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The reinstatement of evolution in the Kansas school curriculum is not only good news for science and for the students. It is a timely demonstration that researchers can and must act politically when their values are at stake.
The multinational life science company Monsanto has announced royalty-free licences to the technology that it has developed for producing rice varieties with enhanced pro-vitamin A
UK postdocs and research students receiving European Commission fellowships are complaining of effective cuts of up to 30% in their salaries as a result of the low value of the Euro.
Two former Microsoft executives have agreed to provide $12.5 million to build a broad-band telescope array designed to help in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
A member of the group of brothers that founded one of the first US cellular telephone companies has agreed to endow a brain research institute at the University of Washington in Seattle.
A grassroots campaign by US scientists has helped to oust three anti-evolutionists from elections to the Kansas school board, clearing the way for evolutionary theory to be taught again in the state’s classrooms.
Physicists are setting traps to catch antihydrogen, the simplest element in the mirror world of antimatter. Their results could challenge our picture of fundamental particles and forces, says Alexander Hellemans.
Geneticists are set to be the winners in a chemical lottery, as a mammoth range of randomly mutated mice promises them off-the-shelf tools for defining gene function. Alison Abbott investigates.
For 30 years and more, the mechanism of a microbial proton pump has been subject to increasingly sophisticated analysis. The full picture of how the pump operates is now emerging.
Electrons in a quasicrystal cannot flow as freely as they do in normal metallic crystals because of its nonperiodic structure. It turns out that in a decagonal quasicrystal the electronic behaviour reflects the tenfold symmetry of the crystal structure. Patricia A. Thiel and Jean Marie Dubois
The enzyme telomerase is activated in most human cancers. So it comes as a surprise to learn that mice engineered to lack telomerase, as well as a tumour-suppressor protein, p53, develop cancers that would not appear in mice lacking just p53. The explanation may lie in the nature of cancer development.
Oceanic diatoms come in all shapes and sizes. It now appears that the larger species may be more serious players in ocean biogeochemistry than previously thought: in a process dubbed the 'fall dump', they can make a bigger contribution to ocean sediments than their more abundant, smaller-celled relatives.
The proteins inserted into a cellular membrane determine the identity of that membrane. Such proteins are not inserted spontaneously, but rely on a set of 'translocases'. A new bacterial translocase - with relatives in chloroplasts and mitochondria - has now been identified, providing further support for a bacterial origin of these organelles.
Earth's crust is continually being created at the spreading centres of mid-ocean ridges. Here, magma rises up from the mantle and resides in shallow chambers before erupting onto the sea floor. A system of these magma chambers has been imaged in three dimensions for the first time.
Histone proteins, which bundle up DNA into a compact structure in the nucleus, can be modified in specific ways. One such modification, newly identified, has been linked to a specific nuclear function: the ability of the nucleus to divide.
One of the defining features of superconductivity is that it can be destroyed by an applied magnetic field. Superconductivity has now been discovered in the unlikeliest of places: inside a permanent magnet.
Can microwaves from mobile phones damage brain tissue? Daedalus proposes that circularly polarized microwaves at the right frequency could rotate protein molecules with unforeseen consequences.
