Laying hens, kept four to a cage, now have 450 square centimetres of space
each. The European Commission wants them to have 850 square centimetres, more
headroom and a perch. The proposal, which will go before ministers from European
Union states sometime this year for possible adoption next January, follows a
report by the EU’s Scientific Veterinary Committee.

But a study by CNEVA, France’s national veterinary research centre in
Ploufragan, Brittany, shows hens in the bigger cages are more likely to peck
each other to death. “The birds have enough space to be more aggressive, but not
enough to be really comfortable,” says Jean-Paul Morisse, director of animal
protection research at CNEVA.

The researchers studied about 900 hens divided between standard battery cages
and the bigger cages that European officials recommend. Over two years, hens in
the bigger cages were almost twice as likely to die as their more cramped
counterparts. Eighty-three per cent of deaths in the bigger cages were due to
cannibalism, compared with 30 per cent in the smaller cages.

The bigger cages also caused a fourfold increase in the number of broken
eggs, says Jean-Michel Faure of INRA, the national agricultural research agency,
which oversaw the study.

The EU’s veterinary committee recommended that hens should be allowed enough
room to spread their wings, take a dust bath and build nests. But it did not
specify how big cages would need to be for these normal behaviours. The French
researchers argue that the dimensions were imposed “arbitrarily” to appease
animal welfare groups.

Rocks such as monazite or apatite have successfully trapped natural
radioactive elements, like thorium and uranium, throughout periods of massive
geological change. Unlike researchers in the US and Australia who are working
with silicate and titanate compounds in the hope of imitating these rocks, the
French chose a previously unknown thorium phosphate salt.

Thorium phosphate-diphosphate (TPD) is a crystalline solid in which uranium,
neptunium or plutonium can replace the thorium. The compound can be easily
transformed into a ceramic and stored as tiny pellets.

“It is not suitable for all nuclear waste, but the host matrix perfectly
immobilises tetravalent ions like uranium and plutonium,” says Michel Genet,
head of the team, whose research will be published in the Journal of Alloys
and Compounds.

French researchers say that the thorium phosphate ceramic is ten times more
resistant to water corrosion that other materials tested. “These
cubic-centimetre packets of thorium-phosphate-diphosphate could be stored by the
thousands,” says Genet.

Although the ceramic could be used to store plutonium waste from spent fuel,
the principal application for this research is in storing waste from dismantled
nuclear weapons.

BEES can be trained to recognise and seek out particular smells, French
researchers have found. They claim the technique could be used by farmers to
pollinate crops more efficiently, and even by environmental officers to identify
pollutants.

Bees are choosy about which plants they pollinate. Their choice depends on
the amount of nectar a plant produces and when it produces it. They use colour
and smell to recognise plants that are likely to reward them with a hearty meal.
Although their use of colour has been well studied, less was known about how
bees recognise smells.

The French team, led by Minh-Ha Pham Delegue at the Laboratory of Comparative
Invertebrate Neurobiology in Bures-sur-Yvette, has found that the olfactory
receptors on bees’ antennae are sensitive to hundreds of chemicals. However,
their recognition of plants depends on combinations of just a few. The mechanism
is so sensitive that bees can distinguish between two species of sunflower that
have chemically similar smells and look identical to the naked eye.

The researchers discovered that when a bee finds a plant with suitable
nectar, it associates the “reward”—the sugar in the nectar—with the
smell of the plant. After a while it learns which odours lead to food. In the
way that bees associate odours with food, says Pham Delegue, “their sense of
smell is very similar to vertebrates”.

She found that she could lure bees to plants that they would not normally
pollinate by artificially increasing the flowers’ nectar content. The bees soon
learnt to be attracted to the smell of those plants, and revisited them even
when the nectar was removed. Pham Delegue believes that bees could be trained to
pollinate crops that do not have enough nectar to attract them naturally, thus
maximising the amount of fruit or seed the crops produce. She points out that
training bees would be cheaper than spraying plants with chemicals that mimic
bee pheromones, a method used in North America. In the same way, she says,
environmental agencies could use bees trained to recognise pollutant odours as
highly sensitive biological detectors.

