Volume 391 Issue 6668, 12 February 1998

Is the US Department of Energy abusing its monopoly of information on nuclear weapons to stifle argument?

washington

Mystery surrounds the origin of a 2.5-km-wide canyon pictured by the Mars Orbiter Camera pictured last month during the 87th orbit of the Mars Global Surveyor Spacecraft.

washington

Controversy has broken out over a proposed $6.3 billion research and tax incentive package that the US government says is needed for the United States to comply with the Kyoto agreement on climate change.

munich

European fusion scientists are determined to stick to the original ambitions of the ‘next-step’ fusion reactor, ITER, amid waning enthusiasm from the United States and key European nations.

MUNICH

A new Canadian consortium called ITER Canada has been set up to promote Canada's participation in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

london

A single pharmaceutical company combining expertise in chemistry, biology, and genomics will emerge if Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham decide to merge.

paris

SmithKline Beecham has suspended its use of a gene sequence database owned by the gene sequencing company Human Genome Sciences.

washington

The US National Security Council has blocked a planned study by the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency into the maintenance of the United States nuclear weapons stockpile.

tokyo

Tokyo University's Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology is to become the first university organization in Japan to set up a company that will encourage researchers to seek patents on the results of their research.

munich

A special postage stamp to mark the 50th anniversary of Germany's basic research organization, the Max Planck Society was launched last week.

washington

Professional organizations representing US biomedical researchers attacked proposed cloning legislation as debate began on two bills that were introduced into the Senate.

washington

Exploding populations of research animals could lead to the outbreak of infectious diseases among irreplacable animal colonies, according to a report from the National Research Council.

sydney

Australia's chief scientist has persuaded the government to revamp its scientific advisory mechanisms, gained greater leverage for scientists over policy — and managed to have his own job upgraded.

The economic crisis that hit Korea at the end of last year has brought hard times for the nation's scientists, but despite cuts and the effect of the plummeting won, some researchers see hope for the future.

Twenty-first century computers could achieve astonishing speed by exploiting the principles of quantum mechanics. New techniques of quantum error correction will be essential to prevent those machines from crashing.

The skin of many animals includes cells that respond to light by dispersing or aggregating granules within them. A study of such cells in frog skin now delivers the finding that they express a molecule, melanopsin, which is similar to the light-sensitive rhodopsins in eyes. In itself, that is not surprising. What is unexpected is that melanopsin is more closely related to invertebrate than to vertebrate rhodopsins, including that in the frog's own eyes. In evolutionary terms, then, this observation throws up all sorts of tantalizing questions.

In continental regions, the Earth's outer shell, the lithosphere, deforms because of the various strains put upon it. Such deformation is spread over hundreds to thousands of kilometres in horizontal extent. Taken together, observations and calculations from southern California and New Zealand, central Asia and Greece put our understanding of the mechanical properties of continental lithosphere on a new footing. The authors also offer the interpretation that deformation of the upper crust is being driven from below by flow of the upper-mantle part of the lithosphere.

Oystercatchers are socially and sexually monogamous birds, but a new study reflects another side to their lifestyle. Occasionally, an usurping female will try to break up a pair, and, after fighting with the resident female, she may stay to form a polygynous trio. The male is mated by both females, and they cooperate to defend their territory and raise a brood. Although polygyny is very rare in oystercatchers, the authors suggest that both females benefit in terms of elevated social status.

What happens to the metal of a paper clip when you bend it? Tackling that seemingly simple question depends on knowing how change on the atomic scale relates to change at the mesoscopic scale (of around 10-6 m) and upwards. Molecular dynamics simulations are used in this work. A new, multidisciplinary analysis provides a quantitative case-study of how complicated phenomena at the atomic level are transformed into the dislocations that allow metals to deform.

Clinical trials of vaccines against the human immunodeficiency virus are underway, but initial results do not seem promising — at least for one type of vaccine. By injecting patients with a recombinant form of a viral envelope protein, gp120, the idea was to induce an antibody response that could fight subsequent infection with the virus. But in a trial of 18 people, all became infected with HIV-1 and, at the level of the immune system, those who had received the vaccine did not seem to deal with the infection any differently than unvaccinated patients.

Every spring, leaves unfold from tightly packed buds. But how are they packed within these buds to allow efficient expansion at the right time? A study into the geometry of unfolding, for the leaves of two species of deciduous tree, indicates that folding depends on a number of design parameters. These include the shape of the leaf, and angle at which the folds run relative to the midrib of the expanded leaf.

The usual experience is that hardly any radiation will penetrate a metal plate with holes in it that are smaller in diameter than the radiation's wavelength. It comes a surprise then that thin, perforated silver films deposited on quartz are remarkably transparent to radiation at certain wavelengths, selectively and strongly retransmitting it at wavelengths greater than the hole diameter. The explanation for this extraordinary behaviour seems to rest with the excitation of surface modes called surface plasmons, which are oscillating electromagnetic fields localized at the metal surface. The practical use of the phenomenon could be in radiation-filtering devices.

One way in which our immune system detects virally infected cells is by monitoring levels of class I major histocompatibility complex (MHC). In infected cells, class I expression is downregulated, acting as a signal to the natural killer (NK) cells to target that cell for destruction. But some class I homologues stimulate — rather than inhibit — the NK cells, and one group has now found out why. They have discovered a signal-transducing adaptor molecule called DAP12, which couples recognition of class I MHC to an activating signal-transduction pathway.

Comets raining down on the Earth is the stuff of science-fiction movies. Yet recent mass extinctions have been caused by just such events, and, Daedalus has noticed, these seem to occur roughly every 26 million years. One theory to explain this is that the Sun has a companion star ('Nemesis') with a 26-million-year period — every time Nemesis swings past the Sun, it disturbs the Oort comet cloud, resulting in a storm of comets. To test this theory, Daedalus proposes investigating the age of craters on the moon, which should reveal the period of Nemesis and when she will strike next.

Physicist who was instrumental in Britain's war effort.

A volcanic eruption was a fitting subject for Joseph Wright. The artist had links with some of the great scientific thinkers in an age when science was beginning to discover the secrets of the forces that shape the Earth.