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SEISMOLOGY:
Did Test Ban Watchdog Fail to Bark?
Eliot Marshall
Opponents of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) are finding fault with the global seismic detection system that monitors compliance, because it missed India's announced second round of nuclear blasts in May. They are now trying to cut its budget. But a strong consensus has emerged among U.S. seismologists that the system worked well and should easily have detected a blast even smaller than India's claim of the equivalent of 800 tons of TNT; they believe that an 800-ton blast would have been visible all over the world. This has led some experts to suggest that the announced tests on 13 May may have been at most small subcritical blasts fueled by chemical explosives--"hydrodynamic" experiments of the type detonated occasionally by U.S. and Russian weapons engineers and not considered a bomb test under the CTBT.
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NOVAYA ZEMLYA:
The Quake That Roared
Eliot Marshall
Politics and seismology don't always mix: Currently, seismologists are challenging India's official version of two bomb tests announced in May (see main text), while last summer, they differed with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other agencies over claims that Russia had detonated a nuclear blast at a test site on the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya. Independent seismic detectors had quickly traced tremors to a spot off the coast and concluded they were caused by an earthquake. In the Russian case, the CIA later retreated, without openly conceding an error. Researchers involved argue that the events illustrate the benefits of open scientific analysis of suspect signals.
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CABINET APPOINTMENT:
Los Alamos Ally Gets Top DOE Post
Andrew Lawler
Ending months of speculation, President Bill Clinton last week said he would nominate U.S. United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson to succeed Federico Peña as head of the Department of Energy (DOE). The move would put a former seven-term congressman whose district included DOE's oldest weapons lab at the helm of the $16.6 billion department. Richard Holbrooke, a former State Department official, was named to replace Richardson.
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CARBON DATING:
Rock Dates Thrown Into Doubt, Researcher Under Fire
David Malakoff
The age of some striking Arizona petroglyphs is being called into question in a Technical Comment in this issue (p. 2132) challenging the validity of the technique used. The method uses accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon analysis to date microscopic quantities of carbon-rich organic material that are believed to become trapped beneath a thin layer of natural varnish on rocks. The researcher who pioneered the method acknowledges that his technique is flawed and produces "ambiguous" results but counters that faulty lab technique explains why other researchers have been unable to replicate his results. The controversy has sparked inquiries by the National Science Foundation and the university where the research was performed and is likely to cast a cloud over rock-varnish science as a whole.
David Malakoff is a writer in Bar Harbor, Maine.
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ASTRONOMY:
ESA Commits to Hubble's Successor
Alexander Hellemans
The prospect that the United States and Europe will collaborate on building the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST)--the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope--moved a step closer last week. During a meeting in Liege, Belgium, European and American astronomers and space scientists honed their plans for the $900 million instrument, and the European Space Agency announced that it has earmarked about $200 million from its science budget to collaborate on the NGST.
Alexander Hellemans is a science writer in Naples, Italy.
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BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH FUNDING:
Dexter Takes Over Wellcome Trust's Pot of Gold
Nigel Williams
LONDON--Next week, Mike Dexter, one of Britain's most distinguished cell biologists, will takes the reins of the world's largest private fund for biomedical research, Britain's Wellcome Trust. Dexter takes over at a time when public funding for research is being consolidated at fewer departments; money for infrastructure is chronically scarce; the public research budget is stagnant; and a large cadre of researchers are marooned on short-term contracts. All of this has given the trust, with annual spending almost matching that of the government-funded Medical Research Council, enormous influence within Britain's biomedical science community (Science, 22 November 1996, p. 1292).
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BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH FUNDING:
Europe's Cold Spring Harbor
Nigel Williams
HINXTON, U.K.--Last week, about 300 scientists gathered here for a symposium to mark the completion of the Wellcome Trust's transformation of an elegant 18th century country house and surrounding parkland into the hub of the U.K.'s genome research effort. The new $22 million conference center, in which the symposium was held, aims to provide a venue for cross-fertilization between visiting scientists and the handful of labs on the site: the trust's gene sequencing facility, known as the Sanger Centre; the European Bioinformatics Institute, an outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory; and the U.K. Medical Research Council's Human Genome Mapping Programme Resource Centre.
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CHEMISTRY:
New Fullerene Rounds Out the Family
Robert F. Service
Researchers have isolated a spherical carbon molecule that contains just 36 carbon atoms, in contrast to the 60 carbons in its famous cousin, the buckyball. Tests show that the new molecule, described in this week's issue of Nature, is far more chemically reactive than its larger relative, which could make it easier to fashion into everything from high-temperature superconductors to high-strength materials.
