Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> <jats:bold>STRASBOURG, FRANCE</jats:bold> —About a year ago, a dozen European scientists identified something they saw as missing from the European research scene: an organization to act as a voice for working researchers across the continent. Last weekend at a constituent assembly of 200 “founding members” here, that vacuum was transformed into “Euroscience,” an association of scientists and citizens concerned about science and technology, modeled on the American Association for the Advancement of Science. </jats:p>

<jats:p>A blue-ribbon panel has recommended that the National Science Foundation proceed with plans to build a new U.S. research station at the South Pole to replace its aging facility there. But the panel also says the new station should be a slimmed-down version of a facility proposed 3 years ago.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The hubbub over the cloning of Dolly, a Scottish mountain sheep, continued without letup last week. In Senate hearings and at a meeting of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, experts, including Dolly's “father,” Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, and nonexperts alike offered opinions on how the cloning technique might change the way humans reproduce and whether human cloning should be made illegal.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Plant pathologists fear that a valuable collection of plant viruses and viroids may be threatened. For financial reasons, the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), a vast library of microbial cultures that is a vital resource for researchers around the world, has decided, for now, not to build a greenhouse at its new facility in Manassas, Virginia, and has also dismissed the curator of the plant-virus collection. ATCC officials say they want to protect the collection, but even they concede that it might be in jeopardy.</jats:p>

<jats:p> <jats:bold>ANAN, JAPAN</jats:bold> —The inventor of the world's first bright blue light-emitting diode (LED) and leader in the race to commercialize a blue laser is an easygoing researcher far off the beaten technology track in Japan. But Shuji Nakamura of Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd. is all business when it comes to science. </jats:p>

<jats:p>For the past 20 years, astronomers have had compelling evidence that there is more to the universe than meets the eye: About 90% of the mass of the universe seems to be invisible. This “dark matter” could consist of dim stars, not bright enough to be seen from Earth. It could simply be neutrinos. But there is a more exotic alternative: Dark matter could be made up of massive particles yet to be discovered, collectively known as WIMPs, and a new wave of experiments is now coming on line to catch one.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Over the last 30 years, space-based detectors have picked up hundreds of gamma-ray flashes, but astronomers disagree about what might be producing them and even where they come from. Now a burst source may have been revealed. Just hours after astronomers had narrowed down the position of a burst, a Dutch group pointed a telescope at the site and spotted a dim galaxy in the far reaches of the universe.</jats:p>

<jats:p> The great flu pandemic of 1918 rates as one of history's greatest killers, causing as many as 40 million deaths worldwide. Now for the first time, researchers have gotten a look at some of the genes from the virus at fault. In work described on page <jats:related-article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="doi" page="1793" related-article-type="in-this-issue" vol="275" xlink:href="10.1126/science.275.5307.1793" xlink:type="simple">1793</jats:related-article> , they have used polymerase chain reaction techniques to amplify and sequence segments of five viral genes obtained from the preserved lung tissues of a U.S. Army private who died in the epidemic. </jats:p>

<jats:p>For most people, biodiversity brings to mind plants, animals, or maybe insects. But a new breed of scientist, using gene-typing tools borrowed from biology's molecular revolution, is finding evidence of untold millions of new species hidden in the microbial world. Researchers are turning up dozens of groups of bacteria, archaea, and single-celled eukarya in soil, sediments, and water that are at least as genetically distinct from each other as azaleas are from aardvarks. With the new molecular techniques, scientists also are getting glimpses of how human impacts, ranging from oil spills to the buildup of greenhouse gases, are perturbing these busy microscopic communities which provide the nutrients that sustain all other forms of life.</jats:p>

<jats:p>A new detector on the HERA positron-proton collider in Hamburg, Germany, has confirmed a long-standing puzzle about the toplike spin of protons and neutrons—and physicists are delighted. The puzzle is that the quarks that make up protons and neutrons don't contribute nearly enough spin to explain the total. By confirming the shortfall, the new detector, called HERMES, has shown that its sophisticated spin-probing technology is working properly—and may eventually be able to track down the missing spin.</jats:p>