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Attempts to replicate the recent success of US technology transfer need to focus on the toughest elements of the problem: the availability of venture capital and the structure of the university system.
Germany is to fund a major Earth sciences programme, giving priority to practical research such as the development of early-warning systems for natural disasters.
The classic textbook shape of electron orbitals has now been directly observed. As well as confirming the established theory, this work may be a first step to understanding high-temperature superconductivity.
When under attack by a predator, many organisms activate defensive responses. But in two unrelated species, wild radish and water fleas, predation also increases the resistance of an organism's offspring which have had no previous contact with the predator.
Noise has always had positive and negative aspects - in some cases it is a nuisance, but in other systems, such as Brownian ratchets, it can be used productively. Advances in understanding a type of 'flashing' ratchet and large, rare fluctuations are making noise more useful than ever.
Long-term potentiation (LTP) in a region of the brain called the hippocampus is thought to underlie some forms of learning and memory. Fresh evidence for this theory comes from studies of transgenic mice that have been engineered to overexpress a subunit of the NMDA receptor called NR2B. These mice are not only smarter than usual, but they do, indeed, show enhanced LTP.
Some sort of dark-matter 'halo' is needed to explain the rapid rotation of spiral galaxies, but how much dark matter exists at the centre of galaxies is less clear. The latest idea suggests that, because of an unexpectedly strong interaction with the galactic disk, dark haloes may have a central bulge of dark matter, similar to the stellar cores of galaxies.
When a protein has been selected for destruction it is usually tagged with a specific destruction signal then it is thought to be unfolded and fed into the protein-digesting machinery. Such global unfolding is now demonstrated directly for the first time, in the ClpAP bacterial protein-destruction system, through the clever use of a green fluorescent protein as the target.
When a newly synthesized protein folds into the correct three-dimensional conformation, bonds between the thiol groups of cysteine residues - so-called disulphide bonds - cannot form spontaneously. This is because bond formation generates two electrons, which need to be mopped up by an oxidant. Studies in bacteria have identified two members of the electron-transport chain as oxidants that can do this job.
The erosion of a mountain range can lead to reduced or increased topographical relief. In both cases, the Earth's crust rises in response to this erosion, producing potentially higher peaks, which might drive the climate to a more erosive (and cooler) state. A new analysis suggests that changes in erosion from global cooling actually produce lower peaks, which are less likely to cause further cooling.
The first images of the X-ray sky have been returned by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, showing that the recently launched instrument is functioning correctly. Once it has been calibrated, Chandra is expected to deliver huge scientific dividends, in particular in detecting faint X-ray sources.
The decision for a cell to live or die depends on changes in its external environment, which are integrated into a survival response by signal-transduction mechanisms. A protein called Akt is an important component of pro-survival signalling pathways, and a sheaf of papers now tells us more about how it acts. In particular, these studies show that Akt alters the activity of factors that regulate gene transcription.