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Research News
NEUROCHEMISTRY:
Teaching the Brain to Take Drugs
Ingrid Wickelgren
New evidence is indicating that, along with dopamine, another neurotransmitter, glutamate, may contribute to the learning of addictive behavior by producing long-term, stable changes in the brain that lead to compulsive drug-seeking. Researchers have found, for example, that blocking glutamate transmission in rats prevents behavioral sensitization, in which repeated doses of amphetamine or cocaine make the animals increasingly frantic and more likely to engage in purposeless motions; this may parallel the increasing anxiety and drug craving that humans feel after repeated hits of amphetamine or cocaine. Scientists have also identified lasting cellular and molecular changes that seem to increase activity in the brain's glutamate circuitry in animals given cocaine; brain imaging studies in humans have buttressed the theory that these circuits may be reactivated during drug cravings. If the notion that glutamate plays such a critical role in addiction holds true, drugs that block glutamate activity could one day help addicts kick their habit.
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NEUROCHEMISTRY:
Pills to Help Keep You Clean
Ingrid Wickelgren
Neuroscientists are finding hints that drugs that interfere with glutamate transmission might be used to treat addiction. So far, the greatest promise has been shown by a drug called acamprosate, which has been approved for treating alcoholism in Europe and is in clinical trials in the United States: Researchers showed in the late 1980s and early 1990s that acamprosate blocks the ability of glutamate to stimulate electrical activity in both rat cortical neurons and in the cortexes of anesthetized rats. They are now looking more systematically for other glutamate inhibitors; the over-the-counter cough suppressant dextromethorphan may be one.
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ASTRONOMY:
Seeking the Sun's Deepest Notes
Alexander Hellemans
The sun's oscillations carry clues to its interior, and astronomers have been watching them avidly with a network of telescopes called the Global Oscillation Network Group and a space-based observatory called SOHO (Science, 31 May 1996, p. 1264). But so far, the sun's deepest notes--slow pulsations that stir its very core--have eluded them. At a workshop early this month in Boston, researchers discussed new strategies for identifying these deep undulations and weighed one claim of a candidate detection.
Alexander Hellemans is a science writer in Naples.
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MICROBIOLOGY:
A Tangled Tale of E. coli Virulence
Kristin Weidenbach
On page 2114, microbiologists confirm expectations that hairlike appendages known as bundle-forming pili found on the surface of enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC)--a common cause of diarrhea in children in developing countries--are critical to the full virulence of these bacteria. The pili bundle together into ropelike filaments that interweave among bacteria, binding them into large aggregates. The tests also suggest that another key to EPEC's virulence is the ability of the pili to disentangle themselves so the bacteria can go on to infect new intestinal cells.
Kristin Weidenbach is a science writer in Boston. She received the highest dose of the bfpF strain.
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ECOLOGY:
El Niño Drives Spectacular Flower Show
Richard A. Lovett
TUCSON, ARIZONA--This spring's eruption of wildflowers in the Southwestern desert, one of the most dazzling blooms of the century, came courtesy of the heavy rainfalls of last year's El Niño. The desert display has been a boon to scientists hoping to learn more about how wildflowers survive in harsh climates--and why not every flower blooms in every rainy year. Botanists are finding that not just total rainfall, but its timing and how it interacts with temperature and plants' own survival strategies, determines when these blooms occur.
Richard A. Lovett is a writer in Portland, Oregon.
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COSMOLOGY:
Cosmic Web Captures Lost Matter
James Glanz
SAN DIEGO--Vast hydrogen clouds filled the early universe but have since vanished, leaving the matter they contained unaccounted for. But in a talk at an American Astronomical Society meeting here earlier this month, a cosmologist predicted that observers will soon find most of the ordinary matter in the universe right under their noses. Computer simulations show that the primordial clouds condensed over time into a vast, filamentary network of ionized gas--a cosmic cobweb that now links galaxies and galaxy clusters.
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MICROBIOLOGY:
Possible New Weapon for Insect Control
Evelyn Strauss
Scientists have identified a promising new group of toxins that might eventually be used instead of or in combination with those from their old standby, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). On page 2129, an insect toxicologist and his team report the discovery of proteins that the bacterium Photorhabdus luminescens uses to kill a wide variety of insects, including common pests, and demonstrate that the toxins work when eaten by an insect pest--a prerequisite for use in genetically altered plants. Combining the new toxins with Bt could ease the problem of insects becoming resistant to Bt toxins, in part because an insect is very unlikely to become resistant simultaneously to two toxins that kill by different mechanisms.
Evelyn Strauss is a free-lance writer in San Francisco.
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PALEONTOLOGY:
Dinosaur Fossils, in Fine Feather, Show Link to Birds
Ann Gibbons
Following up on controversial reports from 2 years ago, a team of Chinese, Canadian, and American paleontologists now claims that in rich fossil beds in China they have finally discovered the real thing--dinosaurs with feathers. In reports in this week's issue of Nature and the July issue of National Geographic, they describe two species of turkey-sized theropod (meat-eating) dinosaurs that have unmistakable feathers fanning out from their forearms and tails. But doubters still contend that the ancestors of birds branched off from the reptiles before dinosaurs appeared; they say the feathers only show that the new finds are flightless birds, not dinosaurs.
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