Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
President Clinton's offer to share missile defence with his allies brings to mind his presidency's weaknesses — his fondness of fudge and reluctance to embrace unpopular truths.
A leading politician with close links to Russia's military industries and its arms exporting companies has been appointed the country's new head of industrial and scientific policy.
Rival approaches to the publication of the genome sequences of different organisms are causing growing tensions between scientists at dedicated sequencing centres and university-based biologists who want to use sequences to work on organisms.
Mouse geneticists are worried that pressure to sequence other species to model human disease may delay the finishing of the complete sequence of the mouse genome.
A recalculation of the amount of money spent by Israel on research and development shows that country spends 3.5 percent of its gross domestic product on civilian research, more than any other OECD country.
Spain is in a quandary over an invitation to participate in a planned French synchrotron, as such a move could dash the long-held hopes of Spanish scientists for their own machine
Althouh Canada has long complained of a ‘brain drain’ of scientists to the United States, the government says Canada may be experiencing more ‘gain’ than ‘drain’.
The Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Roche is to close its prestigious Basel Institute for Immunology, which has been home to three Nobel prizewinners.
Recent experience with clinical trials of gene therapy in the United States may have persuaded the government that similar trials of transplants from animals to humans should be strictly regulated at the federal level.
The team that created Dolly the sheep captured the headlines, but several groups now have patents on cloning. Peter Aldhous considers how this tangled web of proprietary claims will affect the future of the technology.
There is evidence of a variety of early organisms from the Archaean — some 4,000 to 2,500 million years ago. Now life at deep-sea hot springs can provisionally be added to the list.
The recognition properties of biomolecules, such as peptides, could be used in the design of novel materials. A step in this direction is the controlled selection of peptides that can distinguish between different semiconductor surfaces.
For decades, a short amyloid peptide called Aβ has been thought to underlie the neurodegeneration characteristic of Alzheimer's disease. This peptide is produced from a longer precursor protein by two protein-cleaving enzymes, known as β-secretase and γ-secretase. Presenilin, a suspect of old, is now revealed as the γ-secretase.
According to quantum mechanics, matter can be regarded as waves. ‘Matter waves’ made from composite particles known as polaritons, which are part light and part matter, can be amplified in a semiconductor to produce a matter-wave analogue of a laser amplifier.
The adhesive properties of the feet of geckos are remarkable, enabling them to scuttle up walls and across ceilings. From force measurements on the hairs — setae — that cover the feet, it seems that the ‘stickiness’ stems from the rapid formation and breaking of intermolecular bonds between foot and substrate.
The behaviour of electrons is fundamental to most of physics and chemistry, yet processes involving more than one electron are poorly understood. Experiments that expose atoms to intense laser fields throw new light on one process in which electrons dance together.
An influx of calcium ions into the cytoplasm activates a variety of cellular processes. The Ca2+ concentration is then returned to sub-micromolar levels by an ATP-driven Ca2+pump. The first high-resolution structure of such a pump reveals in exquisite detail the structural features that may underlie the pump's activity.
Last week Daedalus invented a new electromagnetic pump. He now intends to run this motor in a vacuum. By dumping energy into the vacuum, the pump would allow ‘virtual’ particles in the vicinity to become real, and would pour out particles of amazingly low energy. A new field of physics awaits development.
