Hafnium: Stepping into the Limelight!

Blood disorders stepping into the limelight.

Plant genomics moves into the limelight.

Two major considerations impelled Ronald Phillips [University of Minnesota and Director of the National Research Initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)], and Michael Freeling (University of California, Berkeley), to organize a recent colloquium, ‘‘Protecting our Food Supply: The Value of Plant Genome Initiatives’’ (Stanford, CA, June 2–5). First, the increased wealth of the dev...

Reluctant Vesicles Coaxed into the Limelight

Synapses respond to brief, repetitive stimulation with synaptic depression when initial transmitter release probability is high. Vesicle depletion has been a long-standing hypothesis for depression, but results unexplained by the depletion hypothesis have been nagging. In this issue of Neuron, Xu and Wu show that, under some conditions, calcium current inactivation explains stimulus-dependent d...

Stepping into the Interactive Drama

Achieving a successful Interactive Drama where the user can act as a character in the story requires not only finding an algorithmic solution for combining interactivity and narrativity, but also interfacing those algorithms with the user. This paper focuses on the way in which the user can choose the actions of the character. Three specific issues are discussed: the variety of choices proposed...

Colugos: obscure mammals glide into the evolutionary limelight

Substantial molecular evidence indicates that tree-shrews, colugos and primates cluster together on the mammalian phylogenetic tree. Previously, a sister-group relationship between colugos and primates seemed likely. A new study of colugo chromosomes indicates instead an affinity between colugos and tree-shrews.