The most prestigious job in physics is about to change handsNAPOLEON once asked of a newly appointed general, "Has he luck?" Rolf-Dieter Heuer clearly does--and in Napoleonic quantities. At the moment, he is the research director of the German Electron Synchrotron, an important but local institution based in Hamburg. On December 13th, however, he was chosen to be the next director-general of CERN, Europe's main particle-physics laboratory. Luckier still, he does not actually start his term for 12 months. By then, if all has gone well, he will be in charge of the best Christmas present that a physicist could imagine--the world's biggest particle accelerator. Inside it, he and the thousands of other physicists who work at CERN hope to find the secrets of the universe: dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions, tiny black holes that evaporate in an eye-blink and the origins of mass itself. ...

  The pinot noir genome is sequenced. GM wine, anyone?THE battle between those who think character comes from nature and those who think nurture is the key is not confined to students of humanity. It lies at the heart of winemaking, too. For European growers, the variety of grape is important, of course. No one would mistake cabernet sauvignon for sangiovese or riesling for chardonnay. But grape varieties are normally propagated as cuttings; in other words, clones. What creates a wine's character, they argue, is the terroir--that mysterious combination of soil and microclimate that gives appellations controlees their cachet. In other words, the essence of a wine lies in its nurture.Many New World winemakers would say phooey! to that. Where you grow your grapes matters--but no more than it does for any other crop. The true flavour is encoded in the genes and the consistency of a cloned crop is an asset. Environmental diversity is something to be resisted, not celebrated, since it masks the character of the grape and makes it difficult to produce a consistent product. It is not for nothing that the term "varietal wine" was invented in California. ...

  In Britain, fundamental physics is in a pickleISAAC NEWTON, besides being the founder of modern physics, was also master of Britain's mint. That is a precedent which many British physicists must surely wish had become traditional. At the moment, money for physics is in short supply in Britain. Having spent a lot of cash in recent years, physicists and astronomers are now finding they do not have enough money to use the very facilities they paid to have built. On December 14th, for example, the British delegation to CERN, Europe's biggest particle-physics laboratory, abstained from a vote to increase the budget to make best use of the Large Hadron Collider (see article). A vote for a rise, British delegates said, would be a vote for job losses elsewhere in physics. The budget was carried nonetheless and Britain is obliged to pay up. Perhaps not coincidentally, the country's government had announced a few days earlier that it would withdraw from the International Linear Collider (ILC), an $8 billion project to build the successor to CERN's new toy. Since America seems almost certain to cut its ILC budget, too, this project looks to be in trouble. ...

  Men propose; women disposeWOMEN often complain that dating is like a cattle market, and a paper just published in Biology Letters by Thomas Pollet and Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University, in England, suggests they are right. They have little cause for complaint, however, because the paper also suggests that in this particular market, it is women who are the buyers.Mr Pollet and Dr Nettle were looking for evidence to support the contention that women choose men of high status and resources, as well as good looks. That may sound common sense, but it was often denied by social scientists until a group of researchers who called themselves evolutionary psychologists started investigating the matter two decades ago. Since then, a series of experiments in laboratories have supported the contention. But as all zoologists know, experiments can only tell you so much. Eventually, you have to look at natural populations. ...

  Human evolution has speeded up over the past 80,000 years. That raises awkward questions about the concept of "race"PROBABLY, more bad science has been conducted on the concept of human race than on any other field of biology. The reason is that an awful lot of research into race has been motivated by preconceived ideas that one lot of people are somehow "better" than another lot, rather than being a disinterested investigation of regional variations in a single species and the evolutionary pressures that have created them. Contrariwise, even well constructed studies, if they do find racial differences, risk opposition from those who deny that people from different parts of the world could ever differ genetically from one another in important ways. As a result, only the foolish or the daring rush in to add to the carnage. It remains to be seen which category the authors of two papers in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences fall into. ...

  The building blocks for life emerged on Mars--but not life itselfFOR a dull lump of greyish rock, ALH 84001 has had an eventful life. The meteorite, which was retrieved from the Allan Hills of Antarctica in 1984, is certainly well travelled. Experts in the field think it came from Mars, having been blasted off the surface of that planet by a collision with an even bigger meteorite. More than that, it contains minerals that some researchers believed, in a flurry of publicity when the rock was properly examined just over a decade ago, must have been made by living things on the Martian surface. The number constituting "some" has been dwindling since then, but there are still a few hold-outs who think ALH 84001 is indeed the first evidence of extraterrestrial aliens--albeit of bacterial dimensions.The reason why ALH 84001 is so interesting is that it contains organic compounds. Life is thought to have emerged on Earth from a primordial soup of such compounds, which are based on carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, though just how it did so is obscure. When ALH 84001 was analysed, however, some astrobiologists suggested that the conventional explanation might be wrong. Perhaps life had evolved on Mars first and the red planet had then "seeded" its blue neighbour when rocky projectiles similar to ALH 84001 were blasted off its surface in abundance in an era when the solar system had a lot of loose asteroids flying around. ...

  Dinosaur bones are fairly rare fossils, but compared with what is shown in this picture, they are as common as muck. It is a piece of dinosaur skin (or, rather, its petrified transmutation). It belongs to a fossil hadrosaur (a type of herbivorous dinosaur) that lived 67m years ago in what is now Hell Creek, North Dakota. The first bones of the animal were discovered in 1999 by Tyler Lyson, now a graduate student at Yale, but then a schoolboy. A full-scale expedition to recover it has, however, only recently been mounted. The fossil's state of preservation is remarkable. Besides skin, various ligaments and tendons have been found, and the specimen is now undergoing examination in the industrial equivalent of a hospital body scanner, at a Boeing workshop in California, to see if any internal organs have been petrified, too. ...

