US scientists in budget limbo

Policy Punctuations : US Budget

Calling on scientists to fight budget cuts.

THE FUNDING LEVELS REQUESTED BY THE Bush Administration for 2006 (“Caught in the squeeze,” J. Mervis, News Focus, 11 Feb., p. 832) represent a decrease in science and technology funding across the board. This budget and its priorities do not bode well for American science and technology or for America’s scientists and science students. Underfunding science and technology research and education ...

EGFR in Limbo

The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is normally activated by ligand-induced dimerization. Oncogenic mutations in EGFR promote activation in a largely ligand-independent manner. Shan et al. uncover a partially disordered state of EGFR kinase, providing evidence that oncogenic mutations counteract this intrinsic structural instability to promote dimerization and aberrant activation.

Biofuels Policy in Limbo

Philip Martin....................................9 Any game works better when the rules are enforced consis­ tently, whether it is the Superbowl or Monopoly around the kitchen table. If the referee is indecisive, then the players are uncertain about how to play and the game degenerates. Transportation fuel markets in the United States currently resemble a game with inconsistently enforced rules...

Combinatorics in Zfc Limbo

In their paper, Large-scale regularities of lattice embeddings of posets [RW99], Remmel and Williamson studied extremal properties of posets and their incomparability graphs on N k . Properties (1) through (3) of their main result, Theorem 1.5, are proved using Ramsey theory. The proof of Theorem 1.5 (4), however, uses Friedman’s Jump Free Theorem ([Fri97] and [Fri98] ), a powerful ZFC independ...