One problem is that, over time, the bees may learn that the plants they are
attempting to feed from have little or no nectar, and they will go off in search
of the real thing. However, Pham Delegue believes that when bees are taught a
false association while they are very young they will remember it for life.

THE celebrated French sense of smell, nurtured down the centuries on the
fruity bouquets of fine wines, is now being applied to a less palatable subject:
air pollution. Scientists are training volunteers in Grand Couronne, a village
outside Rouen in northern France, to recognise the different smells given off by
a local rapeseed oil factory that is accused of fouling the village’s air. They
hope the results will help the factory to eliminate the offending chemicals from
its emissions.

Residents of Grand Couronne have been complaining of a sulphurous stench ever
since the Saipol factory was built in 1993. But their objections were too
subjective and unquantifiable for the factory to know what action to take. The
new technique is designed to identify precisely those molecules responsible for
the smell.

The 17 volunteers are being trained over four months to distinguish the
smells of 45 different molecules. They will be taught to associate the smell of
a chemical with a smell they know well. For instance, isobutylamine smells like
camembert cheese, acetyl pyrazine like cooked rice.

“The idea is to find your own personal smell-associations,” says Maryline
Jaubert, educational director of IAP Sentic, a biochemical company specialising
in odours that is training the volunteers. “`That stinks’ is definitely not a
part of the vocabulary.” Her husband and work colleague Jean-Noel, a researcher
at the University of Le Havre, says: “Unlike colours or sounds, we are not
educated in this sort of classification as children.”

After the training course, the volunteers will test the constituents and
intensity of the smells in the air outside their windows twice a day from
January until June next year. At the same time, the factory will use its new
£800 000 odour-removing equipment. To test whether the equipment is making
a difference, the volunteers will not be told which days the factory turns it
on.

Alain Brinon, regional manager of Saipol, admits that the factory is emitting
a “cabbage-like” odour. “It has a sulphurous component which some people compare
to eggs,” he says. “The aim of this joint exercise is to objectively find out
the intensity and the exact molecular composition of these odours.”

Some residents are already sceptical. “Last time they said they had improved
the process, the smell got worse,” says volunteer “nose” Jean-Jacques Metayer.
But others would like to see the technique extended to monitor other pollution.
Marie Jose Malkiels, another volunteer, singles out diesel fumes.

AS THE Ariane 5 rocket shot into the sky above French Guiana last week,
officials from the European Space Agency (ESA) and its French counterpart, CNES,
proclaimed the launch a complete success. The ghosts of last year’s disastrous
maiden flight, which ended with a bang just 37 seconds after liftoff, seemed
finally to have been exorcised.

But as the rocket’s controllers studied the flight data, they were forced to
revise that entirely rosy assessment. A shortfall in the launcher’s thrust left
its dummy payload thousands of kilometres below the intended orbit. And despite
an extensive recovery operation, the vehicle’s solid rocket boosters were lost
at sea.

The problems began a few minutes into the flight, after the first-stage
engine and the solid rocket boosters had lifted Ariane out of the densest part
of the atmosphere. At an altitude of about 60 kilometres, the boosters separated
from the main body of the rocket as planned. But their parachutes apparently
failed to open, and a recovery boat searching the drop zone found nothing more
than pieces of wreckage in the water.

The loss was a big disappointment. CNES was planning to inspect the boosters
to discover whether they had come close to burning through their casings. If
they had, modifications would be needed. This inspection will now have to wait
for the next test flight, set for 1998.

Roughly nine minutes into the flight, towards the end of the first-stage
burn, there was another problem. The rocket began to spin faster than expected
around its long axis, causing the liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel in the first
stage to flatten against the walls of the tanks. This made it appear to sensors
that fuel levels were low. “The engine stopped to prevent the turbopumps,
starved of fuel, from exploding,” says Daniel Mugnier, launch director for the
flight.

