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The laser and its microwave predecessor, the maser, shouldn't have worked. No less a giant than Niels Bohr (and many other physicists) said so -- a beam with such a [...]

Author(s): David Swinbanks Tokyo At the start of the new millennium, can scientists in Japan look forward to a bright future? On the surface, things seem to be improving. Following [...]

NIH guidelines urge scientists to share research tools Washington The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has published guidelines that actively encourage researchers to share NIH-funded research tools that they [...]

Author(s): J. L. Heilbron [1]; W. F. Bynum [2] That grand insight of the twentieth century, that science is a social process, has penetrated even into the black box where [...]

Author(s): Michael Berry [1] Singularities are places where mathematical quantities become infinite, or change abruptly. In waves -- of light, for example -- there can be singularities in the intensity, [...]

Author(s): Brent Ellerbroek (corresponding author) [1]; François Rigaut [1] Over the past decade, astronomers have made significant progress in improving the resolving power of ground-based optical and near-infrared telescopes. Atmospheric [...]

100 YEARS AGO The Daily Chronicle recalls that a London paper of the first week of 1800 alluded to the then recent hot disputes in France and England respecting the [...]

Author(s): Stephen H. Kirby (corresponding author) Subduction zones, where oceanic plates dive deep into Earth's mantle, pro- duce graceful arc-shaped chains of volcanoes landward of oceanic trenches and parallel belts [...]

Author(s): Diego di Bernardo [1]; Alan Murray [1] The heartbeat is recorded on an electro- cardiogram (ECG) as a characteristic trace determined by changes in the electrical activity of the [...]

Author(s): Benjamin S. Orlove (corresponding author) [1, 2]; John C. H. Chiang [2]; Mark A. Cane [2] Farmers in drought-prone regions of Andean South America have historically made observations of [...]

Author(s): Rob Channell (corresponding author) [1]; Mark V. Lomolino [2] As one moves from the core to the periphery of a species' geographical range, populations occupy less favourable habitats and [...]

What was the purpose of the announcement by Celera Genomics on Monday that it now has DNA sequences totalling more than 90 per cent of the genome in its database? [...]

Author(s): Natasha Loder 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 [...]

Author(s): Declan Butler Paris European Union research commissioner Philippe Busquin is backing plans by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) to establish a website called 'E-Biosci'. This will be a [...]

Author(s): Henry Gee [1] The Real Science Behind The X-Files: Microbes, Meteorites and Mutants by Anne Simon Simon & Schuster: 1999. 320 pp. $25 There are two reasons why proponents [...]

Author(s): David Rabinowitz (corresponding author) [1]; Eleanor Helin [2]; Kenneth Lawrence [2]; Steven Pravdo [2] Near-Earth asteroids are small (diameters < 10 km), rocky bodies with orbits that approach that [...]

Biochemicals range Cayman Chemical http://www.caymanchem.com Reader Service No. 100 Latest edition of this biochemicals catalogue Hundreds of new biochemicals are listed in Cayman's 1999-2000 catalogue, including eicosanoids, nitric-acid reagents, lipids, [...]

Author(s): Peter Pockley Sydney The Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee has criticized a white paper released by the education minister David Kemp as being 'flawed' by the government's refusal to accept that [...]

Author(s): Natasha Loder Hoeven, Netherlands The Netherlands is faced with a crisis in the recruitment of postdoctoral researchers, with scientists increasingly reluctant to accept living on a series of short-term [...]

Author(s): Gretchen C. Daily [1]; Brian H. Walker [2] There is an urgent need, and a strong basis, for partnership between businesses and environmental scientists. Although this suggestion is not [...]

Author(s): W. F. Bynum [1] William Osler: A Life in Medicine by Michael Bliss Oxford University Press: 1999. 600 pp. £27.50, $35 Louis Pasteur was once described as the most [...]

Author(s): Ralph Lewin [1] Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible by Joseph A. Amato University of California Press: 2000. 288 pp. $22.50, £13.95 According to some religions, [...]

100 YEARS AGO Is New Zealand a Zoological Region? Will you allow me to make one remark on the letter of Mr. H. Farquhar, advocating an affirmative answer to the [...]

Author(s): James H. Butler (corresponding author) Methyl bromide (CH[sub.3] Br) and methyl chloride (CH[sub.3] Cl) both originate in large part from natural sources. These gases can reach the stratosphere where [...]

Author(s): David V. Goeddel (corresponding author); Arthur D. Levinson (corresponding author) On 6 December, the founder of Genentech, Robert Swanson, succumbed to brain cancer. He was only 52, and with [...]

