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.
Planetaria are getting ever better at capturing the glories and the challenges of the night sky. They are underused not only in that astronomical context, but for other sciences too.
The increasingly aggressive tactics of animal rights activists have prompted the UK Government to consider changes to the law to make it easier to stop individuals organising campaigns of intimidation.
Animal rights activists in Munich have been accused of using confidential information from a Bavarian ethics commission as the basis of a campaign against experiments on Java macaques.
Last Friday, work began outside the town of Sutherland, about 400 kilometres north-east of Cape Town, on building the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere.
Japan's ministerial budget requests for next year were finalized last week, with IT, nanotechnology, immunology and bioinformatics looking set for an increase in funding.
Fires that have destroyed 6 million acres of US forest have also wiped out both historic research that foretold this summer's disaster, and new research designed to find out how to prevent such massive fires from flaring up in future.
A world-renowned virology institute in Moscow faces a major threat to its collection of viruses if it fails to find a way of paying its electricity bill.
Devon Island, a barren, windswept outpost in the Canadian arctic, is being used by US researchers as a new simulated Mars habitat in order to learn more about how to operate on Mars.
Opponents of moves to limit global warming under the Kyoto Protocol have seized upon a controversial new scientific paper that appears to absolve carbon dioxide of blame for the rapid warming seen over the past few decades.
The US National Institutes of has launched a new series of grants for large-scale collaborative projects by pledging $25 million over five years toward the construction of a ‘virtual cell’.
Physicists at CERN were locked in a dilemma earlier this week: whether or not to gamble SFr30 million (US$17 million) pursuing the possible first viewing of a Higgs boson.
Tiny airborne particles affect the Earth's climate, in part by influencing the formation of clouds. But modelling the effects of these aerosols is proving to be one of the thorniest problems in climatology, says Mark Schrope.
Incontrovertible evidence of cannibalism has been found at a 900-year-old site in the southwestern United States. Why do horrified critics deny that many societies have found cannibalism acceptable?
Twenty carbon atoms can form many structures — say, a ring or chain. They might also form spherical or bowl-like geometries, but these have only existed in theory. These two structures have now been created for the first time in minute quantities.
The idea of transplanting organs from other species — most usefully, pigs — into humans raises excitement and controversy. The cloning of pigs may represent a step towards this goal. But the finding that pig endogenous retroviruses can infect mice transplanted with pig cells is cause for concern.
Circulation in the North Atlantic at depths of 500-2,000 metres is largely fed by water from the Labrador Sea. Data from an armada of subsurface floats provide the first direct view of the flow of this water.
The immune system can tailor its production of antibodies to the type of infection. Three sequential DNA-shuffling processes underlie this ability. The same protein is responsible for the last two of the processes, and oddly it is an RNA-editing rather than a DNA-recombining enzyme.
The speed at which a jet can travel is limited by the mechanical strength of the rotor blades — as the rotor speeds up there is some point at which it breaks. This can also happen at the molecular scale if individual molecules are made to spin fast enough.
A new protein involved in producing the amyloid-β peptide — the building block of the brain ‘plaques’ seen in Alzheimer's disease — has been identified. This discovery may provide both a new drug target and fundamental insights into how cells dispose of redundant membrane proteins.
Controlling the motion of nanoscale objects is an important issue in making smaller and faster electronic devices. The smallest ever transistor — based on a single C60molecule — reveals the role oscillations can play in the operation of a nanodevice.
Kitchen rags, domestic mops, bathroom flannels — all will be transformed by the Daedalus Dirt Eater fabric, which employs a carefully formulated mix of bacteria that makes the fabric self-cleaning.
