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Stem cells are increasingly implicated in maintaining certain cancers. Studies of an intractable type of brain tumour provide hints as to why such cells may underlie the tumours' resistance to therapy.
A compact electron accelerator can be made by the cunning use of laser pulses to let electrons 'surf' on a plasma wave. The problem has been controlling exactly how much the electrons are accelerated.
Are two penises better than one? Not so, implies a study of doubly endowed earwigs. An ancestral behavioural preference for the right penis might have facilitated the loss of the left in species that arose later.
Embryonic stem cells have great potential in medicine, but the current methods used to grow them prevent their therapeutic use. A dual-action compound has been discovered that may help solve this problem.
The discovery that parts of a solid helium crystal could flow through other parts without friction ignited physicists' interest. Independent experiments confirm this unusual superflow, but its origin remains mysterious.
Satellite data show that phytoplankton biomass and growth generally decline as the oceans' surface waters warm up. Is this trend, seen over the past decade, a harbinger of the future for marine ecosystems?
How do voltage-gated ion channels in cell membranes open? The latest work suggests that the process depends on having the correct lipid molecules in the membrane, with phosphate groups being mandatory.
The versatile DNA molecule has found many applications beyond biology. In its latest role, it serves as a self-assembling scaffold to arrange different metal ions in a row, like pearls on a string.
Black holes box at two weights: active galactic nuclei are in the super-heavyweight class, whereas galactic black holes are relative featherweights. But does the same physics pack both objects' punches? It seems that it does.
Active galactic nuclei vary in a manner similar to Galactic black hole systems when appropriately scaled up by mass, meaning it is possible to determine how active galactic nuclei should behave on cosmological timescales by studying the brighter and much faster varying Galactic systems.
In laser-plasma based particle accelerators, a second laser pulse colliding with the first is used to obtain better control over the injection and subsequent acceleration of electrons. In this scheme, the electron beams are highly collimated, monoenergetic (with energy spread < 10%), tuneable (between 15 and 250 MeV) and most importantly, stable.
Reconstruction of the amount of oxygen in the ocean during the Ediacaran period using carbon- and sulphur-isotope records identifies three distinct stages of oxidation over this interval. Complex animals may have evolved during the second stage, indicating that this event may have played a key role in the evolution of eukaryotic organisms.
