News of the Week
News Focus

News of the Week

DRUG-ABUSE RESEARCH:
White House Stirs Interest in Brain-Imaging Initiative

Andrew Lawler

BOSTON--Massachusetts General Hospital just dedicated one of the most sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging machines around, one of dozens of neuroimaging machines planned for labs across the country, all paid for by White House drug czar John Walters's office. Researchers are now putting together a major initiative to use the machine in concert with advances in genetics and animal research to vault the field into the forefront of neuroscience.

[Full Text] [PDF]

BIOTERRORISM:
A Call for Restraint on Biological Data

Jennifer Couzin

Two events last week are prompting a public debate about whether unclassified research that might conceivably help bioterrorists should be openly published. A congressional resolution called on journals, scientists, and funding agencies to take more care about releasing such information, and, separately, the American Society for Microbiology sent a letter to the National Academy of Sciences 22 July requesting a meeting of biomedical publishers to discuss whether and how to publish research results that might be co-opted by terrorists.

[Full Text] [PDF]

BIOTERRORISM:
Student Charged With Possessing Anthrax

David Malakoff

A University of Connecticut graduate student has become the first researcher charged under new antiterrorism laws with mishandling a potential bioterror agent. Federal prosecutors last week charged Tomas Foral, 26, with unlawfully possessing anthrax-tainted cow tissue.

[Full Text] [PDF]

PSYCHOLOGY:
Violent Effects of Abuse Tied to Gene

Erik Stokstad

A new study of both genetics and social surroundings points to the influence of a particular genotype on aggressive behavior in young adults from a troubled background. On page 851, a team of clinical psychologists reports that a certain form of a gene that breaks down neurotransmitters makes men more likely to be violent, but only if they were maltreated as children.

[Full Text] [PDF]

NEUROSCIENCE:
Long-Awaited Technique Spots Alzheimer's Toxin

Laura Helmuth

STOCKHOLM--On 24 July at the International Conference of Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders here, a team revealed the first images from a positron emission tomography technique that picks up one of the defining--and first--features of Alzheimer's disease. This putative marker, as well as others reported at the meeting, could be invaluable not only for diagnosis but also in clinical research, conference attendees say.

[Full Text] [PDF]

ASTROPHYSICS:
'Winged' Galaxies Point to Black Hole Mergers

Robert Irion

X literally may mark the spot as astrophysicists hunt for colliding black holes. Results of a new mathematical model, published online this week by Science, maintain that cross-shaped radio galaxies harbor massive black holes that suddenly flipped their spins, probably by absorbing black holes from other galaxies. When combined with a census of these distinctive galaxies, the model suggests that such titanic encounters happen about once a year in the cosmos.

[Full Text] [PDF]

EUROPEAN PATENTS:
Tough Stance on Stem Cell, DNA Claims

Gretchen Vogel

BERLIN--Biotech players hoping to stake claims on human stem cells or DNA sequences in Europe saw a couple of warning shots whiz across their bows last week. On 24 July, the European Patent Office strongly limited a controversial patent covering stem cell technology, striking out all references to human or animal embryonic stem cells. And a British think tank called on patent offices around the world to refrain from awarding patents on DNA sequences.

[Full Text] [PDF]

2003 U.S. BUDGET:
NSF Gets Big Lift; Pluto Mission Backed

Jeffrey Mervis

Senators Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Kit Bond (R-MO) have delivered on their promise to put the National Science Foundation budget on a 5-year doubling track. But they also served notice that they are putting the agency on a tight leash.

[Full Text] [PDF]

WOMEN'S HEALTH:
U.K. Hormone Trial to Pause for Review

Martin Enserink

For at least 3 months, no new patients will be enrolled in a large trial of hormone replacement therapy taking place in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. The U.K. Medical Research Council, the trial's main sponsor, ordered the pause last week and decided to ask an international panel to recommend whether to continue the trial in the face of evidence that prompted termination of a similar U.S. study 3 weeks ago. However, women already enrolled will be asked to keep taking their pills.

[Full Text] [PDF]

HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICS:
Tevatron Sees Light at End of Tunnel?

Charles Seife

Scientific results from the Tevatron accelerator are beginning to trickle out, and a 2-week shutdown in June might have marked a turning point in the battle against the machine's problems. But the accelerator's particle beams still fall far short of their target brightness levels, and scientists still await the Tevatron's reemergence as a flagship accelerator.

[Full Text] [PDF]
News Focus

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY:
In Yeast, Prions' Killer Image Doesn't Apply

Jennifer Couzin

Infectious proteins called prions have been fingered for causing an array of rare but horrific brain illnesses. Researchers studying these misfolded proteins have found prions in yeast and fungus; unlike those in mammals, however, they don't seem to harm the host. Now a radical new line of inquiry is casting human prions not as prototypical evildoers but more like the rare bad guys in an extended family of eccentrics.

[Full Text] [PDF]

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY:
Susan Lindquist: Prion Expert Leads the Whitehead Institute

Eliot Marshall

Susan Lindquist never planned to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a leader of a fast-developing area of protein studies (see accompanying story), or the director of a major academic center: the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she was chosen to head last fall. As Lindquist tells it, her strategy was pretty simple: to follow her curiosity.

[Full Text] [PDF]

SENSING:
Brainstorming Their Way to an Imaging Revolution

Daniel Clery

OXFORD, U.K.--Terahertz waves penetrate fog, peer through paper and clothes, and look into human tissue, but their useful properties are terra incognita to most because of the huge cost of existing sensors. Last week, however, a team of scientists from across Europe began testing an imaging chip that could open up this long-neglected part of the electromagnetic spectrum to new applications, from medical imaging to satellite observations of Earth. The device itself is intriguing enough, but equally novel is how it's being developed.

[Full Text] [PDF]

SENSING:
Terahertz on a Chip

Daniel Clery

In the Star Tiger team's photonic bandgap material, silicon "logs" are lined up to create a macroscopic version of a crystal lattice: a structure with arrays of holes like the serried ranks of atoms in a crystal. And just as a semiconductor's crystalline structure can forbid the movement of electrons with particular energies--an energy bandgap--a silicon "woodpile" blocks certain wavelengths of radiation.

[Full Text] [PDF]

CHEMICAL WEAPONS:
U.S. Research on Sedatives in Combat Sets Off Alarms

Alexander Stone

The U.S. government is sponsoring research into the feasibility of combat use of sedatives and other drugs that inhibit the function of the central nervous system. The work, described in documents obtained by Science, is part of a broader effort to create an arsenal of nonlethal weapons for soldiers and police. But critics say that turning such drugs into tools to subdue hostile forces would run counter to an international treaty that bans the use of chemical weapons.

[Full Text] [PDF]

METEOROLOGY:
Great Balls of Ice!

Xavier Bosch

MADRID--Two and a half years after several hefty chunks of ice mysteriously fell from a clear sky in Spain, a team of Spanish researchers has proposed a novel mechanism for generating "hail" on a clear day. Other experts are far from convinced, in part because it would take so much time to accrete such large masses that the whole notion seems implausible.

[Full Text] [PDF]