ORDER #1: OVER AND OVER AND OVER . . .
Obsessive cumpulsive disorder is much more common than
anyone had thought, say researchers. Up to 5 million people
in the US, 3 per cent of the population, will suffer from it at
some point in their lives.
Pages 26-31
ORDER #2: HEAT AND DESTROY
A cake tin, a microwave oven and an infrared camera may seem an
unlikely recipe for detecting plastic landmines, but a team of
researchers in New Zealand are turning them in to a cheap and
reliable detector. With more than 12,000 people being killed
every year by landmines, this development could give great hope to
the people of Angola, Afghanistan and Cambodia, where the most
widely used method of detecting mines is to prod the soil with a
stick. Page 13
ORDER #3: GROWING UP TOO SOON
Girls exposed in the womb to high levels of chemicals that mimic
the sex hormone oestrogen go through puberty early, suggests a
unique long-term study from the US National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences. Page 5
ORDER #4: TUBBY TUBERS
Hold the French fries - the monster chip is on its way. Genetic
engineers in Germany have created a potato big enough to feed a
family of six. The potatoes were created almost accidentally as
part of a programme to investigate the breakdown of sugars in the
tubers. Page 17
ORDER #5: ALL QUIET ON THE DRILLING FRONT
Technology developed to shoot down nuclear missiles is being put
to a more down-to-earth use - as a silent alternative to the
pneumatic drill. Developed by the US Government's Brookhaven
National Laboratory, the RAPTOR has been developed to shatter
concrete with a high-speed projectile issuing only the sound of a
gentle hiss of air. Page 6
ORDER #6: HAVE CANCER COPS MISSED THE REAL CULPRITS?
The official body set up to investigate the cluster of childhood
cancer cases around the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria has
been accused of making a fundamental statistical error. A
statistician in Oxford claims this error caused the committee to
wrongly dismiss his explanation for the cluster: that the cancers
were triggered by infections brought into the area. Page 10
ORDER #7: TEETH FALLOUT
Plutonium from the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant is
turning up in the bodies of teenage children right across Britain
and Ireland, according to an analysis of teeth commissioned by the
Department of Health. The amount of plutonium in the children
depends on the distance they live from Sellafield. Page 16
ORDER #8: LUCKY FIND
A lost 'living fossil', rediscovered in Madagascar, could be a
missing link in the evolution of flowering plants. Page 11
ORDER #9: RESTLESS IN SEATTLE
Video, speech recognition and Bayesian inference are set to
revolutionise our approach to computing, according to the head of
research at Microsoft. Pages 22-25
ORDER #10: TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT
Molecular computers have moved one step closer. Scientists have
discovered how to make molecular wires and are now busy designing
molecular transistors. Pages 32-35
ORDER #11: SMALL FRY GO BIG TIME
The most rapid and extensive biodiversity known to science occurs
among little freshwater fishes known as cichlids. Now these tiny
fish are revolutionising our ideas about evolution. Pages 36-40 -
###
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