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A United Nations-sponsored meeting in Paris this week will indicate whether humanity has the wherewithal to save our closest cousins in the animal kingdom from extinction.
With fish farming on the rise, researchers are seeking ways to make aquaculture more sustainable. One solution may mean turning carnivorous fish into vegetarians. Kendall Powell gets a taste of the future.
After 40 years in development, and some $650 million of NASA funds, Gravity Probe B is almost ready to launch. Would Einstein, whose theories it is about to test, have approved? Tony Reichhardt reports.
The dating of ancient languages by a technique called glottochronology is undergoing a revival, stimulated by the computational and statistical methods used to tease out evolutionary relationships in biology.
In response to a transient hormonal cue, a developing egg commits irreversibly to a mature state. Surprisingly, this irreversible switch is composed of intrinsically reversible components.
The small icy bodies that make up the Kuiper belt are the most distant objects known in the Solar System. A consistent picture is now emerging which suggests that these objects formed much closer to the Sun.
The genome of the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis briggsae has been sequenced, and shows some remarkable differences from the genome of the better known — and physically similar — C. elegans.
Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest and most distant explosions in the Universe. A convincing body of evidence now links these bursts to supernovae, but there is still more to learn about their origins.
The structure of the last of the major pigment-containing protein complexes involved in photosynthesis is now revealed. The details complete our picture of electron shuttling in this vital process.
The speed at which mid-ocean ridges grind out new ocean floor varies considerably. The slowest-spreading ridges are especially tough to study — but the latest data show that they are especially intriguing.