  Personal genetic testing is advancing rapidly. But beware of oversellingGENETIC testing promises a lot. In particular, it promises to tell people things ranging from their risks of developing ailments as diverse as heart disease, cancer and autism to how much coffee they can safely drink. It also promises a lucrative market for those doing the testing. Single-gene tests, such as those for particular forms of genes that predispose people to breast cancer, have been available for a while. This year, however, has seen the arrival of commercial versions of techniques that can sample a person's entire genetic make-up, and do so in a way that will enable him to benefit from future discoveries as well as existing knowledge. In many cases, knowing the risk will also allow (and might, indeed, encourage) someone to modify his behaviour to avoid a disease he is at risk of--or, failing that, to mitigate its consequences. Nevertheless, concerns are being raised about the accuracy of some tests now on the market, and also their usefulness when the results are supplied direct to consumers, rather than with professional medical advice. ...

  The race for the $1,000 genome is onJUST as computers used to occupy entire rooms, and were able to make only a few thousand computations a second, so the first DNA-sequencing machines were able to read only about 5,000 genetic "letters" a day. Technology changes. Now it is possible for a single machine to sequence a human genome of about 3 billion letters in two months. At this rate, those 5,000 letters would take less than ten seconds.So where next? If the X Prize Foundation has its way, it will soon be possible to sequence a genome in hours. To make that happen, the foundation, perhaps better known for its spaceflight prize, is offering the Archon genomics prize. This will be worth $10m to the first team able to sequence 100 human genomes accurately in ten days or less. (The prize is sponsored by Stewart Blusson, a philanthropist who is president of Archon Minerals, a mining company based in Vancouver.) ...

  Subliminal smells can have powerful effectsIN A world where sight and sound seem to reign supreme, all it takes is a cursory glance at the size of the perfume industry to realise that smell matters quite a lot, too. Odours are known to regulate moods, thoughts and even dating decisions, which is why any serious romantic will throw on the eau de toilette before going out for a night on the town. Yet in all these cases, those affected are aware of what they are smelling. Unlike the media of sight and sound, in which subliminal messages have been studied carefully, the potential power of subliminal smells has been neglected. Wen Li and her colleagues at Northwestern University in Chicago are now changing that. In particular, they are investigating smells so faint that people say they cannot detect them. The idea is to see whether such smells can nevertheless change the way that people behave towards others. ...

  Farm animals are infecting people with a new strain of superbugFILTHY surroundings that are home to a population fed on antibiotics provide the ideal breeding grounds for superbugs. But badly run hospitals are not the only such places. Farms where animals are reared intensively also provide an incubator for drug-resistant diseases. Recent research suggests that veterinary surgeons and farmers in Europe and Canada may be picking up potentially fatal infections from pigs and possibly cattle.Superbugs evolve when common bacterial infections develop resistance to the drugs used to treat them. The most widespread cause of hospital infections, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is one such example. About a third of people carry some form of S. aureus on their skin, where the bacteria do no harm. However, if they enter the bloodstream, they can cause disease. And if the resulting illness cannot be treated because the bacteria are drug-resistant, the infection can prove fatal. MRSAkilled some 19,000 people in America and 1,600 people in Britain in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available. ...

  Why Venus is lifelessFOR a planet named after the goddess of love, Venus is something of a misfit. Its clouds of sulphuric acid, crushing atmosphere of carbon dioxide and blast-furnace surface temperature of 457A°C are anything but lovely. Yet in its youth it was, like its gentler sister Earth, swathed in oceans that provided a suitable breeding ground for life. What went wrong?Since 1962 more than 30 spacecraft have made the trip to Venus, seeking to understand Earth's nearest neighbour and so-called twin planet. The most recent of these, Venus Express, was launched by the European Space Agency in 2005. In the current issue of Nature, nine papers report what it has found so far. ...

  Some people are more prone to infection than others. One answer could be to dose them with the molecules that their immune systems cannot makeLOUIS PASTEUR, the 19th-century French microbiologist and chemist, is credited with confirming that microbes cause disease. When studying ailing silkworms, he made two vital observations. The first was that la flacherie, as the worms' illness was called, was contagious. This led to the germ theory of disease and, ultimately, to the development of antibiotics to treat infectious illnesses in people. In all the excitement over germs, however, his second observation got overlooked: la flacherie was passed from parent to offspring. Almost 150 years later, the idea that susceptibility to infectious disease can be inherited is finally coming of age. A meeting held last week at the Pasteur Institute in Paris heard how the next generation of drugs will target not the microbial agents of infectious illness but their human hosts.To this end, researchers are studying how different versions of certain genes could cause some people to succumb to infection whereas others are left relatively unscathed. They thus hope to explain not only why some people can be infested with virulent microbes without contracting a disease (whereas others become ill even though they are less infected) but also why such patterns run in families and in ethnic groups. ...

  Some creatures know how to identify and choose healthy foodANTIOXIDANTS are the health freak's weapon of choice. They mop up molecules in the body that would otherwise damage cells and could cause cancer. They are found in many fruits and vegetables, and even in red wine. Without biochemistry, people would not know of their existence. But researchers now think that birds can see them and that they choose foods containing them.In the wild, plants need to disperse their seeds to survive and colonise new areas. One way of doing this is to grow attractive fruits that animals eat, pips and all. The creatures then spread the seeds as nature takes its course. That is why plants produce fruit that is often brightly coloured and tasty. But do animals also choose to eat fruit because it is nutritious? ...