Volume 403 Issue 6766, 13 January 2000

AIDS in Africa threatens the United States. It should act accordingly.

WASHINGTON AND PARIS

Celera Genomics Corporation appears to have cut back on its plans to singlehandledly complete a high-quality sequence of the human genome. The company now says that it intends to achieve the same end by combining lower-quality sequence with data from the international, publicly funded Human Genome Project (HGP).

LONDON

When the dust settles over the recent dramatic upsurge in the value of biotechnology stocks -- with the price of shares in some companies increasing three- or fourfold within a few weeks -- a key role in triggering the goldrush could be credited to a US investment website visited regularly by many thousands of small investors.

WASHINGTON

A series of technical obstacles could block completion of the US National Ignition Facility (NIF), according to an interim project review delivered this week to Bill Richardson, the Secretary of Energy.

LONDON

The British government was so worried about the loss of scientists and engineers to the United States in the late 1960s that it considered banning foreign recruitment advertising, according to documents released last week.

WASHINGTON

Bell Laboratories has won patent rights to one of the most important high-temperature superconductor materials, yttrium barium copper oxide, which was identified as a superconductor by several rival groups of in 1987.

MILAN

Reversing the conventional direction of Italy's scientific migration, a major genetics research institute in Milan will move to Naples this summer, helping to secure city's reputation as one of the country's leading genetics research locations.

WASHINGTON

Officials at the US National Institutes of Health are pushing for President Clinton's budget request for the 2001 fiscal year to include funds that would allow work to begin on a new $270-million centre for research in the neurosciences.

WASHINGTON

US President Bill Clinton is expected to request substantial increases in funding for basic scientific research in his budget request for the 2001 financial year, which will be released on 7 February.

LONDON

Britain is bidding to make the Royal Observatory at Greenwich the symbolic timekeeper of the Internet, with the launch of Greenwich Electronic Time, or GeT.

PARIS

The EU research commissioner is backing plans by the European Molecular Biology Organization to establish a European counterpart to PubMed Central — the free Web site for life science papers due to be launched later this month in the United States.

TOKYO

The Japan Development Bank has announced that it is to set up a dedicated biotechnology fund, a move that reflects to a growing willingness by Japanese investors to nurture domestic start-up companies.

How has the diversity of animal and plant forms evolved? Researchers are combining evolution, development and genetics to address this hot topic.

In its recent deliberations over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the US Senate was not well served by the directors of the US weapons laboratories.

How a science-fiction TV series treads the line of scientific plausibility.

The best environmental policy depends on how you frame the question.

Life, but not intelligence, abounds under the ice of frozen planets.

In a DNA computer, the input and output are both strands of DNA. A computer in which the strands are attached to the surface of a chip can now solve difficult problems quite quickly.

Insects are superb flying machines — many can hover and manoeuvre with great precision, all the time taking in information about their surroundings. These capabilities would be immensely useful in surveillance and industrial fault-location. A growing understanding of the principles of insect flight is paving the way to the realization of such micro-air-vehicles, although formidable engineering challenges remain.

In 1994 NASA committed itself to discovering, within ten years, all near-Earth asteroids greater than 1 km in diameter. Such 1-km near-Earth objects (NEOs) could cause global devastation if they struck the Earth. A new study suggests that the number of 1-km NEOs is only half what we thought. But most of the threatening NEOs (between 100 m and 1 km) have yet to be discovered.

Chloroplasts start life as a proplastid precursor, and differentiation into the mature chloroplast involves the import of over 2,000 different proteins across the inner and outer envelopes of the proplastid. Little is known about the receptor complexes involved in import, but a new study reports the dissection, in vivo, of one component of this translocation machinery.

The tip of the chromosome — the telomere — has been extensively studied in organisms ranging from yeast to humans. But proteins that regulate its maintenance and replication have not been identified in another model organism, the nematode wormCaenorhabditis elegans, until now. Mutant worms that cannot replicate their telomeres have been identified, and one of the mutated genes, mrt-2, also monitors damaged DNA, providing a link between telomeres and double-stranded DNA breaks.

Protons have an intrinsic spin that becomes useful when they interact with other polarized particles or with an electromagnetic field. Previous methods to polarize large numbers of protons have used high magnetic fields and extremely low temperatures. A new experiment reports high proton polarization in modest magnetic fields and at liquid-nitrogen temperatures.

First-order phase transitions are common in crystalline solids (such as between graphite and diamond) and non-crystalline materials. But for a long time the idea of a first-order phase transition between two liquids was scoffed at. Now, a direct structural study of liquid phosphorus under high pressure provides evidence for just such a transition.

The bony fishes gave rise to terrestrial four-legged animals. For that reason alone their origins are of great interest. A newly described 400-million-year-old fossil from south-eastern Australia consists only of part of a braincase, but it has a mixture of characters which make it a candidate member of the basal group from which the bony fishes arose.

How can we instantly recognize a familiar object? Probably because the brain already contains a model of that object. Such ‘internal’ models have been invoked in helping to control many of the brain's cognitive mechanisms and now, for the first time, one of these models has been visualized. The model in question occurs in the cerebellum and is thought to be involved in controlling movement.

A coal mine fills with water unless constantly pumped out, and Daedalus has an idea for harnessing this water supply. At the bottom of deep mines, water becomes supercritical and is a powerful solvent. If there was a way of releasing it, then it would deliver a stream of useful products to the surface.

The independent evolution of a bird-like tail has been discovered in an oviraptorosaur.

“It was a dark and stormy night…” Nalgene have just the thing for that first line.