As a result, the first stage was jettisoned early, leaving the rocket short
of speed. What’s more, this stage was supposed to make almost a complete orbit
of the Earth, before re-entering the atmosphere off the Pacific coast of
Colombia, where its break-up would have been monitored by NASA aircraft. Because
it was jettisoned early, it re-entered and broke up some 8000 kilometres short
of its target, off the coast of Papua New Guinea (see Map).

Ariane 5 is designed to rotate slowly during launch to keep its radar
transponders pointing towards tracking stations on the ground. One theory is
that the unexpected rapid spinning was caused by exhaust from turbines that
pressurise the fuel before it is burnt. The spinning was also followed by a
switch to a backup inertial guidance system. According to ESA, the rocket’s main
computer made the switch after becoming confused by the unexpected rolling
motion.

In contrast to the flaws in the first stage’s flight, the second performed
perfectly and made up much of the missing thrust. But the shortfall still left
the dummy payload in an orbit that at its most distant point was some 9000
kilometres closer to Earth than expected.

If the payload had been a commercial satellite, it could have fired its own
thrusters to correct the orbit, using fuel intended to keep it on station during
its working life. This would have cut about a year off a typical satellite’s
life of more than a decade. Such errors are not unusual in the launch industry,
but the smaller Ariane 4 rocket has built up a reputation for much greater
accuracy. Arianespace, the launch company set up by ESA, wants to maintain these
high standards.

Stephane Chenard, a space analyst with the Paris firm Euroconsult, believes
that the problems will not prove too serious. “Calibrating these effects is what
a test flight is for,” he says.

Arianespace’s backers are also upbeat despite the continued teething
troubles. “We have succeeded with a prototype. We still require time and hard
work,” says CNES president Alain Bensoussan.

LANDSLIDES triggered by melting glaciers have killed tens of thousands of
people in the Andes in recent decades. But a team of French scientists says it
could dramatically reduce this death toll by predicting where and when
landslides will happen.

These tropical glaciers are smaller than those in the Alps and extremely
sensitive to fluctuations in the weather. Glaciers in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia
have started to melt at an alarming rate this century, especially in the past 20
years. Ice fields have become more prone to shocks from earthquakes, volcanic
activity and land slippage.

“More Peruvians have been killed by landslides caused by glaciers than in all
the country’s recent terrorist upheavals,” says Pierre Ribstein, a hydrologist
with the CNRS, the French national research agency, in Paris, and the team’s
chief researcher. In the most devastating avalanche, around 20 000 people in the
Peruvian mountain village of Yungay were overwhelmed by 6 million cubic metres
of water, which swept through their valley at 280 kilometres an hour when a
glacier on the Huascaran Norte mountain slipped in 1970. More recently, waves of
water up to 8 metres high—generated when unstable land or glaciers fall
into reservoirs and cause them to overflow—have regularly crashed through
mountain villages.

By examining cores of ice taken from several glaciers, Ribstein and his
colleagues have worked out how the climate in the Andes has varied this century.
They have identified the areas most prone to melting in warm phases, the
temperatures at which the glaciers become unstable, and the local effects of
melting. This should warn local authorities where the glaciers are fragile,
allowing them to prepare diversion walls and lower lake levels at dangerous
times.

The ice cores that the French team examined were extracted by geologists from
Ohio State University, led by Lonnie Thompson. They contain information on
weather changes in the region over the past 15 000 to 20 000 years. Ribstein’s
team used the tip of the cores to look at the most recent changes.

The team claims that the measurements also provide one of the most precise
indicators yet of global warming this century. Since the 1950s, for example,
glaciers in the Cordillera Real range in Bolivia have shortened by between 25
and 50 per cent. This melting has accelerated significantly since the start of
the 1980s. Ribstein is now collecting further data to discover how much of the
melting is caused by phases of El Niño—a disruption of ocean
currents and trade winds that causes a build-up of warm surface water in the
eastern Pacific—and how much is due to longer-term global warming.

