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<jats:p>Ashland, Oregon—Deep-sea oceanography was once supported by several different agencies, but the National Science Foundation (NSF) now finds itself funding the lion's share of research in everything from the geochemistry of deep-sea vents to the development of new undersea robotic craft. Last month, NSF's Marine Geology and Geosciences program invited about 40 marine researchers to a gloves-off workshop to discuss future directions. They got an emotional response. Researchers offered ideas ranging from more interdisciplinary research to better public relations, but if there was one single theme it was this: hard choices lie ahead.</jats:p>

<jats:p>For many years, immunologists have puzzled over how a single gene mutation can cause the diverse symptoms of Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, a rare hereditary disease characterized by symptoms ranging from a severely compromised immune system to bleeding and cancer. Recent studies of WASp, protein produced by the gene at fault in WAS, are helping to solve that mystery, and at the same time are pointing to some intriguing new connections between the cell's internal communication pathways.</jats:p>

<jats:p>London—In one of Britain's most prestigious institutes for the social sciences, the London School of Economics, a pioneering evolutionary biologist is opening her colleagues' eyes to a Darwinian view of human behavior.</jats:p>

<jats:p>London—The effort to put human mental activity under the evolutionary spotlight is triggering a remarkable burst of collaboration between biologists and psychologists. Thirty of them recently gathered at a workshop here to discuss recent findings. Among them are results implying deep evolutionary roots for the mental mechanisms behind numeracy—the ability to assess bulk or amount—and the tendency to discount future rewards in favor of present ones.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Over the past year, one of the four huge detectors on the Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics, has picked up 18 unusual events. Marked by debris that forms four jets and has an unusual pattern of masses, the events don't fit into any known physics, but they are so tantalizing that, so far, physicists can't write them off.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Materials scientists have taken another step toward mimicking biological structures. They have assembled groups of lipid molecules into structures resembling cells, with an outer membrane encasing a series of vesicles. The artificial cells may boost efforts to use lipid spheres for delivering drugs to tumors and other tissues: By slowing the release of the drugs, the double membranes could lengthen the time between doses.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Neurobiologists have pinpointed the roots of memory in laboratory mice, by plucking out key proteins or adding an excess of them in particular clusters of brain cells. These feats at last offer direct confirmation of the reigning theory of how we remember and show how molecular changes affect the patterns of electrical activity that memories are made of.</jats:p>

<jats:p> Solving certain problems in computer science is a gamble: There's no way to know in advance how long an algorithm will take to yield an answer. In this issue (see <jats:related-article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="doi" page="51" related-article-type="in-this-issue" vol="275" xlink:href="10.1126/science.275.5296.51" xlink:type="simple">page 51</jats:related-article> ), a group of researchers presents a technique for bettering the odds by imitating Wall Street: splitting the computer's investment among a “portfolio” of different programs in the hope that one of them will get lucky. </jats:p>