The penultimate step towards the creation of artificial life has just been announcedLIKE a striptease artist in front of an eager audience, Craig Venter has been dropping veils over the past few years without ever quite revealing what people are hoping to see: the world's first artificial organism. He has been discussing making one since 1995, when he worked out the first complete genetic sequence of a natural living organism. And, after a lot of hard graft and blind alleys, he and his team have almost got there. As they report in this week's Science, they have replicated the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, the species that was the subject of that original sequencing effort. It is not actual life, but it is surely the tease before the last veil finally falls away.Though Dr Venter (pictured above at the helm of his yacht, Sorcerer II) is the public face of the effort, and the 17-strong team that did the work are all employed by the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, the synthetic genome project is equally the brainchild of his collaborator, Hamilton Smith. Indeed, it is in Dr Smith's name that the paper announcing the synthesis is published--along, of course, with the 16 others including Dr Venter himself. ...

  What the boss looks like determines how he performsA COUPLE of years ago a group of management scholars from Yale and the University of Pittsburgh tried to discover if there was a link between a company's success and the personality of its boss. To work out what that personality was, they asked senior managers to score their bosses for such traits as an ability to communicate an exciting vision of the future or to stand as a good model for others to follow. When the data were analysed, the researchers found no evidence of a connection between how well a firm was doing and what its boss was like. As far as they could tell, a company could not be judged by its chief executive any better than a book could be judged by its cover. A few years before this, however, a team of psychologists from Tufts University, led by Nalini Ambady, discovered that when people watched two-second-long film-clips of professors lecturing, they were pretty good at determining how able a teacher each professor actually was. At the end of the study, the perceptions generated by those who had watched only the clips were found to match those of students taught by those self-same professors for a full semester. ...

  A "bionic" eye lens points to a new way of building microelectronic circuitsCONVENTIONAL contact lenses are good at correcting vision. That, however, is not enough for Babak Parviz. Dr Parviz, who works at the University of Washington, in Seattle, wants to get them to provide information, too. His model is the "head-up" displays of useful information on the windscreens of aircraft. Putting such displays into lenses might be valuable for both soldiers and civilians, but shrinking the technology to the point where it could be done has proved hard. Last week, however, at a conference in Tucson, Arizona, organised by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Dr Parviz revealed that he was getting close.The lenses are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the stuff used in overhead projection sheets. Dr Parviz uses PET because his research has shown that metal circuits can be safely attached to it. The trick is building that circuitry in the first place, because the components--most notably, light-emitting diodes, or LEDs--have to be made at high temperatures using corrosive gases. ...

  Transplanting immune-system stem cells along with kidneys stops rejectionWOE to the patient waiting for someone to offer up a spare organ for transplantation. Demand so far exceeds supply these days that in America alone around 17 people die every day while languishing in the queue. Nor do problems end there. Even the lucky ones, who do get their desired replacement part, face a lifetime on immunosuppressant drugs, to stop the alien tissue being rejected by their own immune systems.David Sachs and Benedict Cosimi, of Harvard Medical School, have been working for some time to find a way around these problems. Their goal has been to trick the body into thinking that a foreign organ is really a native one, so that its immune system refrains from rejecting the foreigner. In this week's New England Journal of Medicine they report a small but promising study that, if confirmed on a grander scale, may deal with the issue once and for all and usher in a world in which immunosuppressant drugs are unnecessary and organs no longer need be matched to patients. That would make the lives of transplant patients easier and longer, and might also increase the useful supply of organs available for transplant. ...

  How to stop echoes giving you awayIN GREEK mythology, Echo was a mountain nymph who lost her voice and was condemned to repeat only the words of others. Now science is poised to silence the sprite completely. A group of physicists, led by Steven Cummer of Duke University in North Carolina, has devised plans for a cloak that would shield objects from sound, preventing its reflection. Such a device could be used to hide submarines.Sonar, the technique employed to detect subs, uses a transmitter to emit a pulse of sound--usually a distinctive "ping"--and a receiver to listen for its reflection. That reflection indicates the presence of an object and the time that elapses between the sound's being emitted and its being detected indicates how far away it is. A second ping allows the object's direction, speed and location to be calculated. ...

  One of the first close-up photographs of Mercury taken for almost 33 yearsThis is one of the first close-up photographs of Mercury taken for almost 33 years. It was snapped by a spacecraft called MESSENGER that was launched by NASA, America's space agency, in 2004. The craft's name, an allusion to Mercury's role as the messenger of the gods of ancient Rome, is one of the most contrived examples of reverse acronymics ever to come out of an agency famous for the art. It supposedly stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging. The picture is mostly of parts of the planet unmapped during the previous mission to Mercury, by Mariner 10. ...

  Uncovering the origin of syphilisIT WAS called the "French disease" by the Italians and the "Italian disease" by the French. In the Netherlands it was assumed to be Spanish; in Russia, Polish. The Turks thought it was a Christian affliction. The Tahitians thought it came from Britain. According to Kristin Harper of Emory University in Georgia, they were all wrong. Syphilis, the illness with so many suspected origins, actually came from the New World. In other words, Columbus brought back much more than knowledge of an unsuspected continent from his travels.For hundreds of years, people have debated whether syphilis came from the Americas or whether it, along with a number of closely related diseases, had a much longer history in Europe. Because the first undisputed outbreak was recorded in 1495, shortly after Columbus's return, circumstantial evidence suggests an origin on the western shores of the Atlantic. But now science has turned to genetics in search of a definitive answer. ...

