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The article cites a U.S. report that states that Asian nations are catching up with Europe and the United States in terms of scientific output. According to the report, in 2004, countries from the Asia Pacific region including China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and India produced 25 percent of the world's research papers. By comparison, Europe produced 38 percent of the world's scientific papers, and the United States produced 33 percent. Within Asia, China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan grew the most. In China, some institutions even pay researchers extra for publications in indexed journals, especially ones that carry widely cited articles.

When government can't afford to match the research grants paid to rich labs in North America, Europe and Japan, it must be especially galling to have to pay more than one's wealthy competitors for standard lab equipment and materials. The extent of the problem is revealed by "Nature" survey of researchers in Germany, Poland, the U.S. and Brazil. On both sides of the Atlantic, the larger and more competitive market of the established scientific powers ensures that prices are driven down. But elsewhere, the poor get poorer. What can researchers do to combat these harsh economics of scale? Sometimes it helps to negotiate just a little harder. One Polish group leader told "Nature" that he got a 35 percent discount on centrifuges after confronting his local retailer with cheaper prices across the nearby German border.

The Pacific plate converges with northeastern Eurasia at a rate of 8-9 m per century along the Kamchatka, Kuril and Japan trenches[SUP1]. Along the southern Kuril trench, which faces the Japanese island of Hokkaido, this fast subduction has recurrently generated earthquakes with magnitudes of up to ∼8 over the past two centuries[SUP2-6]. These historical events, on rupture segments 100-200 km long, have been considered characteristic of Hokkai-do's plate-boundary earthquakes[SUP7,8]. But here we use deposits of prehistoric tsunamis to infer the infrequent occurrence of larger earthquakes generated from longer ruptures. Many of these tsunami deposits form sheets of sand that extend kilometres inland from the deposits of historical tsunamis. Stratigraphic series of extensive sand sheets, intercalated with dated volcanic-ash layers, show that such unusually large tsunamis occurred about every 500 years on average over the past 2,000-7,000 years, most recently ∼350 years ago. Numerical simulations of these tsunamis are best explained by earthquakes that individually rupture multiple segments along the southern Kuril trench. We infer that such multi-segment earthquakes persistently recur among a larger number of single-segment events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]