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Volume 403 Issue 6765, 6 January 2000

Opinion

  • Outstanding discoveries are inspiring, thanks to the research opportunities that they open up. But the creative processes involved, and obstacles to them, also deserve consideration.

    Opinion

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News

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News in Brief

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Correspondence

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Commentary

  • … from Gerbert d'Aurillac to Watson and Crick.

    • J. L. Heilbron
    • W. F. Bynum
    Commentary
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Book Review

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Millennium Essay

  • Three wave singularities from the miraculous 1830s.

    • Michael Berry
    Millennium Essay
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Futures

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News & Views

  • Atmospheric distortion limits the sensitivity of ground-based telescopes. Adaptive optics is the answer — new techniques mean that computer-controlled mirrors may soon compensate for distortion in any part of the sky.

    • Brent Ellerbroek
    • François Rigaut
    News & Views

  • Against conventional ecological wisdom, it seems that a species in decline will usually retreat to the edges of the area it once occupied. This is because human impacts, such as deforestation, tend to sweep all before them as they move across a landscape, overwhelming the previous ecological patterns.

    • Thomas Brooks
    News & Views

  • One way to regulate programmed cell death (apoptosis) is to keep the various components of apoptotic pathways in separate locations, and allow them to come into contact only when needed. The two main stores are the mitochondria and the plasma membrane, but a third has now been identified – the endoplasmic reticulum. Moreover, there is evidence that the protein stored here, caspase-12, is involved in the neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer's disease.

    • Huseyin Mehmet
    News & Views

  • Evidence that about 90% of the Milky Way is invisible ‘dark matter’ has been largely circumstantial until now. The chance discovery of an extremely old and faint white dwarf — a burnt out star — may be the first example of one type of dark matter proposed by theorists.

    • Brad Hansen
    News & Views

  • Subduction zones are places where slabs of ocean crust dive deep into the Earth's mantle — as, for instance, beneath Japan. New studies provide insight into the influence that a slab's thermal structure, cold or warm, may have on the seismic and volcanic activity associated with subduction.

    • Stephen H. Kirby
    News & Views

  • Eukaryotic chromosomes are confined to the nucleus, which is separated from the rest of the cell by a membrane called the nuclear envelope. Within this envelope are protein-lined channels known as nuclear-pore complexes, through which cellular material is transported into and out of the nucleus. A study now links this to chromosomes, showing that the three-dimensional organization of chromosomes is provided, in part, by interactions with the nuclear pore complex.

    • Wai-Hong Tham
    • Virginia A. Zakian
    News & Views

  • A receptor known as P2X1 is a mediator of muscle contraction in the vas deferens, and thus of the ejection of sperm. Male mice in which the gene encoding P2X1 has been deleted show dramatic reductions in fertility, implying that disruption of receptor action could provide a form of male contraception.

    • Tim Lincoln
    News & Views

  • Oxide catalysts can reduce the temperature at which methane burns, thereby reducing emissions of nitrogen oxide pollutants. But finding catalysts that are stable at high temperatures is not easy. The synthesis of promising new catalysts that remain active at high temperatures is a step in the right direction.

    • Jon G. McCarty
    News & Views

  • Three-dimensional X-ray data could be obtained, in principle, from stereo photography except that (unlike light) X-rays produce a shadowgraph of the subject. DREADCO chemists are hunting for a screen material that can record the passage of X-rays, and then be etched to create a mask from which a true stereo-image can be created.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Brief Communication

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Progress

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Article

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Letter

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