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Washington A health-advocacy groupis suing the US Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) for failing toclassify dietary salt as a food additive.
The Washington-based Center for Sciencein the Public Interest says there is scientificevidence that salt raises blood pressure andprematurely kills 150,000 Americans a year.
But the FDA classifies dietary salt as“generally recognized as safe”, giving theagency no authority to limit how much salt
foods can contain. The advocacy group says
it hopes the lawsuit will force the FDA tochange salt’s status.
Americans consume about 4 grams ofsalt a day — roughly twice the amountrecommended in the US government’srecent dietary advice (see Nature 433,794–799; 2005). Overindulgence occurs
in other countries too. The UK governmentis currently waging a campaign to cut
Britain’s salt intake by one-third.

Future looks bright fortable-top synchrotron

PHOTON PRODUCTION LABTokyo A Japanese company has developed
a synchrotron light source small enough to
fit in a laboratory — although the handy
technology comes at a hefty price.
Synchrotrons produce X-rays that can beused to probe the structure of materials.
Their unwieldy size means that scientists
must travel to large facilities and wait theirturn to use the rays for their experiments.
Researchers have come up with theories
on how to shrink the device (see Nature428, 789; 2004), and now a working
miniature is available for sale — theMIRRORCLE-6X, manufactured by thePhoton Production Laboratory of Shiga,
Japan. With a storage-ring diameter of 60
centimetres, the whole machine easily fits
in a lab, and generates X-rays of up to afew mega-electronvolts using a novel
electron-injection technology. Large
facilities, whose synchrotrons are tens
to hundreds of metres across, typically

Sex changes seen in radio-collared voles
London The use of radio-transmitter collars to
track and monitor animals has dramaticallyskewed the sex ratio of a population ofendangered water voles, British ecologists havefound. They fear the technology may be further
endangering this population, and could have
similar effects on other studied animals.
The scientists, led by wildlife researcher Tom
Moorhouse of the University of Oxford, UK,began fitting a Norfolk population of Arvicola
terrestris (pictured) with radio collars three years
ago to study their migration and matingbehaviour. Over the course of the project, theyobserved a 48% decline in the expected numberof female offspring from tagged animals (T. P.
Moorhouse and D. W. Macdonald, J. Appl. Ecol.
42, 91–98; 2005). They think that stress may be
responsible for the shift: voles raise more malesin hard times, as they are more likely to survive.

produce rays of about the same energy.
At roughly US$2.5 million a piece, theMIRRORCLE-6X is unlikely to find its way
into most laboratories any time soon. ButHironari Yamada, who helped to develop
the machine at the Ritsumeikan Universityin Shiga, says that private businesses —from semiconductor manufacturers topharmaceuticals producers — are lining
up to buy the device.

Indian institute gets
cash to aim for the top
New Delhi The Indian government has
granted Rs1 billion (US$23 million) tothe Bangalore-based Indian Institute ofScience to help it to develop into a “worldclass university”.
The surprise announcement was madeby the finance minister Palaniappan
Chidambaram while presenting India’s
annual budget on 28 February. He said theinstitute is the first of many that will receive
huge funding increases in coming years, as
the government works to boost India’sinternational competitiveness.
“We were not expecting this generosity,”
the institute’s director Goverdhan Mehta
told Nature. “More than the money, whatmakes us really happy is the recognition
that we deserve this.”

Enzyme washing powdercleans up rogue prions

Downsized: the MIRRORCLE-6X weighs in atunder half a tonne and easily fits in the lab.

London A new way of decontaminating
medical equipment might reduce the riskof prions being transmitted to patientsduring surgery.
Steel surgical instruments are usuallysterilized by washing and heating. But
studies have indicated that this does notremove prions — abnormal proteins thought

A. HARRINGTON/ALAMY

Pressure group sues
food agency for
not adding salt

Radio collars were thought to cause somestress, but few scientists believed that theywould influence behaviour or reproduction.
Moorhouse says he will stop using the collars
after further investigating the effect.

to cause variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease,
the human version of mad cow disease. The
only method proven to rid instruments ofprions is bathing them in corrosive chemicals.
In the face of a tiny theoretical risk of priontransmission, the UK government in 2001
allowed surgeries to use tools that have been
simply washed and heated.
Researchers at the UK Medical ResearchCouncil Prion Unit in London now say thatusing a biological washing powder, withadded enzymes called proteases, does thetrick (G. S. Jackson et al., J. Gen. Virol. 86,
869–878; 2005). The team hopes that afine-tuned version of the process will beavailable for use in surgeries by the endof the year.

Launch success lifts
Japan’s space hopes
Tokyo Japan’s space agency is celebrating thesuccessful launch and deployment of aweather satellite last Saturday that has put
it back in the Asian space race.
The launch success comes as a relief after
a string of recent failures, including the lossof an Earth-observing satellite blasted bysolar flares, two spy satellites that had to beblown up after a botched launch, and a
mission to Mars that ran out of fuel. “Wecould not afford another failure,” says
science minister Naruaki Nakayama.
The space agency says that improved
reliability and reduced costs should help
them compete with China for futurecommercial launches.
Japan’s rocket programme is unusual inthat it is not an offshoot of a military missileprogramme. But observers note that it isincreasingly being seen to have potential
military applications. The country is now
moving to work with the United States on amissile defence programme.
NATURE | VOL 434 | 3 MARCH 2005 | www.nature.com/nature8©2005 Nature Publishing Group