Volume 397 Issue 6718, 4 February 1999

Last week's announcement that Britain will set up a Food Standards Agency opens a door for someone special.

washington

Restrictions on the purchase of foreign computers has left the United States trailing other countries in its ability to model long-term climate change.

washington

The American Geophysical Union has concluded an exhaustive internal debate with a call for action to counter the threat of global warming.

munich

A manned flight to Mars moved beyond the realms of science fiction with the development of a new type of propulsion engine by the Italian Space Agency.

anaheim, california

US scientists have been urged to help promote science education by M.R.C. Greenwood, chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

boston

Harvard University is to invest between $150 and $200 million in new research and education programmes with a special emphasis on facilitating interdisciplinary activities.

sydney

The first ever meeting of the world's environment ministers in Antarctica called for effective action against the lucrative but illegal fishing in the Southern Ocean.

munich

Germany's influential science council has called for a 30 per cent increase in public funding of energy research despite the new government's decision to phase out nuclear power.

washington

US citizens who have spent time in Britain since 1980 might be barred from donating blood. The move is an attempt by the US authorities to reduce the theoretical risk of transmission of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

bangalore

Scientists from eight states in Asia want the United Nations science agency Unesco to set up a global fund to conserve and promote ‘indigenous and civilizational knowledge systems’.

WASHINGTON

Hopes of increases in science spending in the US faded this week with Bill Clinton's proposed budget for 2000 forcasting a freeze in research and development spending at 1999 levels for major agencies.

paris

Tensions are running high between researchers at France's national research agency and the research ministry over a leaked external assessment of the agency.

tokyo

Japanese research laboratories are resisting government-led efforts to increase the external evaluation of research in government institutes and national universities.

The European Science Foundation warned last week that a proposed European Union directive, intended to ensure that copyright owners receive full legal protection when their work is distributed in digital form, could weaken the ‘fair use’ arrangements enjoyed by scientists.

Further evidence that HIV-1 originally came from chimpanzees bears on a variety of issues — the evolution of AIDS viruses, disease transmission from animals to humans, and chimpanzee conservation and welfare.

The ‘electron gas’ is an important model of the electrons in a solid. Its properties depend on the electron density, and it has long been suspected that at low densities the electrons would be susceptible to magnetic ordering. The difficulty of producing a dilute electron gas in the lab has now been overcome, and magnetic polarization has been observed at unexpectedly high temperatures.

Apoptotic cell death is driven by two classes of caspase — one to initiate the response and the other to carry it out. But initiator caspases can also activate death-promoting factors from the mitochondria. One of these is cytochrome c and another, the apoptosis-inducing factor, has now been identified. Both reside in the space between the inner and outer mitochondrial membranes, flagging this compartment as an important store of death factors.

It is increasingly evident that ocean variability in the Arctic can have global consequences. During the 1990s, thanks in part to data gathered by US submarines, unprecedented and system-wide changes in the region have been observed, and they were subject to discussion at a meeting late last year.

How are messages from different regions of the brain bound together so that we can, say, associate a particular smell with a particular place? The accepted theory is that different stimuli are represented by the synchronous firing of different groups of nerve cells. Two studies provide evidence for this theory by showing that such synchronization occurs in humans at a frequency of around 40 Hz.

When mathematicians play with marbles they make advances in number theory and arithmetic progressions. A new proof calculates the maximum number of marbles that can be placed in a line without any four of them being evenly spaced, and raises hopes that a long-standing problem in number theory might finally be solved.

Explosive eruptions of volcanoes, such as that which destroyed Pompeii, are especially threatening to neighbouring human populations. Understanding of this type of eruption is still at an early stage, although it is clear that fragmentation of magma in the conduit inside the volcano is a key process. New models of magma fragmentation provide improved — but still imperfect — simulations of the behaviour of real volcanoes.

Explosives that detonate at the speed of light, rather than at the speed of sound (or slower) could be made with the help of photochemical dyes. However, photosensitive explosives will require careful handling and storage if they are going to transform the business of blasting rocks.

Pioneer in environmental physics.

Under the heading ‘Biotechnology’, twenty-four items that just might be what you are looking for to make life that little bit easier. Web links — hyperlinked on nature.com — are given where available. Compiled in the Nature office from information provided by the manufacturers.