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Clashing perspectives on the ethics of the donation of human eggs for research purposes are likely to complicate international collaboration — whether stem-cell researchers like it or not.
A Nature Special Report investigates the ethics and economics of donating eggs for stem-cell research. In this, the first part Erika Check investigates whether paying donors would increase supply. In the second part Helen Pearson asks what is known about the long-term health risks faced by donors.
A Nature Special Report investigates the ethics and economics of donating eggs for stem-cell research. In the first part Erika Check investigated whether paying donors would increase supply. In this, the second part Helen Pearson asks what is known about the long-term health risks faced by donors.
Some feared that widespread use of AIDS treatments in Africa would encourage drug resistance, with globally disastrous consequences. But there's no crisis yet, reports Erika Check.
One way to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is to put it back in the ground. In this, the first of two News Features on carbon sequestration, Quirin Schiermeier asks when the world's coal-fired power plants will start storing away their carbon. In the second, Emma Marris joins the enthusiasts who think that enriching Earth's soils with charcoal can help avert global warming, reduce the need for fertilizers, and greatly increase the size of turnips.
One way to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is to put it back in the ground. In the first of two News Features on carbon sequestration, Quirin Schiermeier asked when the world's coal-fired power plants will start storing away their carbon. In the second, Emma Marris joins the enthusiasts who think that enriching Earth's soils with charcoal can help avert global warming, reduce the need for fertilizers, and greatly increase the size of turnips.
Many otherwise productive cultivars of rice suffer badly if immersed in water for long. The identification of a gene variant that confers tolerance to this threat has practical potential.
For some years, astronomers have been trying to track down all the lithium predicted by standard cosmological models. Spectroscopic dissection of globular clusters reveals that the answer might lie in the stars.
The sense of smell is triggered by receptors in the olfactory epithelium that lines the nose. In mice at least, that lining is also responsible for receiving chemosensory cues involved in mating and other social behaviours.
Acidic and basic molecules are antagonistic, and keeping them in their place is no easy job — unless, it seems, one unites them under the tutelage of ordered, nanoporous materials known as organosilicas.
A quadrillion previously unnoticed small bodies beyond Neptune have been spotted as they dimmed X-rays from a distant source. Models of the dynamics of debris in the Solar System's suburbs must now be reworked.
A family of enzymes called caspases — best known for their involvement in programmed cell death — now seems to be pivotal in the progression of two neurodegenerative diseases.
The use of X-rays to construct three-dimensional tomographic images is well established in medicine. The same principle is being extended to the nanoscale, bringing us startlingly accurate pictures of tiny objects.
Artificially activating the right neurons at the right time causes visual perception of a face. This new result shows that such neurons directly underlie the recognition of complex objects.
The predicted primordial lithium abundance is a factor of two to three times higher than the value measured in the atmospheres of old stars. This discrepancy is resolved by showing that trends in the abundances of other elements are explained by turbulent mixing, which takes the lithium deep into the stars and destroys it.
This paper reports the occultation of X-rays from Scorpius X-1 at millisecond timescales, which they attribute to a population of small trans-neptunian objects.
Terahertz radiation propagating through ferroelectric lithium tantalate (LiTa03) couples to lattice vibrations, resulting in phonon-polariton waves. The new X-ray diffraction technique makes it possible to follow directly the absolute displacements of ions in the lattice that underlie the propagation of these waves.
This paper reports a study of supercurrents through a quantum dot created in a semiconductor nanowire by local electrostatic gating. Owing to strong Coulomb interaction, electrons only tunnel one-by-one through the discrete energy levels of the quantum dot. This, nevertheless, can yield a supercurrent when subsequent tunnel events are coherent.
Hox clusters in the cnidarians Nematostella vectensis and Hydra magnipapillata have genes that correspond to anterior-group Hox genes in Bilateria, but the remainder of the Hox genes shows signs of an independent origin.
This paper describes the identification of the only single gene that is known to exclusively regulate liver specification, and shows that liver formation is regulated by inductive Wnt signals and crosstalk between the endoderm and mesoderm along the gut tube.
A subunit of the ARC/Mediator co-activator complex is a key effector of the SREBP transcription factor during regulation of lipid homeostasis in human cells and Caenorhabditis elegans. The SREBP activation domain directly targets a KIX domain on ARC105/MED15
A gene that enables some strains of rice to survive under water for a period of time is identified. Furthermore, this gene confers its submergence tolerance when transferred into a strain of rice that normally dies when submerged under water.
A single-molecule approach was used to observe the growth dynamics of individual microtubules. Observations suggest that small tubulin oligomers can add directly to growing microtubules, and that the protein XMAP215 facilitates the addition of longer oligomers.
