COASTAL ECOLOGY:
Death by Suffocation in the Gulf of Mexico

LAFITTE, LOUISIANA--Scientists have traced the origins of a vast hypoxic, or oxygen-poor, region in the Gulf of Mexico to inland fertilizer use; now officials must decide what to do about it. Researchers first documented this periodic "dead zone" off the Mississippi's mouth in the early 1970s, but it wasn't until 1985 that they began to step up research efforts by taking oxygen readings at dozens of offshore stations. Now concern is rising that smaller oxygen-depleted regions off the U.S. coast could also grow. Because the gulf's is one of more than 50 similar oxygen-starved coastal regions worldwide, any steps taken to heal the gulf will be monitored intently across the globe.

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FISHERIES BIOLOGY:
Ecology's Catch of the Day

A massive federal effort to take into account the health of a fish's habitat--and not simply its population size--could lead to major changes in the way the United States manages its fishers. This move to give ecologists a greater voice in the management of commercial fish stocks comes courtesy of the 1996 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which mandates that by 11 October, eight fishery management councils around the country must have finished mapping out "essential fish habitat" for more than 600 species. But fisheries experts say that not enough is known by orders of magnitude about the habitat of even the best studied commercial species, the summer flounder.

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OCEANOGRAPHY:
Instruments Cast Fresh Eyes on the Sea

MONTEREY BAY, CALIFORNIA--From roving sensors that drift in the oceans' midwaters to fixed offshore observatories, a raft of innovations is opening up new horizons in ocean research, making the sea, while still daunting, much more accessible. New chip and sensor technologies have shrunk instrument packages while increasing their capacity to store huge amounts of data, and materials such as Teflon-coated titanium, rugged spheres, and dense plastics have enabled engineers to devise better ways to cope with the sea's corrosiveness and crushing pressures, so many oceanographers no longer must wait a year to go out on a ship or schedule a costly manned-submersible dive. But some researchers say that while the technology today is unquestionably driving the science, federal funding falls short of the long-term buy-in that new oceanographic tools require.

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OCEANOGRAPHY:
Sensing the Sea Without Breaking the Bank

Ocean scientists faced with budget cuts for new instrumentation (see main text) have adopted NASA's mantra of "faster, cheaper, better." Innovative tools at relatively low cost are surfacing throughout the United States, as researchers develop technology that their colleagues elsewhere can adapt and use.

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ESTUARINE ECOLOGY:
Stirring Up the Chesapeake's Cradle of Life

According to biological modelers, a 16-kilometer-wide eddy near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay creates oases of tiny plants and animals that nourish fish and crustaceans; the area has now joined a list of probable ecological hot spots in the Chesapeake now being studied in a 6-year, $3 million National Science Foundation project called Trophic Interactions in Estuarine Systems. The project is testing the idea that an estuary's physics largely explain why fishery yields in the Chesapeake and other bays are so much higher than in lakes and the open ocean and could ultimately help agencies make better fishery-management decisions.

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ESTUARINE ECOLOGY:
Bringing Ocean 'Fringe' Research Into the Mainstream

According to experts, broad coastal studies such as the effort to map links between biology and physics in the Chesapeake Bay (see main text) are hampered by the fact that much of the $200 million a year in federal spending on coastal research gets frittered away on rote data collection. But some agencies are forging ahead on their own to give monitoring a better scientific underpinning.

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HUMAN GENOME PROJECT:
A Planned Boost for Genome Sequencing, But the Plan Is in Flux

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) last week awarded $60.5 million to seven centers across the United States to scale up their efforts to sequence the human genome. The awards should enable the centers to crank out 117 million bases next year--almost double the total produced so far by all U.S. groups combined. But exactly what the centers will do with the money isn't clear, for NHGRI has asked them to spend the next 2 months evaluating a proposal for a radical change in the plan to sequence all 3 billion base pairs that make up our genetic code.

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NEUROSCIENCE:
First Images Show Monkey Brains at Work

Researchers have published the first functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) of activity in a monkey's brain, achieved by patiently training the monkey and designing a special seat to restrain it in the magnet. These studies could ultimately help neuroscientists get more out of human fMR images, and should also benefit traditional electrode studies of monkey brain activity by providing a way to identify the parts of the brain active during certain tasks.

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DRUG DEVELOPMENT:
Small Molecule Fills Hormone's Shoes

Drug companies have long sought small compounds that mimic the effects of protein drugs yet evade breakdown in the digestive tract, but the small chemicals, which might be just 1/50 of a protein's size, seemed too puny to turn on the proteins' surface receptors. Now, on page 257, researchers report their discovery of a small molecule that activates the receptor for granulocyte-colony-stimulating factor, a cytokine that is commonly used to boost patients' immune systems after chemotherapy. Although the new compound works in mice but not humans, it is being heralded as evidence that the right small molecule can indeed fill a protein hormone's shoes.

