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Public health needs strong advocacy within government — and Congress should make sure that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to provide it.
We've been told to eat less and move more to battle the growing obesity epidemic. But could getting more shuteye also be a way to fight the fat? Helen Pearson investigates.
Interdisciplinary research is the new buzzword, but does a grounding in different disciplines really make you better at solving problems? Amanda Haag joins an experiment to find out.
Maurice Taieb laid the groundwork for the discovery of Lucy, the most famous fossil human ancestor. Rex Dalton meets the Tunisian-born geologist who prefers the desert to the limelight.
Satellite measurements of changes in Earth's gravity field reveal ice loss from Greenland's ice sheet. Over the past four years, this melt has contributed to global sea-level rise at an accelerating rate.
The three-million-year old skeleton of a three-year-old child provides an outstanding resource to understand the development of a human ancestor that seems to have both walked upright and climbed through trees.
How does one best search for non-replenishable targets at unknown positions? An optimized search strategy could be applied to situations as diverse as animal foraging and time-sensitive rescue missions.
HIV-1 prompts a massive cellular immune response, but eventually it tires the immune cells. Blocking the activation of a cell receptor called PD-1 might restore these exhausted cells.
Thermonuclear supernovae were thought to occur only when white-dwarf stars of a certain mass explode. The discovery of a supernova that is way over the mass limit might require a reworking of the model.
Embryonic stem cells are prized for their ability to mature into all the specialized adult cell types. It may now be possible to reprogramme adult body cells to have the characteristics of stem cells.
Many drugs isolated from microorganisms have complex molecular structures, making it difficult for chemists to modify them. But it seems that enzymes can provide a short cut to drug variants.
The high-redshift supernova SNLS-03D3bb has an exceptionally high luminosity and low kinetic energy, which both imply a super-Chandrasekhar mass progenitor.
This paper reports the observation of quantum phase transition to a ferromagnetic state in a gaseous spinor Bose–Einstein condensate. The formation of ferromagnetic domains and domain walls is observed, and spin vortices (containing non-zero spin current but no net mass current) detected in situ.
In quantum metrology, entangled states can be used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The use of a specially designed, entangled state of two Ca+ ions achieves an ultra-precise spectroscopic measurement of the electric quadrupole moment.
The structural, chemical and physical characterization of a low-density, empty germanium framework structure, or clathrate, synthesized using a new route exploiting an ionic liquid as a reaction medium is described.
In vivo evidence details the existence of the haemangioblast: a bipotential precursor of both blood and endothelial cells that has been hypothesized to exist for almost 100 years, but for which formal proof has so far been lacking.
A small molecule that mimics enhanced melanocortin 1 receptor signalling in response to ultraviolet light can stimulate pigmentation and thereby protect mice with light skin from DNA damage and cancer formation.
The dynamic exchange of motor proteins in a functioning 45-nm rotary complex was observed in vivo and GFP–MotB stator proteins visualized in individual bacterial flagellar motors. Fluorescence recovery after photobleaching reveals that the ∼22 MotB motor proteins exchange rapidly with a pool of free protein while the motor is actively rotating.
The use of long double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) in Drosophila, where Dicer-mediated processing produces small RNAs inside cells, has been thought to reduce the probability of 'off-target effects' (OTEs). However, this study shows that OTEs mediated by short homology stretches within long dsRNAs are prevalent in Drosophila.
