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Bristol-Myers Squibb has been stoking its research productivity. Meredith Wadman investigates whether an acquisition would be the right prescription for the company.
From a New Jersey beauty parlour to cutting-edge genetics by way of her own alopecia, Angela Christiano's life has all been tied up with hair. Helen Pearson meets a woman whose head is full of the stuff that covers it.
As radar satellites reach ever higher resolutions, they are exciting both scientists and the military. Can they make money too? Quirin Schiermeier reports.
Biodiversity researchers have focused on diversity at the cost of ignoring the networks of interactions between organisms that characterize ecosystems.
Newton's gravity, that old classical warhorse, is well established on scales as large as the Solar System. The latest experimental confirmation of its validity is tiny in scale, but big in implications.
Mutations that affect the opening and closing of ion channels in cell membranes are associated with disease. Defects in other properties of these channels can also cause ion leakage, with equally devastating consequences.
Atomic force microscopy is a well-established technique to image all kinds of surfaces at the atomic scale. But the force patterns that emerge can also pin down the chemical identity of individual atoms.
Insect viruses that cause polyhedrosis produce infectious microcrystals within a cell. These inclusions were used in a study that pushed the state of the crystallographic art to explain their exceptional stability.
Photonic lattices are materials specially designed to cage light. By shaking the mesh of the cage, we can see how light, initially passing freely, finds its room for manoeuvre progressively restricted.
Aneuploidy is the condition in which a cell has extra or missing chromosomes, and is often associated with tumours. But whether it is a cause or a consequence of cancer remains a vexed question.
Confirmation of localization effects in a true Anderson lattice of a perturbed periodic potential is achieved by using a photonic lattice on which random fluctuations are imposed. Nonlinear, self-focussing effects are also observed.
At low temperatures, a superconducting current that flows through a graphene layer sandwiched between two superconducting electrodes can be carried by either electrons or by holes, depending on the gate voltage that determines the charge density in the graphene layer. Interestingly, this finds that a finite supercurrent can flow even when the charge density is zero.
Investigations of individual graphene sheets freely suspended on a microfabricated scaffold in vacuum or in air reveal that the membranes are not perfectly flat, but exhibit an intrinsic waviness, such that the surface normal varies by several degrees, and out-of-plane deformations reach 1 nm.
Electrophysiology and in vivo imaging in larval zebrafish reveal a systematic relationship between the location of a spinal neuron and the minimal swimming frequency at which the neuron is active. This suggests an unexpected pattern of organization within zebrafish spinal cord that underlies the production of movements of varying speeds.
This paper reports a chemical genetics strategy for regulating a developmental protein in a fetus in a reversible, time-controlled fashion. Remarkably, this control can be achieved in the mother's uterus. An existing chemically regulated allele of glycogen synthase kinase-3β (GSK-3β) is used, where the protein is fused to a tag, and its activity depends on the presence of rapamycin, which destabilizes the mutant.