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Next month's meeting of European governments at Maastricht is billed as being the gateway to a more coherent European community, but it will be only if governments can suppress their ill temper.
The last of the hundreds of oil-well fires left in Kuwait by Iraq should be capped this week. Although progress has been remarkable, a mechanism is needed to cope with future large-scale disasters.
The British fashion for converting public laboratories into self-governing agencies seems to have helped rescue one of the oldest of them from the torpor into which it was driven in the 1970s.
THE synthesis of molecular carbon structures in the form of C60 and other fullerenes1 has stimulated intense interest in the structures accessible to graphitic carbon sheets. Here I report the preparation of a new type of finite carbon structure consisting of needle-like tubes. Produced using an arc-discharge evaporation method similar to that used for fullerene synthesis, the needles grow at the negative end of the electrode used for the arc discharge. Electron microscopy reveals that each needle comprises coaxial tubes of graphitic sheets, ranging in number from 2 up to about 50. On each tube the carbon-atom hexagons are arranged in a helical fashion about the needle axis. The helical pitch varies from needle to needle and from tube to tube within a single needle. It appears that this helical structure may aid the growth process. The formation of these needles, ranging from a few to a few tens of nanometres in diameter, suggests that engineering of carbon structures should be possible on scales considerably greater than those relevant to the fullerenes.
Databases for neuroscience must handle large volumes of image and graphical data as well as domain knowledge. Several software development efforts are addressing these issues in an attempt to aid the acquisition, analysis and exchange of complex data sets.
New Orleans, Louisiana, is the venue for next week's 21st Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. New developments to watch out for include a single-cell transfer system and a selection of implantable transmitters for studying animals under field conditions.
