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Nature press release for 19 September issue
September 19, 2002[1] PHYSICS: CERN MAKES ENOUGH ANTIHYDROGEN TO TEST THEORY (DOI: 10.1038/nature01096)
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature`s website on 18 September at 1900 London time / 1400 US Eastern time (which is also when the embargo lifts) as part of the AOP (ahead of print) programme. Although we have included it on this release to avoid multiple mailings it will not appear in print in the September 19 issue, but at a later date.***
Physicists report in Nature online this week that they have made at least 50,000 atoms of antihydrogen, the antimatter counterpart of normal hydrogen atoms. This large quantity of the looking-glass substance should enable them to put to the test one of the most fundamental assumptions of the conventional theory of elementary particle physics: the Standard Model. If antihydrogen doesn`t behave as expected, the Standard Model will need replacing with something better.
Antihydrogen has been made before, but never in the quantities now produced by an international team of scientists working on the ATHENA experiment, based at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Antihydrogen is made from two antimatter particles: the positron, which is the counterpart of the electron, and the antiproton. In normal hydrogen atoms, an electron orbits a nucleus composed of a proton. The electron has a negative electrical charge, and the proton has a positive charge. In antihydrogen this situation is reversed: a positively charged positron orbits a negative antiproton. According to the Standard Model, the two types of atom are equivalent, like mirror images. But they are also incompatible: when matter meets antimatter, they annihilate one another in a burst of energy.
Differences between hydrogen and antihydrogen might help to explain why it is that matter greatly predominates over antimatter in the visible Universe, even though the Big Bang should in theory have produced both in equal amounts. The reason for this imbalance is still a mystery. And if antihydrogen responds differently to gravity, that will raise questions about the validity of the theory of relativity and might even point the way to the long-sought unification of relativity with quantum theory.
CONTACT:
Jeffrey Hangst tel +41 79 201 0270; e-mail jeffrey.hangst@cern.ch
[2] BRAIN: RESEARCH HOMES IN ON OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES (pp269-270)
Many people report experiences of `leaving` their body and watching it from above. Now Swiss researchers, writing in a Brief Communication in this week's Nature, report that they have found the brain centre that may trigger this phenomenon.
Neurologist Olaf Blanke and his colleagues of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland were using electrodes to stimulate the brain of a woman during her treatment for epilepsy. Exciting one spot - the angular gyrus in the right cortex - repeatedly caused out-of-body experiences. "I see myself lying in bed, from above," she told them. When asked to lift and look at her arm, she thought it was trying to punch her.
Blanke suspects that the angular gyrus may match up information from the visual system, which sees the body, and those that create the mind`s representation of the body using touch and balance information. When the two become dissociated, an out-of-body experience might result.
CONTACT:
Olaf Blanke tel +41 22 372 8355, e-mail olaf.blanke@hcuge.ch
[3] CHEMISTRY: NEW POLYMERS SHIFT SHAPE IN ELECTRIC FIELD (pp284-287)
A new class of all-organic polymers that can change shape when subjected to an external electric field is described in this week`s Nature. These polymers have a variety of potential applications as `smart materials` - in drug delivery and as artificial muscles, for instance.
Q. M. Zhang and colleagues at the Pennsylvania State University, Philadelphia, developed the new composites, which change shape under the influence of far smaller electric fields than previous polymers.
CONTACT:
Q. M. Zhang tel +1 814 863 8994, e-mail qxz1@psu.edu
[4] EARTH: MODEL OF EARTHQUAKE PREDICTION IN QUESTION (pp287-291)
Current earthquake hazard assessments for California, Japan and other earthquake-prone regions may be misleading, suggest Jessica Murray and Paul Segall of Stanford University, California, in this week`s Nature.
Earthquake forecasts for most densely populated regions incorporate the 'time-predictable' recurrence model, which is based on the concept that an earthquake will occur on a fault segment when the stress released from the previous earthquake has built back up to the same level.
Parkfield, California, with its simple tectonic setting and the large amount of geodetic data collected there, should be an ideal locale for testing the time-predictable model. But rigorous application of the model predicts that the magnitude 6 earthquake of 1966 should have been followed by another in 1987, argue Murray and Segall. The next Parkfield earthquake has still not occurred.
In an accompanying News and Views article, Ross S. Stein, of the US Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California, discusses the implications of this work.
CONTACT:
Jessica Murray tel +1 650 723 5485, e-mail jrmurray@pangea.stanford.edu
Ross Stein tel +1 650 329 4840, e-mail rstein@usgs.gov
[5] LIFELINES: GENE HELPS FLOWERS BLOOM IN SPRING (pp308-312)
Plants flower only when spring comes because they measure the length of the day as it changes through the seasons. The model plant thale cress, or Arabidopsis, achieves this clock-watching trick thanks to the gene CONSTANS, Steve A. Kay and Marcelo J. Yanovsky of the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, report in this week`s Nature.
Arabidopsis flowers if its proteins cryptochrome 2 and phytochrome A detect light at the same time as CONSTANS expression rises during the late afternoon, the researchers show.
CONTACT:
Marcelo Yanovsky tel +1 858 784 2356; e-mail yanovsky@scripps.edu
[6] BRAIN: YOU CAN TEACH AN OLD OWL NEW TRICKS (pp293-296; N&V)
In many species, adults adapt poorly to change. But there`s hope for us all, this week`s Nature suggests. A new owl experiment shows that, as long as change is incremental, the plasticity of the adult brain can be a match for the young.
