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The Guardian 04.09.03 Life 7 DiSDatch journal of science Rnd more on the web nature.com guardian.cxi.uklife nature original periodic table's neutral atoms. Railsback grouped ions with similar charge according to where they are found, he writes in Geology. Some elements appear several times with different charges. Sulphur appears four times: SJ, S'- and even Geologists know a mineral's properties such as its melting point, or how easily it dissolves in water depend on the size, charge mid structure of its ions. Ions can be grouped into families with similar chemical behaviour, which are therefore found in similar natural environments.

The five families in Railsback's table represent minerals in soil, the Earth's crust and mantle, and those dissolved in water, in the atmosphere and forming basic nutrients of life. Life prefers singly charged ions, like potassium (K') in fertiliser or sodium (Na') in salt, whereas multiply-charged ions like aluminium (Al '') can form resilient minerals that might only be found in the crust or mantle. Geologists have welcomed the new periodic table. "It has an almost obsessive attention to detail that recalls the miniaturist painters," says Stephen Elphick, a rock physicist at the University of Edinburgh. News from Nature, the international First Americans may not have been Asian Who colonised the Americas when, where and how is the subject of intense debate.

Research in this week's Nature hints that its ancestry is more complex than expected. Conventional wisdom says they were colonised about 13,000 years ago by-Mongoloid people crossing the Bering land bridge from Asia. Recent work on ancient human remains suggests some of the first Americans might have come from elsewhere. Rolando Gonzalez-Jose from the University of Barcelona and colleagues haw taken skull measurements from an extinct tribe from Baja California, Mexico. They appear with features not usually associated with the more Mongoloid The authors suggest Palaeoameri-cans might have contributed to the ancestry of Baja California, or the two populations may have evolved similar features independently over time.

Kidney cancer paper retracted The authors of a paper, published three-and-a-half years ago in Nature Medicine, claiming that patients with terminal kidney cancer had been successfully treated with individualised vaccines, have retracted their work. Scientists in Germany, where the clinical studies were carried out, say they are relieved the affair is closed, but the delay in correcting the record has sapped researchers' morale. An investigation committee at the University of Gottingen reported last November that the paper "failed to meet the requirements of good scientific It found the lead author, Alexander Kugler. guilty of gross negligence, but cleared the other 14-co-authors of scientific misconduct. The vaccine trials, sponsored by healthcare company Presenilis, were suspended earlier after allegations of irregularities in clinical practice.

The university had been accused of being slow to complete its investigation. The retraction appears in this month's Nature Medicine, with an editorial on why it took a further 10 months from the committee's ruling to persuade the authors to retract. "It is more meaningful if authors take the responsibility, and it has more power within the scientific community," says editor Beatrice Renault. One of the authors, Rolf-Hermann Ringert of the University of Gottingen. says that despite errors in the publication including inaccuracies in primary data and inclusion of patients not fulfiling the requirements of the trial he tried to persuade the journal to publish corrections.

He stands by the central claim that this type of vaccine is effective. Oldest examples of figurative art found Ivory carvings said to be the oldest known examples of figurative art have Southampton. "They depict the animal world in a semi-realistic way. It shows early man moving from his immediate world to an imaginative world." New periodic table invented A new periodic table could soon be in geology classrooms. It shows how chemical elements are distributed in nature, sorting them by electrical charge rather than weight.

Bruce Railsback of the University of Georgia in Athens redesigned the periodic table after becoming tired with pointing at the original version in class. "I marched into my office, and began working on a better table." The Earth's minerals consist mostly of electrically charged elements, or ions. These behave differently from the been unearthed in a cave in south-west Germany. Researchers say they could change our understanding of early man's imaginative endeavours. The artefacts including a lowen-mensch (lion man) figurine have been carbon-dated to about 30,000 years ago, when some of the earliest known relatives of modern humans populated Europe.

Discovered last year by a team led by US archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tubingen in Germany, at the Hohle Pels cave near Ulm, they include horse and a bird figures. Conard thinks the figures are older than fragments of a previous lowen-mensch, found in 15)39 ncarVogelherd. The new objects were at a lower level in the cave floor sediments. "These discoveries have incredible significance," says Clive Gamble, an archaeologist at the University of Cloned pigs die of heart attacks There are new fears about cloned animals' health after three cloned pigs died from heart attacks. The pigs were created using a variation on the technique that made Dolly the sheep.

A Taiwan-based team rammed a whole adult cell into a fertilised egg emptied of its own genetic material. One piglet died within clays. Another three died of heart failure at less than six months, team leader Jerry Yang of the University of Connecticut in Starrs disclosed this week in Biology of Reproduction. He dubbed the condition "adult clone sudden death This is a reminder that cloned animals are far from normal. Many fall ill or die just afterbirth Dolly passed away at the relatively tender age of Their problems probably arise because the adult DNA is not properly reprogrammed to drive embryo growth.

Yang is now hunting for the genes responsible, perhaps those that govern heart function. The deaths call into question transplanting organs from cloned pigs into humans. Researchers have already genetically engineered partly humanised pig cells and then cloned them to make whole pigs, whose organs might avoid rejection by human recipients. Randall Prather, who has cloned pigs at the University of Missouri-Columbia, says these dangers can be sidestepped by breeding from first-generation clones. Cell reprogram-ming is completed when clonal animals make sperm and eggs, so their offspring should be normal.

Nature supplies the news content for this page, but the Guardian has sole editorial responsibility for this supplement as a whole In brief US researchers have patented a technique to manufacture batteries a thousandth of a millimetre across. A team at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma pour molten plastic into an aluminium oxide honeycomb so fine that 60 pores straddle the width of a human hair. The prototype produces only about a millionth of a mllllamp. "You're not going to power a flashlight with it," admits team leader Dale Teetere, who hopes it might drive microscopic machines of the future. Source: Journal of Power Sources.

Chronic wasting disease, a prion BSE-related condition affecting mule deer, can spread efficiently from animal to animal. This "horizontal" transmission, rather than maternal transfer, may account for the epidemic in the central US. Michael Miller and Elizabeth Williams of the Wildlife Research Centre, Fort Collins, Colorado, studied transmission of CWD in two populations of captive Colorado mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus). One group was born to mothers that had the disease. The second was born to disease-free mothers, but joined the first group at 3-4 months old.

All the former and almost all the latter contracted CWD over four years. Because the incidence of CWD was similar, the research suggests maternal transmission does not contribute to disease transfer. Concentrating deer in captivity or transporting infected animals may facilitate transmission, the authors speculate. Source: Nature..