It looks unlikely that medical science will abolish the process of ageing. But it no longer looks impossible"IN THE long run," as John Maynard Keynes observed, "we are all dead." True. But can the short run be elongated in a way that makes the long run longer? And if so, how, and at what cost? People have dreamt of immortality since time immemorial. They have sought it since the first alchemist put an elixir of life on the same shopping list as a way to turn lead into gold. They have written about it in fiction, from Rider Haggard's "She" to Frank Herbert's "Dune". And now, with the growth of biological knowledge that has marked the past few decades, a few researchers believe it might be within reach.To think about the question, it is important to understand why organisms--people included--age in the first place. People are like machines: they wear out. That much is obvious. However a machine can always be repaired. A good mechanic with a stock of spare parts can keep it going indefinitely. Eventually, no part of the original may remain, but it still carries on, like Lincoln's famous axe that had had three new handles and two new blades. ...

  In our article "Me too, too", published on November 24th, we said that earlier reports of human cloning had turned out to be fraudulent. This referred to Hwang Woo-suk's work in Seoul. The creation of a human blastocyst by somatic-cell nuclear transfer in 2005, by researchers at Newcastle University, in England, was entirely real. We apologise for not making that clear at the time. ...

  Not so much designing a better mousetrap as designing a better mouseTO ENCOURAGE people to take his ideas seriously, Aubrey de Grey, the originator of the strategies for engineered negligible senescence, has organised a competition. He is offering a prize for the development of what he calls a Methuselah mouse.There are actually two prizes to be had. One is for longevity, the other for rejuvenation. The prize for longevity can be won by a new strain of mouse--one bred or genetically engineered to live a long time. That for rejuvenation requires treatment to begin when the mice are already in middle age. ...

  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. ...

  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. ...

  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. ...

  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. ...

  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 constructedstudies, 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. ...

  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. ...