Agricultural botanists in France have now shown that genes for herbicide
resistance engineered into oilseed rape can persist for several generations in
hybrids between the transgenic rape and wild radishes. Meanwhile, British
researchers have found that potatoes engineered to resist attack by aphids can
also harm ladybirds, the pests’ natural predators.

While experts stress that neither finding poses a major environmental threat,
industry sources fear that the new results will further undermine public
acceptance of genetically engineered crops.

The escape of genes into wild plants has always been the main worry
surrounding transgenic crops. To study this, Anne-Marie Chèvre and her
colleagues at INRA, France’s national agricultural research agency, based near
Rennes, planted plots of wild radish, Raphanus raphanistrum, next to
transgenic oilseed rape, Brassica napus. The rape was engineered to
carry a gene for resistance to the herbicide glufosinate ammonium and did not
produce pollen.

The researchers had found previously that the rape produced hybrids carrying
28 chromosomes, 19 from the rape, 9 from the radish. In this week’s
Nature (vol 389, p 924), they describe experiments in which the hybrids
were planted surrounded by wild radishes, and followed through four
generations.

Subsequent generations of the hybrids had variable numbers of
chromosomes—anywhere between 20 and 60. “We never found a stable variety,”
says Frédérique Eber, the team’s chromosome specialist. Even in
the fourth generation, however, 20 per cent of the hybrids retained the gene for
herbicide resistance.

Although the results suggest that the gene might be lost eventually,
botanists note that the hybrids studied by the French team are more persistent
than many crosses between different species, which frequently don’t survive
beyond the first generation. “Often things will die out at that stage,” says
Philip Dale of the John Innes Centre in Norwich.

John Beringer of the University of Bristol, who chairs Britain’s Advisory
Committee on Releases to the Environment, believes that there is no cause for
public alarm. But hybrid weeds could remain in fields and sprout despite
herbicide spraying. “It is more of a problem for farmers than an environmental
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There is already a climate of public opposition in Europe to imports of
American soya beans and maize engineered to produce the bacterial insecticide
Bt. Industry sources fear the French findings could delay approval for
transgenic crops currently awaiting the green light in Europe, which include
five separate strains of herbicide-resistant oilseed rape. “We’ve had a whole
spate of bad news recently,” says David Bennett of the European Federation of
Biotechnology, based in The Hague. “I can only assume the European Commission
will react badly.”

More bad news for plant biotechnologists comes from Nick Birch of the
Scottish Crop Research Institute in Dundee and Mike Majerus of the University of
Cambridge. They fed two-spot ladybirds, Adalia bipunctata, for two
weeks on peach-potato aphids, Myzus persicae, that had fed on sap from
potatoes engineered to carry a lectin from snowdrops—a protein that
interferes with insect digestion.

The engineered potatoes were made by John and Angharad Gatehouse of the
University of Durham, and in greenhouse tests they killed off significant
numbers of the aphid pests. But in experiments to be reported in a future issue
of Molecular Breeding, Birch and Majerus found that female ladybirds
fed with aphids from the engineered potatoes lived half as long as those fed on
aphids from normal potatoes. Males given lectin-containing aphids lived for an
average of 46 days, 5 days less than those in the control group.

In mating studies, up to 30 per cent fewer viable eggs were laid when one of
the parent ladybirds was fed aphids from lectin-transformed potatoes. “But these
effects on ladybird reproduction wear off after three to four weeks,” says
Birch.

This is the first time that such a knock-on effect on a beneficial predator
species has been seen. While it adds to the concerns about the safety of
transgenic crops, Birch notes that the engineered potatoes should require less
insecticides. “It may become a question of balancing the risks of transgenic
plants with the risks of chemical applications,” he says.