Volume 391 Issue 6663, 8 January 1998

washington

NASA, the US space agency, is bracing itself for an anticipated avalanche of proposals from researchers keen to join its new Astrobiology Institute for the interdisciplinary study of life in the universe.

new delhi

After lengthy negotiations, India has agreed to share with the United States weather and atmospheric data gathered by its geostationary satellites over the Indian ocean.

paris

The French government has put forward draft proposals for the reform of the national biomedical research agency, Inserm, aimed at streamlining its administration and increasing its capacity for strategic planning.[PARIS] The French government has put forward draft proposals for the reform of the national biomedical research agency, Inserm, aimed at streamlining its administration and increasing its capacity for strategic planning.

washington

One of science's best known names, Stephen Jay Gould, has been chosen as the next president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

washington

The US government has been urged to develop an interagency surveillance strategy to combat the threat of space debris to missions such as the International Space Station.

tokyo

Despite an austere budget that reflects Japan's struggling economy, the government has yet again agreed to increase science and technology spending for the 1998 fiscal year.

tokyo

South Korea has approved a new five year science and technology innovation plan, designed to increase government funded research and development to boost innovation and economic growth.

paris

A French artist is hoping to launch a satellite into orbit early next century that would return to Earth in 50,000 years, delivering a cargo that includes millions of messages from today's inhabitants of Earth.

munich

Recent moves by some of Germany's older universities to address a murky aspect of their Nazi pasts now includes for the first time a university from the east.

san francisco

. A group of Nobel laureates is due to learn shortly whether it has been successful with its offer to help restructure academic standards for the California science curriculum.

washington

Some US researchers involved in genome sequencing have urged their major funder not to become too distracted with other activities which, they argue, could delay the speedy completion of the project.

new delhi

India has released a draft of new ethical guidelines on biomedical research which would allow genetic screening in employment but ban moves to making such tests a prerequisite for life insurance.

One of the hottest debates in palaeontology is whether birds evolved from dinosaurs. A study of two exceptionally well-preserved specimens of a theropod dinosaur from China — complete with skin, internal organs and eggs — provides new clues to the origin of feathers.

The Cosmological Principle states that, on large enough scales, the Universe is the same in every place and in every direction. This assumption helps to form the basis of the Big Bang theory. But the Cosmological Principle is false, according to one analysis of galaxy redshift surveys, which implies that the Universe has a never-ending hierarchical structure in which galaxies group together in clusters which, in turn, group together in superclusters, and so on. This analysis is disputed by most astronomers, but is cause for concern -- if it is true, cosmology will be profoundly changed.

A new connection between eukaryotic mitosis and prokaryotic cell division may have been forged with the structures of two GTPases, which seem to be remarkably similar. The first is the tubulin heterodimer -- a protein that assembles into the microtubules involved in eukaryotic mitosis. And the second, FtsZ, forms a filamentous septum during prokaryotic cell division. Could this just be a coincidence, or does it reflect a common ancestry, indicating conservation of functional properties too?

New observations of neutrinos threaten cherished conservation laws, and call into question the completeness of the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the fundamental properties and interactions of every particle in the Universe. New data from the SuperKamiokande detector, a giant underground tank of water lined with photomultiplier tubes, show that neutrinos spontaneously change their ‘flavour‘ in flight, violating the laws of lepton number conservation.

Despite the importance of tropical forests in conservation of the Earth's resources, surprisingly little is known about their history. By studying five sites in east-central Africa, one group now concludes that current biodiverse ‘hotspots’ were not always so species rich. Forests are thought to have survived the vicissitudes of the last glacial episodes in certain ‘core’ areas. But when the climate became warmer and wetter, equatorial forests seem to have expanded from these favourable locations in which they established themselves.

In 1995, periodic variations in the Doppler shift of the light from the star 51 Pegasi hinted at the presence of a planet -- the first ever detected around another Sun-like star. Then last year, spectral line variations appeared to be present, which could only be caused by an undulating, pulsating stellar surface, not an orbiting planet. But now the spectral evidence of pulsations has disappeared, leaving planets as the only plausible interpretation.

Primitive artificial livers are already used for supporting liver-failure patients awaiting a transplant. Unfortunately, the liver is a highly structured organ, and its function is poorly reproduced by a random culture of hepatocytes (liver cells) and tissue-forming fibroblast cells. But a marriage of cell biology with microfabrication can do better. By using photolithography to pattern films of collagen on a borosilicate wafer, hepatocytes and fibroblasts can be made to grow in a controlled array, which can be adjusted to gain the best performance from these artificial livers.

To predict where deposits of oil and natural gas can be found, and to exploit these resources, it would be very useful to know what are the fundamental chemical reactions that generate petroleum. A new study gives clues about these reactions, and the authors propose that organically derived sulphur species are pivotal in regulating the rate at which petroleum is generated.

Dogma has it that air is delivered to the tissues of insects through a series of branched tubes called tracheae and tracheoles. But 350 years' worth of thinking could be overturned by a new study which shows that many caterpillars may, in fact, have a ‘lung’ of sorts. Known as the tokus, this specialized compartment provides the caterpillar's blood cells with oxygen and, under oxygen-poor conditions, the blood cells can be seen to congregate here.

In pre-technological societies, children finished their education, found work and married at a much earlier age than they do today. Daedalus believes that we could see a return to these times by speeding up the rate at which children learn. He plans to do this using magnetic gadgets that stir up the fluid axoplasm in the nerves. By wearing a 400-Hz magnetic hat, children wouldn't think any faster, but their brains would be updated twice as quickly.

Turner delights his audiences with his magical depictions of nature on canvas. James Turrell is using nature itself as the canvas — by digging into a volcanic crater to create a new kind of observatory.

This roundup pulls together products from the areas of automation and DNA amplification, including barcoding LIMS systems, robotic sample processors, microplate carousel systems, PCR kits and thermal cyclers.

Selected papers from 1997 issues of Nature.