Volume 391 Issue 6666, 29 January 1998

New Zealand needs to show renewed imagination if reforms of its science base are to succeed in the long term.

tokyo

The structural reform of Japan's national finances has left many of the country's research institutes facing substantial cuts in their maintenance budgets.

washington

The Clinton Administration will include $157 million in its 1999 fiscal year budget request to Congress for a new spallation source for neutrons, to be based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

london

Britain's minister for university education has warned that some of the brightest science graduates are likely to seek research positions in the United States unless local research conditions are improved.

munich

A former chemist at the University of Bonn, who has been accused of committing scientific fraud, is suing the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen and two of his former research colleagues for DM 437,000.

washington

The US Food and Drug Administration is resisting calls to declare a moratorium on clinical trials of xenotransplantation.

washington

The NEAR (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) spacecraft swung past Earth last Friday on a manoevre that puts it on target for an encounter with asteroid 433 Eros in a year's time.

new delhi

India's planned National Centre for Plant Genome Research is on ice following a dispute between faculty members and the vice chancellor of the Jawaharlal Nehru University where the centre will be based.

washington

The US National Science Foundation wants the government to provide $3 million over three years to support a database to track detailed information on all publicly-supported research and development.

washington

Senator Edward Kennedy has received support from medical research organizations for a bill that would levy a medical research tax on every packet of cigarettes.

munich

The German government has ended its contract with the country's only institute for science film-making, depriving the institute of half its budget, and possibly forcing its closure.

munich

The German government has ended its contract with the country's only institute for science film-making, depriving the institute of half its budget, and possibly forcing its closure.

Six years ago the New Zealand government decided to make a number of radical changes in its approach to scientific funding. Supporters and critics remain divided on the outcome so far of its new strategy.

Two of Japan's government agencies are set to be merged in an attempt to raise the country's scientific standards. But unless a ‘bottom-up’ approach to science is adopted, the culture of basic research may be damaged.

There are many explanations for the technological decline of China at the end of the mediaeval period, and the coincident technological rise of Europe. One, in a word, is geography.

Two satellites will soon be launched that can measure annual variations in the Earth's gravity due to mass changes equivalent to 1 cm of water over 250,000 km²— an area smaller than the Caspian Sea. This is gravity measurement of unprecedented accuracy. It will affect nearly all areas of study of the Earth, especially ocean dynamics, continental water-table variations, sea-level rise, glaciology, and postglacial rebound.

Studies of the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster have revealed a hitherto unknown protein that is involved in the process of memory formation. Flies lacking this protein — known as Volado, meaning 'absent-minded' — cannot learn to associate particular odours with an electric shock. Volado belongs to the integrin family of cell-adhesion receptors, so it could be involved in moulding the connections between neurons.

One aim in drug development is to design molecules that recognize and bind to specific sequences of the DNA double helix, and can thus regulate gene expression. New work with hairpin polyamides, in which the molecules incorporate a code that recognizes all four Watson-Crick base pairs in the minor groove of DNA, provides another step towards this goal. But the achievement of specificity is offset to some extent by an increase in the instability of the interactions.

Arabidopsis thaliana is a tiny weed that serves as a genetic model for over 250,000 species of plant, because of its small genome and the ease with which it can be manipulated. The sequence of the first contiguous stretch of Arabidopsis DNA has now been reported. Although this represents only 1.5% of the Arabidopsis genome, at 1.9 million base pairs the sequence is longer than most of the genomes that have been completely sequenced to date.

If more than two particles or bodies are interacting simultaneously, then no general solution can be found to their equations of motion. This is the many-body problem. A surprising new tool to explore it has been found in atomic physics: it should be possible to attach a positron to a neutral lithium atom. This will allow experiments to be made on the simplest many-body systems — atoms — that avoid a quantum mechanical complication called the exchange force.

When a cell starts to undergo programmed cell death, cytochromec moves from the mitochondria, where it usually acts in an electron-transfer chain, to the cytosol. One of the relatively recent dogmas of apoptosis is that the death-suppressing protein Bcl-2 acts before cytochrome c in this pathway. But two new papers could overturn this dogma, by showing that Bcl-2 can also protect cells after cytochrome chas been released.

Because we're bilaterally symmetrical, we need to be able to coordinate motor control on both sides of the body. To do this, many neurons in the central nervous system project their axons across the so-called midline to the opposite side of the body. But why do only some axons do this while others remain on the same side? This system of control relies on previously identified long-range attractive signals called netrins, and — it now turns out — also on short-range repulsive signals that belong to products of the roundabout family. Moreover, these repulsive signals are downregulated by members of another gene family called commissureless.

When, after a maritime accident, people are set adrift in the sea, the main threat is often the cold as much as death by drowning. Hence Daedalus is working on a survival garment that incorporates acrylic polymers which, on contact with water, swell to provide insulation. But the garment also features a distributed zinc-air battery, which exploits the oxygen dissolved in water and generates heat and hydrogen for buoyancy.

The astrophysicist who linked outer space to the inner space of particle physics.

Berenice Abbott was fascinated by the challenge of capturing on film motion too rapid for the human eye. Her scientific photography has given a new meaning to the term‘portraiture’.

Hardware, software and reagents for working with peptides and proteins are at hand, including amino acid derivatives, peptides for screening, labelling and peptidomimetics and software for sequence analysis. compiled by Brendan Horton from information provided by the manufacturers. c b B H f i p b t