  People do not just say they enjoy expensive things more than cheap ones. They actually do enjoy them moreEVERYONE loves a bargain. But retailers know that people will sometimes turn their noses up at a cheap version of a more expensive item, even if the two are essentially the same. That suggests something is at work in the mind of the consumer beyond simple appreciation of a product's intrinsic qualities. The something in question is expectation, according to research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Antonio Rangel of the California Institute of Technology. Dr Rangel and his colleagues found that if people are told a wine is expensive while they are drinking it, they really do think it tastes nicer than a cheap one, rather than merely saying that they do. ...

  America's new research station at the South Pole is officially openedMOVING house is always traumatic, and the odd tear would have been forgivable as the flag came down over America's old base at the South Pole. It was handed from person to person along a line of scientists and support staff like an egg being passed between penguins. Slowly, it made its way past the marker that represents the exact point of the Pole, and then on to its new staff outside the third incarnation of the Amundsen-Scott station that is the home of America's scientific effort at the Pole. This new station, which formally opened for business on January 12th, took almost 20 years to design and build, and cost $174m. It will house researchers from fields as diverse as neutrino astronomy, cosmology, seismology and atmospheric physics. The first polar base was established in 1957, during the International Geophysical Year. Eventually, it succumbed to the elements and was buried under years of snowdrift. It was followed by a geodesic dome, an unheated structure filled with small shipping containers that served as buildings. That, too, is now partially buried and is scheduled for demolition over the next few years. ...

  Family support is rare. That might be because its spreads diseasesANYONE with children knows the benefits of sympathetic grandparents, aunts and cousins. From babysitting to emotional support when the kids set fire to the carpet, having family around is invaluable. Such co-operative breeding is common in birds as well as humans. It usually involves young adults delaying their own reproduction for a year or two to help their parents raise the helpers' younger siblings. In some species, grandparents also assist their offspring when their own breeding time is over. The nest is thus better defended, more food is gathered and the nestlings are better educated in the ways and wiles of their species. In fact, the benefits of co-operative breeding are so great that many researchers wonder why it is not more common. A study just published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, by Claire Spottiswoode of Cambridge University, suggests the reason is that other organisms also benefit. Pathogens and parasites are able to take advantage of avian co-operation, imposing a price that is not always worth paying. ...

  A group of Chinese scientists has discovered the main biochemical pathways in drug addiction--and without having to do a single experimentMODERN biology has a lot of "omes". The genome--all the genes that go to make up an organism--is a familiar idea. The proteome--all the different proteins--is becoming so. But there are also the transcriptome (RNA), the glycome (sugars), the lipidome (fats) and the metabolome (all the miscellaneous odds and ends not covered by the others). And then there is the bibliome--all the mentions in research papers of known biomolecules. There are now so many of these papers, and the databases linking them are so good, that it is possible to use scientific methods to investigate the bibliome in its own right, just as any of the other, wetter "omes" may be investigated. Which is exactly what a group of researchers from Peking University, led by Wei Liping, have done to get at the biochemical heart of drug addiction.Dr Wei and her colleagues wanted to answer three questions. First, what are the genes and biochemical pathways in addiction? Second, does addiction to different substances involve the same core biochemical mechanisms? Third, does anything in those mechanisms explain why addiction is so hard to shake off? ...

  A rare double ring illuminates the dark matter of the early universeEINSTEIN himself reckoned that, although they must exist, they would be impossible to spot. Yet the great man was mistaken. Astronomers have seen "Einstein rings", formed when light from a distant galaxy is bent by the presence of a nearer massive object, usually another galaxy, that lies directly in its path to Earth. Now they have discovered something even rarer: a double Einstein ring formed by two such intervening objects. The resulting image casts light, as it were, on the question of how "dark matter" was distributed in the early universe. The exact nature of this type of matter is unknown, but it seems to make up a quarter of the contents of the universe. The latest result suggests it is more widely spread than the visible matter that is clumped together to form galaxies, with implications for how those galaxies formed.In his general theory of relativity, Einstein proposed that space and time are distorted by the presence of massive objects. Light, which normally and famously travels in straight lines, thus appears to follow a curved path when it passes near a heavy thing such as a galaxy. This effect is known as gravitational lensing, and the heavy object that causes it as a gravitational lens. If source, lens and observer are exactly aligned, the result is a luminous ring that appears to surround the lens. ...

  In our article "Newton's law of funding", published on December 22nd, we said that cuts to several physics projects financed by Britain's Science and Technology Facilities Council were because a particle accelerator called the Diamond Light Source was more expensive than expected. That was incorrect. Diamond was built within its budget. The actual reason for the cuts, and for their sudden and unexpected announcement, is now being investigated by the House of Commons select committee on innovation, universities and skills. ...

  A new kind of dating agency relies on matching people by their body odourONE of life's little mysteries is why particular people fancy each other--or, rather, why they do not when on paper they ought to. One answer is that human consciousness, and thus human thought, is dominated by vision. Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the other senses. However, as the multi-billion-dollar perfume industry attests, beauty is in the nose of the beholder, too. ScientificMatch.com, a Boston-based internet-dating site launched in December, was created to turn this insight into money. Its founder, an engineer (and self-confessed serial dater) called Eric Holzle is drawing on an observation made over a decade ago by Claus Wedekind, a researcher at the University of Bern, in Switzerland. ...