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Australia's cities impinge upon an ancient landscape shaped by fire. Carina Dennis talks to the researchers who are striving to protect lives and property, while retaining natural fire regimes that nurture the country's biodiversity.
More accurate timepieces could lead to better global positioning systems, insights into fundamental physics and a redefinition of the second. David Adam rates the runners in the race to build tomorrow's atomic clocks.
The interactions of sugars and proteins underlie many biological processes, and cataloguing them is a daunting task. A technique for attaching sugars to microarrays offers a promising, high-throughput solution.
One way of finding out what genes do is to inactivate them, and to study the effects, in 'model' organisms. That has now been done for many thousands of worm genes in two large-scale analyses.
The effect of greenhouse gases on climate is underscored by modelling work showing that formation of the Antarctic ice sheet, 34 million years ago, occurred largely because of a fall in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
When our bodies are injured or infected, inflammatory cells migrate to the damaged area to carry out rescue and repair work. Interactions between three types of protein may form the basis of a highway to guide these cells.
Coherent-state quantum cryptography holds the promise of efficient, secure communication. An experimental demonstration shows that a secure key to the code can be exchanged, even if there is a large transmission loss.
Disjunct distributions of closely related species are not necessarily the outcome of passive fragmentation of populations. Instead, they can be the consequence of speciation within a population.
Cells must often travel long distances to carry out their assigned tasks in the body. New work reveals how the precursors of eggs and sperm are guided during their epic journey to the gonads.
