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Efforts to forecast how Earth's future climate will affect us must consider the economic growth of both rich and poor nations. But there are doubts over the theories being used, as Quirin Schiermeier explains.
SARS caught China unawares. But the ensuing struggle to characterize and contain the virus has put the country's work on infectious diseases back on target. Apoorva Mandavilli reports.
Soil microbes are notoriously hard to culture, so how can we make the ground yield its secrets? Virginia Gewin finds that genetic sequencing — of samples not species — may be the answer.
Instead of the painstaking process of developing new drugs, one Boston-based company is making its mark by pairing up those we already have. Meredith Wadman reports.
Entanglement, a mind-boggling form of correlations that exist between objects in the quantum world, is helping to explain phenomena and jazzing up computing. But it looks as if much more may be in store.
Is there a unified theory that relates size and metabolic rate across all organisms? Maybe not, according to the results of experiments that measured respiration in plants of widely varying mass.
A planet with a mass lower than that of Neptune has been detected as its gravity bent the light from a remote star. This lensing technique adds to our arsenal for spotting small planets outside the Solar System.
Thyroid hormone causes fat loss, but harnessing this action to treat obesity is difficult because it is associated with harmful side effects. However, bile acids generate active thyroid hormone just where it is needed.
How does the complex array of cell types and functions in the mammalian brain develop? Tracking cells by gene expression shows how their fates derive from organization within the simple embryonic neural tube.
Like normal glass, metallic glasses lack long-range order. But experiments and simulations show that, on the nanoscale, clusters of atoms interconnect in these materials to form highly structured ‘superclusters’.
A double-stranded break in DNA can profoundly destabilize a cell's genome. But how does the cell recognize the damage and halt division until it can be fixed? The answer lies in the proteins that package and unravel DNA.