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Volume 414 Issue 6863, 29 November 2001

Volume 414 Issue 6863

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Prospects

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Movers

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Opinion

  • Reviews of books and other creations can be highly opinionated. Editors get used to the brickbats they receive in maintaining a balance between the rights of authors and reviewers, and between fact and interpretation.

    Opinion
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News

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News in Brief

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News Feature

  • Is it possible to predict when nations are about to descend into internal conflict? The US Central Intelligence Agency thinks so, and has spent millions of dollars on a controversial research programme. Robert Adler reports.

    • Robert Adler
    News Feature

  • Increasingly, the drugs giants are outsourcing research in drug discovery to start-up companies. Tom Clarke and Helen Pearson analyse an emerging trend, and ask what both sides expect to gain.

    • Tom Clarke
    • Helen Pearson
    News Feature

  • The next president of Germany's Max Planck Society is putting aside a glittering research career in developmental biology to wrestle with politics, ethics and budgets, says Alison Abbott.

    • Alison Abbott
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Book Review

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Concepts

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News & Views

  • North Atlantic right whales once faced extinction and are still under threat today. But the population decline could be halted if the lives of just a few females were spared each year.

    • Peter Kareiva
    News & Views

  • Ultrashort laser pulses allow physicists and chemists to watch fast molecular motion as it happens. But many fundamental atomic processes are even faster and require the shortest pulses ever created.

    • Yaron Silberberg
    News & Views

  • Marine bacteria can respond to organic particles in sea water, creating hotspots of bacterial growth and carbon cycling. This microscale behaviour should be included in models of the oceanic carbon cycle.

    • Farooq Azam
    • Richard A. Long
    News & Views

  • Cell division relies on the properly timed activation and destruction of certain regulatory proteins. New work shows that many rounds of phosphorylation can help to establish the timing of protein destruction.

    • James E. Ferrell Jr
    News & Views

  • The extreme environment surrounding a black hole provides an ideal test bed for the predictions of general relativity. New observations of a spinning black hole push current theories to their limits.

    • Charles Bailyn
    News & Views

  • The protein that is mutated in a human disorder of the kidney and ear turns out to be an accessory subunit for a chloride ion channel. The discovery explains the symptoms of the disease.

    • Malcolm Hunter
    News & Views

  • Membranes that get fatter when they are stretched are considered counterintuitive, but may be more common than we think. They might even turn up in human tissue.

    • Roderic Lakes
    News & Views

  • High-speed book copying could one day be achieved by piling closed books on top of a copier and pulsing an infrared laser beam at the pages.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
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Brief Communication

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Retraction

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Article

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Letter

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New on the Market

  • Microarrays for the novice, expressive messengers and a breaking story.

    New on the Market
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