Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>Conservation biologists have long believed that the way to save rain forests and the wealth of species inhabiting them is to harvest their trees in a sustainable manner. But that notion has been challenged recently by two researchers who contend that, in some cases, sustainable management can be bad for forests, biodiversity, and loggers. Their heretical prescription for saving at least some rain forests is to permit loggers to cut the most valuable species, and then place the forest off limits to commercial logging. Critics counter that their viewpoint is naïve and damaging to rain-forest conservation.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Congressional opponents of NASA's ambitious Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE) appear to be softening their criticism of the multibillion-dollar program, in part because of changes being made to satisfy the concerns of legislators and scientists. The result likely will be smaller spacecraft and a data-management system more closely tailored to the needs of researchers.</jats:p>

<jats:p> <jats:bold>TOKYO</jats:bold> —Japan's rock-solid faith in predicting earthquakes is about to get a shock from a draft report that says the research program has failed to warn the population about impending earthquakes and has overstated its ability to develop accurate forecasts. The program has been on the defensive since the deadly Kobe earthquake in 1995. </jats:p>

<jats:p> <jats:bold>VENICE</jats:bold> —Last week, Italy's science minister, Luigi Berlinguer, appointed a relatively unknown academic, informatics engineer Lucio Bianco, to head the National Research Council (CNR). Just days earlier, Parliament approved a law that gives Berlinguer more authority and requires his ministry for universities and research to draw up within 1 year legislation to reform the scientific infrastructure. Berlinguer told Science his first target for reform is the CNR, to shift its emphasis toward applied research, and Bianco's appointment is part of his master plan. </jats:p>

<jats:p> <jats:bold>PARIS</jats:bold> —French Health Minister Hervé Gaymard has announced that local authorities will begin distributing potassium iodide tablets to everyone living within 10 kilometers of 24 nuclear installations. In the event of a nuclear accident, the residents would take the tablets to block the uptake of radioactive iodine isotopes, byproducts of nuclear fission that could cause thyroid cancer. The decision in France has sparked considerable interest among radiation scientists in other countries, particularly the United States, where stable iodine is not generally made available to the public. </jats:p>

<jats:p>The old adage about the inevitability of death and taxes has taken on new meaning in Ukraine: A new tax law could spell death for dozens of scientific projects. Several Western organizations have suspended grant payments to members of this country's scientific elite, citing a law that apparently will siphon 20% from each grant. The law could undermine vital support for Ukrainian labs doing world-class science.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Plasma scientists have rushed to take advantage of a new $13 million federal program aimed at generating more basic knowledge about these ionized gases. Jointly sponsored by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, the program aims to reverse a decades-long pattern of viewing plasma science as a large collection of applications, from fusion energy to plasma processing of semiconductors, and revitalize its scientific underpinnings.</jats:p>

<jats:p> <jats:bold>OTTAWA</jats:bold> —Three years after Canada decided it could not afford to do science on the international space station, officials are hoping to broker a deal with NASA that would reopen the facility's labs to the nation's research community in exchange for making an essential piece of hardware. But some Canadian space scientists warn that, even if NASA lets them aboard, the arrangement won't do them any good until the government finds enough money to fund their ideas. </jats:p>

<jats:p> <jats:bold>BALTIMORE</jats:bold> —Tourists visiting this city's revamped Inner Harbor will soon have a new attraction to check out: working scientists. The $160 million Columbus Center, which opens 3 May, combines a sophisticated research facility with a science museum. But some observers wonder whether this marriage of lab and museum will be a happy one. Researchers already have become embroiled in disputes over the design of the building and exhibits. And many are struggling to work out how to play a dual role as scientist and interpreter of science to the public. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Two teams, one of which reports its results on ( <jats:related-article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="doi" page="page 1943" related-article-type="in-this-issue" vol="275" xlink:href="10.1126/science.275.5308.1943" xlink:type="simple">page 1943</jats:related-article> ) and the other in the April issue of Nature Genetics, have ended in a near dead heat in their race to find what appears to be a particularly important tumor suppressor. The gene, located on chromosome 10, may be involved in several kinds of cancers, including gliomas, a deadly brain cancer, and prostate, breast, and kidney cancer. It encodes a protein, the amino acid sequence of which indicates that it is a tyrosine phosphatase, an enzyme that removes phosphate groups from the amino acid tyrosine. Cancer researchers had long suspected that such phosphatases might be tumor suppressors because they directly counteract the actions of another set of enzymes that play a key role in cell's growth-stimulating pathways. This is the first direct proof of that suspicion. </jats:p>