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Volume 399 Issue 6731, 6 May 1999

Opinion

  • Teething troubles on the US neutron spallation source project at Oak Ridge do not justify congressional threats to freeze funding, and should be viewed against a fundamentally problematic background.

    Opinion

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News

  • london

    British companies are failing to reap substantial commercial benefits from neuroscience, according to an audit of neuroscience research published by the Wellcome Trust.

    • Ehsan Masood
    News
  • san diego

    A $25 million plant research contract between the life sciences company Novartis and the University of California at Berkeley is causing deep divisions within the College of Natural Resources.

    • Rex Dalton
    News
  • munich

    Forty-six top US neuroscientists are protesting the treatment of a leading neuroscientist who has been receiving a string of threats from animal rights activists in the state of Bremen.

    • Alison Abbott
    News
  • paris

    The ‘globalization’ of investment in industrial research and development is complicating the link between a nation's public science base and its economic competitiveness, according to an OECD report.

    • Declan Butler
    News
  • washington

    The US National Research Council has been accused of slanting an expert biosafety panel in favour of the biotechnology industry.

    • Meredith Wadman
    News
  • washington

    A growth-enhancing hormone fed to cattle "has to be considered as a complete carcinogen", according to a committee of the European Commission.

    • Meredith Wadman
    News
  • paris and washington

    Publishers and scientists have had a mixed reaction to a proposal from the US National Institutes of Health for a global web site for biomedical literature where articles could be submitted for publication without being peer reviewed.

    • Declan Butler
    • Meredith Wadman
    News
  • washington

    A new type of laboratory that will collect and analyse vast amounts of data to solve complex biological problems is being proposed by scientists from universities and government laboratories.

    • Colin Macilwain
    News
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News in Brief

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News

  • montreal

    If scientific discoveries threaten to outstrip efforts to place their application in an ethical context, "science will need to both wait and to help ethics to catch up", according to a leading Canadian bioethicist.

    News
  • hammamet, tunisia

    An African renaissance is unlikely to happen while English remains the main medium for science education, according to Ali Mazrui, professor emeritus of Africana Studies at Cornell University, New York.

    News
  • london

    Unesco officials are said to be thinking of asking the United Nations general assembly to declare the first decade of the millennium as the ‘Decade for Science’.

    News
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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • A measure of the amount of oil destroyed by high temperatures deep in the Earth may help to gauge the depths to which oil extraction remains commercially viable, and so be useful in estimating ultimate oil reserves.

    • Martin Schoell
    • Robert M. K. Carlson
    News & Views
  • Food is moved through the gut by an ordered process that depends on a balance between signals from neurons and those from non-neuronal pacemaker cells. By studying what happens at the molecular level over whole sections of the colon, one group has now found clues to how this balance is achieved.

    • G. David S. Hirst
    News & Views
  • A micro-mechanical oscillator has been used, for the first time, to measure the dynamics of individual magnetic vortices threading a superconductor crystal. Predicting the behaviour of single vortex lines requires using a ‘1+1’-dimensional model from statistical mechanics — a tool that has wide applications, ranging from quantum mechanics to sequence alignment in genomics.

    • Terence Hwa
    News & Views
  • Over 100 years ago, Santiago Ramòn y Cajal proposed that the nervous substrate for learning and memory is a strengthening of the connections, or even a building of new connections, between nerve cells. We now have definitive evidence that this occurs. The formation of new dendritic spines has been seen after long-term potentiation, and it should tell us much about long-term storage of information in the brain.

    • Per Andersen
    News & Views
  • A Prussian-blue-like magnet exhibiting complicated behaviour has been designed from first principles. This first ‘magnet by design’ switches North and South poles twice as the temperature changes.

    • Olivier Kahn
    News & Views
  • Using an electrochemical fabrication technique, engineers claim to have created the world's thinnest chain. The chain, and other three-dimensional devices, can be built from metal layers only micrometres thick, in a simple, automated process.

    • Sarah Tomlin
    News & Views
  • Biologists have long wondered why some birds have unusually elongated windpipes. According to a new theory, possessors of longer windpipes produce deeper, more booming calls, thus sounding like larger birds and deterring rivals from entering their territories.

    • John Whitfield
    News & Views
  • Hominid species living in East Africa over two million years ago were skilful tool makers, as a new reconstruction of their stone-working techniques shows. Who made the tools, and what they used them for, is more of a mystery.

    • James Steele
    News & Views
  • When the immune system becomes run-down and ineffective, help might come from agents that bind small antibody-antigen complexes into bigger and more tightly associated agglomerations. Macrophages would find such agglomerations easier to mop up, and DREADCO biochemists are exploring several alternative binding candidates.

    • David Jones
    News & Views
  • David Phillips, (Lord Phillips of Ellesmere). For his achievement, in 1965, of determining the structure of the enzyme lysozyme, Phillips can be counted among the founding fathers of structural biology. In later life he was highly influential in British science policy.

    • Louise N. Johnson
    • Gregory A. Petsko
    News & Views
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Scientific Correspondence

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Book Review

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Review Article

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Letter

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Erratum

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Corrigendum

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Erratum

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New on the Market

  • This issue focuses on equipment and software — including freeware, so read on — for the rapidly expanding genomics and bioinformatics markets. Compiled in the Nature office from information provided by the manufacturers.

    New on the Market
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