Volume 401 Issue 6754, 14 October 1999

Principles of merit need to be spelt out in distinguishing valuable knowledge from myth.

London

The 1999 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine

London

This year's Nobel Prize for Physics has gone to Geradus 't Hooft of the University of Utrecht and Martinus Veltman, for his efforts in establishing how the complex mathematical structure of the theory of the electroweak interaction can be used to obtain predictive calculations.

London

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to Ahmed Zewail of the California Institute of Technology who lead work in the development of techniques for ultrafast spectroscopy to allow the study of molecular change in real time.

London

A watershed has been reached in electronic publishing after the publishers of the world's leading scientific journals agreed to act in co-operation towards a 'seamless web' which will link references in journal articles to source papers, across electronic titles.

Washington

The US Department of State is to employ a former Presidential science advisor to help it consider a critical report on the department's understanding and use of science.

Washington

Harold Varmus, the director of the US National Institutes of Health, announced last week that he is to resign at the end of the year.

Tokyo

Japan is planning to become the third partner of an international project to build a large millimetre-wave astronomy observatories at a site in Chile.

Moscow

The Russian Academy of Science has set up a new body to manage its property and channel the income it receives directly to supporting scientists and their work.

Jerusalem

The Israeli police have been accused by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel of taking DNA samples illegally from suspected sex offenders.

San Diego

Arizona State University has cleared a geography professor Ronald Dorn of fabricating rock-dating data.

Munich

A Germany university opens investigations into allegations that a researcher was involved in fabricating data in a paper claiming antisclerotic effect of a garlic preparation.

San Diego

The University of California at Berkeley announced an initiative, which will bring together biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists to address human disease.

Munich

The Austrian Academy of Sciences and the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim are to set up a high profile Institute of Molecular and Cellular Bioinformatics in Vienna.

Paris

The Institut Pasteur named Philippe Kourilsky, a specialist in molecular immunology, as its new director.

London

The International Council for Science is to set up a working group to study the concept of 'traditional knowledge'.

London

The British government agreed last week that physicians should be discouraged from prescribing a novel anti-viral drug because it is not convinced of the drug's cost-effectiveness.

Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, east German scientists are putting the pain of reunification behind them, as Alison Abbott reports.

Anyone with a home PC could join climate modellers in their attempt to forecast how the Earth's climate will evolve in the next century.

Neurobiology offers no evidence that infancy is a privileged time for learning.

Victor Hensen realized that in the sea the very small feed the very large.

A hurricane's path is quite easy to forecast, but its intensity is not. A new model, which takes into account the interaction of the storm and ocean-surface temperature, gives remarkably accurate retrospective simulations.

The way we see the world around us depends on an interplay between two types of signal in the brain -- 'bottom-up' signals, which are derived from the physical data that bombard our sensory receptors, and 'top-down' signals, which interpret these data. For the first time, using a new surgical technique, we can directly see top-down signals in the brain, providing evidence that these signals come from the prefrontal cortex.

The wave-particle duality postulate is well verified and holds that 'atomic' particles have wave as well as particle properties. But, in terms of increasing mass, how far does this principle of quantum theory apply? Experiments with the fullerene C₆₀extend evidence for wave-particle behaviour by an order of magnitude towards -- but still far short of -- the macroscopic domain.

How do biodiversity and ecosystem properties, such as nutrient cycling and response to disturbance, interact? New work shows that in some ecosystems, rather than being a function of the number of species present, this relationship might be dominated by the extrinsic environmental factors that determine biodiversity.

For astronomers, devising better photon detectors is far cheaper than building bigger telescopes. Such detectors can be key elements of progress, and the pulsar at the centre of the Crab nebula is a challenging target for them. New types of superconducting detector have the speed and sensitivity to meet that challenge, and the technology concerned is not yet at its limits.

How does a cell decide to become a nerve cell and not, say, an endothelial cell? Such cell-fate decisions are made by certain 'master' genes, which switch on cellular programmes to differentiate precursor cells into various cell types. Differentiation is thought to be kept in check by molecular 'brakes', and a study of mice lacking Id1 and Id3 indicates that these proteins could act as just such brakes.

One elusive goal in semiconductor technology is realizing the ideal nonvolatile memory -- that is, one that retains information when the power is switched off without battery back-up. In this context, so-called ferroelectric random access memories are promising. Work on a particular form of ferroelectric material provides encouraging evidence that it has the desired properties for nonvolatile memory.

When we encounter a particular pathogen for the first time, the immunological response is often slow. Yet if we re-encounter that pathogen the response is rapid and vigorous owing to a phenomenon known as immunological memory. The best assay yet to distinguish between the various T cells involved in the memory response has now been developed, and it may help us to understand more about how this response is generated.

The main problem with using concrete as a building material is that it cannot creep under load and so it cracks. Daedalus plans to create a crack-free concrete. Known as 'Wet Cement', his concrete will be a calciferous mortar that takes up water from the air, so it never dries out. It will be much less stress-sensitive than conventional concrete, and it will be welcomed by architects and householders alike.

Male guppy fish increase their reproductive success by mating with unfamiliar females.

Clean PCR, automatic karyotyping, and other gene-linked matters.