A fascinating challenge in nuclear structure physics is to find the maximum atomic numberZ— the number of protons — for which a relatively stable nucleus can exist. The question is, just how many stable elements is it possible to make?
Natural selection by predation is often viewed as a constraining force on the signals used by animals: the more conspicuous a signal, the more risky it is. But both correlational and experimental evidence from weakly electric fish seem to show that, in this case at least, predation has in fact been a creative force and resulted in more elaborate signals than would otherwise have been the case.
Most cells do not act in isolation -- they respond to signals from their neighbours. These signals are usually received at the cell surface, then the information is relayed to components that mediate the cell's response. One pathway that transduces such signals is the so-called Wingless pathway, which was originally envisaged as a simple, linear cascade. But new work indicates that the Wingless pathway is much more complex than this.
A single photon is an elusive object, and it used to be impossible to detect photons without destroying them. A quantum non-demolition experiment now shows how to store a single photon, and more importantly how to watch it repeatedly.
Animals -- like humans -- are thought to make decisions based on the expected size and probability of rewards. A neural correlate of this behaviour has now been demonstrated by experiments in which rhesus monkeys have to switch their gaze to a particular target for a juice reward. The number of signals fired by neurons in the lateral intraparietal cortex is found to vary depending on the size of the expected reward.
Some locust species become darker in colour if they change from living in solitary conditions and become members of large swarms. Implant experiments involving albino mutants now reveal the hormone concerned.
A little under two million years ago there was a significant innovation in human evolution. This ‘grade shift’ betweenAustralopithecus and Homowas marked by an increase in body size and a commitment to walking on two legs. These changes were thought to be set off with the advent of hunting, but a new hypothesis contends that they were, in fact, due to systematic foraging for roots and tubers.
A clue to how galaxies form may have been staring us in the face. Clouds of neutral hydrogen with unusually high velocities that are dispersed throughout the Universe may actually be galactic building blocks.
Movement at the molecular level is essential for macromolecules to function, yet it's not clear how such dynamics relate to function. Using NMR spectroscopy, one group has now found a functional correlation for molecular movement in the bacterial Spo0F protein. It turns out that the amino-acid residues that move on a microsecond to millisecond timescale correspond exactly to those residues required for protein interactions.
Gene therapy to improve the sum of human happiness is this week's scheme. It involves the engineering of genes for endorphin production into dermal cells for reimplantation into the subject. One snag, of course, is that gene therapy remains at the experimental stage.