Author(s): R. A. Houghton (corresponding author) [1]; D. L. Skole [2]; Carlos A. Nobre [3]; J. L. Hackler [1]; K. T. Lawrence [1]; W H. Chomentowski [2] The distribution of [...]

Author(s): Lee M. Graves (corresponding author) [1, 2]; Hedeel I. Guy [3]; Piotr Kozlowski [1]; Min Huang [1]; Eduardo Lazarowski [1]; R. Marshall Pope [4]; Matthew A. Collins [1]; Erik [...]

'It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it, too.' So said the theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner when shown the results [...]

Author(s): Declan Butler Paris Plans to launch a Europe-based global website for the scientific literature, E-Biosci, were unanimously endorsed by research organizations, commercial publishers and the European Commission in Heidelberg [...]

US government shuts down Pennsylvania gene therapy trials Washington The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week shut down five gene therapy trials at the University of Pennsylvania indefinitely, [...]

Author(s): Ana Padilla (corresponding author); Ian Gibson [1] We have undertaken an analysis of questions, motions and debates in the British Parliament. The proportion related to science and technology has [...]

Author(s): David Poeppel [1] Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Perseus: 1999. 348 pp. £14.99, $26 Have you ever wondered why the past tense [...]

Author(s): Frank Oldfield (corresponding author) A persistent and misleading myth is that climate variability has been minimal during the Holocene period, the present-day 'interglacial' that goes back 11,500 years. Striking [...]

Author(s): Bruce W. D. Yardley (corresponding author) Arguably the simplest way to review the state of a subject is not to commission an article by an expert reviewer, but just [...]

Author(s): Joshua Schimel (corresponding author) Methane is present at about only 1.8 parts per million in the atmosphere, but is a key player there -- it is a greenhouse gas, [...]

100 YEARS AGO Expressions of opinion from political leaders as to the value of scientific advice, and the need for scientific methods in Government Departments, are so rare, that some [...]

Author(s): Earl Davis (corresponding author) Seafloor spreading is an intermittent process in which roughly 3 km[sup. 3] of oceanic crustal rock is added to the Earth's surface each year along [...]

Author(s): Potter Wickware (corresponding author) A disagreeable side effect of longer lifespans is the failure of one part of the body -- the knees, for example -- before the body [...]

Whatever the prophets may have said, the paperless office is nowhere in sight. But in Nature 's offices, at least, the sheer quantity of accumulated paper is set to diminish [...]

Author(s): Alison Abbott Berlin Documents relating to the Nazi era from the files of Adolf Butenhandt, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry in Berlin during that time, and [...]

Author(s): Herbert N. Arst, Jr [1] Sir Louis Guenin's Commentary (Nature 402, 577; 1999) is a welcome contribution to defining misconduct in scientific research. A related problem is that research [...]

Author(s): John Brunstein [1] Sir Does the expansion of the Internet and journals' online publishing strategies herald the end of 'impact factors'? Many scientific publications now have online versions, often [...]

Author(s): Friedrich Katscher [1] Sir Although the discovery of nucleic acids, mentioned in Peter Little's News and Views article ('The book of genes' Nature 402, 467; 1999), was published in [...]

Author(s): Anne McLaren [1] The Second Creation: The Age of Biological Control by the Scientists that Cloned Dolly Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and Colin Tudge Headline: 2000. 362 pp. £18.99 [...]

100 YEARS AGO The old East Anglian proverb, 'As blue as wad,' occurs to one visiting the Woad Mill described by Mr. [Francis] Darwin in Nature, in 1896 (vol. v. [...]

Author(s): Peter D. Moore (corresponding author) There are plenty of examples of the ecological mayhem that can result from the human introduction of species into new areas. Stories of goats [...]

Fluid 'rope trick' investigated L. Mahadevan, W. S. Ryu, A. D. T. Samuel Nature 392, 140 ( 1998) We wish to amend a small mistake in our calculations, although this [...]

Author(s): M. J. Benton (corresponding author) [1]; M. A. Wills [1, 2]; R. Hitchin [1] Does the fossil record present a true picture of the history of life [1, 2, [...]

Author(s): M. James Nichols; Newsome Nature 402 (Suppl.), C35-C38 (1999) Figure 3a of this paper was published without proper attribution. The photograph was taken by the late F. W. Goro, [...]

Author(s): Alison Abbott Munich German scientists have rejected claims that lack of government funding for genome research is their own fault, for failing to convince politicians of its importance.[illus. 1] [...]