Brie A. Linkenhoker and Eric I. Knudsen of Stanford University School of Medicine, California, developed a step-by-step training programme that enabled adult owls to adapt to prismatic glasses that altered what they saw so that it did not fit with what they heard. The maps of auditory space in the owls' brains did adapt to the bizarre changes they faced.
"An owl whose survival depends on successful orienting to its prey may display an even greater capacity for change, for instance by virtue of neuromodulatory systems that become engaged during such 'arousing' activities as hunting," suggests Hemai Parthasarathy, Senior Editor at Nature, in an accompanying News and Views article.
CONTACT:
Brie Linkenhoker tel +1 650 723 5040, e-mail brieann@stanford.edu
Hemai Parthasarathy tel +1 202 737 2355, e-mail h.parthasarathy@naturedc.com
[7] POLICY: CALL FOR SCIENCE VOICE (pp249-250)
Europe sorely lacks a strong voice of science and scholarship in almost all areas of research policy-making, says Wilhelm Krull of the Volkswagen Foundation, Hannover, Germany, in a Commentary this week in Nature.
Krull argues that a central, financially powerful funding institution, capable of taking its own decisions on the basis of qualitative judgements by the best researchers worldwide, is urgently needed. None of the existing European scientific bodies seems desirous or capable of coping with the huge challenges of becoming the number one address for funding scientific and scholarly excellence in Europe, he says.
What is needed is a completely new European research council. It will take a lot of money, courage and openness by the heads of the existing research organizations, as well as by the EU member states` governments, to form an institution which will have to prove that it can live up to its aspirations. But, says Krull, it is necessary if Europe is to have a chance of achieving its stated goal of becoming the world's most competitive knowledge-based economy by 2010.
CONTACT:
William Krull tel +49 511 83 81 215, e-mail krull@volkswagenstiftung.de
[8] AND FINALLY: WHAT`S UP DOC? (pp291-293)
The dinosaur oviraptor and its relatives were true dinosaur oddities. This week`s Nature adds to the tally of weirdness a description of one of those relatives: it looks like a cross between a dinosaur and a rabbit. Oviraptor itself is a small, two-legged dinosaur distantly related to ferocious carnivores such as velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus. But instead of having a jaw stuffed with long pointed teeth, oviraptor had a parrot-like beak.
The new dinosaur, Incisivosaurus gauthieri, described by Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China, and colleagues, is weirder still. Although many features show that it is closely akin to oviraptor, it has plenty of teeth in its jaws, including what look like two big buck teeth at the front. The new creature demonstrates diversity in the feeding habits of the carnivorous theropod dinosaurs.
The dinosaur comes from the same productive rocks (the Yixian Formation) of the Early Cretaceous of northeastern China that have yielded a wealth of spectacular fossils, including dinosaurs with feathers, and it is believed to be more than 128 million years old.
CONTACT:
Xing Xu tel +86 6893 5433, e-mail xing_xu@sina.com
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
[9] Structure of the Sec23/24-Sar1 pre-budding complex of the COPII vesicle coat (pp271-277)
[10] Allowed and forbidden transitions in artificial hydrogen and helium atoms (pp278-281)
[11] Forward scattering due to slow-down of the intermediate in the H + HD -> D + H2 reaction (pp281-284; N&V)
[12] Odorant receptors instruct functional circuitry in the mouse olfactory bulb (pp296-300)
[13] Robustness of the BMP morphogen gradient in Drosophila embryonic patterning (pp304-308; N&V)
[14] A regulatory cytoplasmic poly(A) polymerase in Caenorhabditis elegans (pp312-316; N&V)
[15] Forkhead transcription factor FOXO3a protects quiescent cells from oxidative stress (pp316-321)
[16] Early origin of canonical introns (p270)
GEOGRAPHICAL LISTING OF AUTHORS
The following list of places refers to the whereabouts of authors on the papers numbered in this release. The listing may be for an author`s main affiliation, or for a place where they are working temporarily. Please see the PDF of the paper for full details.
BRAZIL
Fortaleza: 1
Rio de Janeiro: 1
CANADA
Halifax: 16
Ottawa: 10
CHINA
Beijing: 8
Dalian: 11
Taichung: 8
DENMARK
Aarhus: 1
GERMANY
Hannover: 7
ISRAEL
Rehovot: 13
ITALY
Brescia: 1
Genova: 1
Pavia: 1
JAPAN
Atsugi: 10
Kawaguchi: 10
Okazaki: 11
Tokyo: 1, 10
NETHERLANDS
Amsterdam: 15
Utrecht: 15
SWITZERLAND
Geneva: 1, 2
Lausanne: 2
Zurich: 1
TAIWAN
Hsinchu: 11
Taipei: 11
UNITED KINGDOM
Manchester: 13
Swansea: 1
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
La Jolla: 5
San Francisco: 15
Stanford: 4, 6
Colorado
Boulder: 11
New York
New York: 9, 12
North Carolina
Durham: 12
Pennsylvania
University Park: 3
Wisconsin
Madison: 14
Nature Publishing Group Reference
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Major flooding risk could span decades after Chinese earthquake
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Severe, acute maternal stress linked to the development of schizophrenia
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