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Living things from bacteria to humans change their environment, but the consequences for evolution and ecology are only now being understood, or so the ‘niche constructivists’ claim. Dan Jones investigates.
This month South Africa will officially open the largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. But is the country ready to capitalize on its investment? Michael Cherry investigates.
From pioneering xerographer to innovative teacher, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a physicist with many skills, but perhaps most remembered will be his acerbic aphorisms.
The conclusion of a number-crunching exercise on various data sets is that male university students have significantly higher IQs than their female counterparts. But the methodology used is deeply flawed.
The sharpest images ever taken of matter around the probable black hole at the centre of our Galaxy bring us within grasp of a crucial test of general relativity — a picture of the black hole's ‘point of no return’.
The requirements for vitamin B12 vary among algal species in a seemingly inexplicable pattern. A study that exploits genomic data now provides enlightenment — and evidence of symbioses with bacteria.
Large volcanic eruptions cool the world ocean. In doing so, they temporarily reduce the increase in ocean heat content and the rise in sea level attributed to warming caused by greenhouse-gas emissions.
Static pictures of protein structures are so prevalent that it is easy to forget they are dynamic molecular machines. Characterizing their intrinsic motions may be necessary to understand how they work.
The modest-sized but successful Spitzer Space Telescope has detected fluctuations in cosmic light at infrared frequencies. Is this the signature of the first population of stars that formed in the Universe?
A deep search has turned up an RNA that can carry out the chemically complex ‘aldol’ reaction involved in sugar metabolism. Could this be similar to an ancestral catalyst that existed billions of years ago?
