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Slowly but surely, a key advisory committee is helping the scientific community act more responsibly when conducting and publishing biological research that could carry security risks.
As the H5N1 flu virus continues to sweep across the globe, researchers in some of the countries affected describe in their own words the political and scientific challenges that they face.
Multicellular creatures can be battlegrounds for competing populations of cells. Claire Ainsworth learns how this way of looking at an individual is feeding into immunology and cancer biology.
The floods are getting worse in Tuvalu. As scientists argue over climate change and struggle to measure rising seas, Samir S. Patel meets the locals of this tiny island nation.
Biotech start-ups face a struggle to survive. Virginia Gewin reports on an initiative that brings cash and experience together to improve their chances.
What role do cats play in the epidemiology of H5N1 avian flu virus? We don't yet have all the answers, but it's time to consider new precautions, argue Thijs Kuiken, Albert Osterhaus, Peter Roeder and their colleagues.
A project designed to discover fossils that illuminate the transition between fishes and land vertebrates has delivered the goods. At a stroke, our picture of that transition is greatly improved.
Reports of the death of silicon electronics may well have been exaggerated. A technique that allows the deposition of silicon films from solution could harbinger the era of the inkjet-printed circuit.
How does the immune system avoid potentially damaging responses against the body's own molecules? The answer lies partly in the ability of dendritic cells to sample their surroundings selectively.
Two attempts to measure the isotopic composition of oxygen in the Sun from particles trapped in lunar soils give very different results. A rethink of why the Solar System is as it is might be required.
Nothing lasts for ever, not least human civilizations. There are many reasons why societies stand or fall, and these lessons from the past require investigation at various places and on various timescales.
Those who go with the flow assert that rough surfaces cause turbulence in fluids passing over them. The claim that, under certain conditions, the opposite is possible disturbs that cherished belief.
A detailed description of the pectoral fin of the Devonian fish Tiktaalik roseae — a transitional form between fishes and tetrapods — gives an insight into the origins of the tetrapod limb.
16O is underabundant in lunar grains recently exposed to the solar wind, opposite to an earlier finding based on studies of ancient metal grains — an interesting result as there is no clear way to make 16O more abundant in Solar System rocks than in the Sun.
A collection of synchronized, independent sources emitting indistinguishable photons represents a highly useful resource for quantum data processing. Demonstration of quantum interference between two single photons emitted by two independently trapped single atoms is an important step towards this goal.
Where thin water clouds and anthropogenic aerosols are coincident, the increase to cloud emissivity from elevated haze levels is between 5 and 8 per cent, corresponding to an estimated surface warming in the Arctic under cloudy skies of between 1 and 1.6 degrees Celsius.
Rather than telomere-binding proteins obstructing the replication machinery, one yeast telomere-binding protein, Taz1, is actually required to prevent pausing of the replication fork in telomeric sequences.
Examining cytochrome c oxidase action shows that electron transfer from the haem group to the oxygen reduction site initiates the proton pumping mechanism — this occurs before relaxation steps, where protons are taken up from the aqueous space on one side of the membrane and released on the other.