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BIOMEDICAL POLICY:
NIH Urged to Involve the Public in Policy-Making

To cure a "major weakness" in communication between leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the public, a group of experts at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has recommended that NIH create a new committee in the director's office and a network of public liaison offices throughout the agency that would enable public representatives to communicate more directly with NIH's brass about research policy. This recommendation is just one in a list of a dozen issued last week by IOM, part of a report commissioned by Congress, which asked IOM to carry out this 6-month review of how NIH goes about ranking its funding priorities in order to help clarify its own decision-making.

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ASTRONOMY:
Hints of a Nearby Solar System?

Govert Schilling

A ring of dust, probably kicked up by a swarm of comets, has been spotted around Epsilon Eridani, the nearest sunlike star, just 10 light-years away. The appearance of the dust ring also suggests that planets are orbiting nearby. The discovery was announced this week at the Protostars and Planets Conference in Santa Barbara, California.

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MICROBIOLOGY:
Bacteria to Blame for Kidney Stones?

Tiny bacteria have been fingered as possible culprits behind kidney stones and abnormal calcium deposits in other tissues. The bacteria, described in the 7 July Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are among the smallest ever found, barely bigger than some viruses.

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PARTICLE PHYSICS:
First Glimpse of the Last Neutrino?

Of the 12 elementary particles thought to make up all of the matter of the universe, physicists have spotted 11. Now the last holdout, the tau neutrino, may finally have left its tracks in a detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

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SEISMOLOGY:
A Quieter Forecast for Southern California

An official group of seismologists concluded 4 years ago that destructive temblors were likely to strike Southern California more frequently in coming decades because of the strain built up in the crust by an "earthquake deficit" over the past 150 years (Science, 28 January 1994, p. 460). But now an independent analysis and a review by seismologists, including one of the original panel members, both conclude that the deficit was due to accounting errors--and that the region is right on schedule for quakes.

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CLIMATE CHANGE:
Warming's Unpleasant Surprise: Shivering in the Greenhouse?

At a conference last month in Snowbird, Utah, researchers heard overwhelming evidence that the so-called "conveyor belt" current that warms northern Europe and adjacent Asia has repeatedly slackened and at times even shut off during the past 100,000 years, in concert with dramatic climate shifts around the hemisphere. And computer models suggest that, ironically, the greenhouse's moister air could also squelch the conveyor belt--with potentially alarming repercussions. The prospect underscores the oceans' power over climate, also featured in the Special Section beginning on page 189.

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CLIMATE CHANGE:
As the Oceans Switch, Climate Shifts

While climate scientists ponder the ocean's possible wildcard role in the next couple of centuries of greenhouse warming (see main text), other researchers are considering how the ocean and atmosphere shift climate in our lifetime. Last winter's El Niño was a prime example of ocean and atmosphere conspiring to bring climate change. But oscillations in the North Pacific and the North Atlantic have also long been suspected of shifting climate from decade to decade, and others are on the table.

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AIDS RESEARCH:
International AIDS Meeting Injects a Dose of Realism

GENEVA--The upbeat mood of the last World AIDS Conference 2 years ago has given way to acknowledgment that even the best therapies have flaws: First-line drugs are beginning to fail in some patients, drug side effects are mounting, and new drug-resistant strains of HIV are emerging. In addition, some untreated people who once appeared invulnerable to HIV are now seeing their immune systems begin to decline. Participants also heard about the formidable obstacles to making anti-HIV therapies available to people in poor countries. But new evidence is also suggesting that it might be possible to stimulate the immune system to fight off HIV.

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EDUCATION REFORM:
U.S. Tries Variations on High School Curriculum

The traditional sequence of biology, chemistry, and physics in U.S. high schools, say reformers, may be at the root of poor student performance. One proposal for reform is a program called American Renaissance in Science Education (ARISE), which would reverse the traditional order of teaching the four core disciplines (see Policy Forum); other efforts attempt to emulate Europe and Asia, where middle school students begin a cyclical curriculum that covers all the sciences each year in progressively greater detail and depth. But such changes will be tough to implement, especially given the pluralistic nature of U.S. education across some 16,000 school districts.

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KOREA:
Major Reforms Proposed to Improve Science Payoffs

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA--The new government of President Kim Dae Jung has begun a comprehensive reform of science and technology policy aimed at creating what officials call a "technology-based advanced economy." The reforms are an effort to repair a system that, both scientists and government officials agree, suffers from bureaucratic infighting, a lack of incentives for quality research, and poor links between the academic and industrial sectors.

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STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY:
Race for Stronger Magnets Turns Into Marathon

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ARCHAEOLOGY:
Geological Analysis Damps Ancient Chinese Fires

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SOCIETY FOR DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY MEETING:
How Embryos Shape Up

About 800 biologists gathered at Stanford University from 20 to 25 June for the 57th annual meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology. Study organisms ranged from flies to mice to plants, but there was plenty of common ground, including a new pathway by which signaling molecules can shape the early embryo and a new gene that helps specify right from left.

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