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A move by Russia to support the Kyoto Protocol should usher in an era of international collaboration in mitigating climate change. Validating emissions trading and bringing developing economies into the fold are the next priorities.
The production of silicon chips is big business, but with success have come environmental concerns. Geoff Brumfiel meets the people helping the industry to clean up its act.
Genetic engineering is old hat. Biologists are now synthesizing genomes, altering the genetic code and contemplating new life forms. Is it time to think about the risks? Philip Ball asks the experts.
To form tissues, like cells must clump together. The striking resemblance between one cell aggregate in flies and a cluster of soap bubbles points to a crucial role for surface mechanics in biological pattern formation.
A star surrounded by a disk of dust could be a solar system in the making. Analysis of radiation from the dust suggests that there might be belts of comets or asteroids, and even a planet, orbiting the star.
Histone proteins, which serve as scaffolds for packaging DNA, can be modified in numerous ways. It's been thought that one modification, methylation, is irreversible — but that view must now change.
The last ice age saw the extinction of numerous large mammals — but perhaps not as many as was thought. The woolly mammoth survived to much more recent times, and so, it now seems, did the Irish elk.
Adding guest atoms to inorganic nanotubes, known as ‘doping’, influences their room-temperature magnetic properties — properties that could be exploited in ‘spintronic’ devices and computer memory.
The imaging of events in living cells offers a way to test models of cell behaviour and develop new hypotheses. The invaginating ‘pits’ on the surface of cells are the latest subject of this approach.
