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The president of Harvard has learnt a painful lesson in public communication. The media and Harvard academics may have over-reacted to his comments about women in science, but there is an opportunity to benefit from the affair.
Quirin Schiermeier travels to Sri Lanka with a team of scientists in the wake of last month's tsunami. Together with locals they search through the damage for clues of where the wave hit hardest.
Newly won evidence shows that many real-world network systems obey a power-law scaling, just as if they were fractal shapes. Could this be the harbinger of a new architectural law for complex systems?
Are syphilis epidemics caused by external factors such as human sexual behaviour, or are factors intrinsic to the pathogen more important? Comparing the dynamics of syphilis and gonorrhoea provides some clues.
The ‘translocon’ complex, which determines whether a protein segment will be inserted into or pushed through the cell membrane, seems to make the decision by performing a thermodynamic measurement.
Artificial materials made from oxide building blocks turn out to be excellent ferroelectrics. This shows that materials with specific properties can be designed by atomic-scale tailoring of their composition.
Biodiversity stabilizes ecosystem functioning in small-scale, short-term experiments, but do such findings scale up to the larger world? A global study of fossil reefs from the past 500 million years suggests they do.
