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. ...

  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 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. ...

  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. ...

  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. ...

  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. ...

  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. ...