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In the Tuscan countryside just outside Siena, a historic laboratory is helping Novartis in its bid to become the world's premier vaccine company. Alison Abbott reports.
Air bubbles trapped in the Antarctic ice sheet could yield precious information about Earth's climate more than a million years ago. But to access this record, scientists first have to climb one of the coldest peaks on Earth. Nicola Jones reports.
The rocks of Antarctica are obscured literally, and sometimes scientifically, by its ice. But drilling efforts are now showing what we can learn from the hard stuff. Alexandra Witze reports.
Every summer the Arctic Ocean loses more ice — and it could all be gone within decades. Quirin Schiermeier looks at how the vanishing summer ice affects those living in the north.
How best to serve patients' interests in large clinical trials? Martine Piccart, Aron Goldhirsch and their colleagues argue that maintaining academic independence is essential to early breast cancer trials.
Studies that have provided the first unbiased, large-scale analyses of DNA mutations across an array of cancers also have lessons for the proposal to annotate the entire cancer genome.
A simple chemical reduction process has been used to replicate intricate natural networks of silica at a relatively low temperature. The equally elaborate product is made of silicon — electronics' golden boy.
Evidence for a universal driver of evolution across all timescales could mean that the venerable paradox of stasis is dead. But even with such evidence, some biologists would be reluctant to accept its passing.
The Meridiani Planum region on Mars is rich in minerals derived from evaporation, but lacks a topography consistent with standing water. Do the deposits stem from upwelling groundwater early in the planet's history?
It seems that the epidermis is the cell layer through which growth-promoting plant hormones called brassinosteroids exert their effect on cell expansion — a finding that puts a new perspective on classical views of plant growth.
518 protein kinase genes in the human genome have been sequenced in a large sample of tumours, providing a global view of the patterns of mutations found and the variations in the number and type of mutations between individual tumours.
Classical novae are thousands of times brighter than dwarf novae, and are accompanied by the formation of shells around the system. This paper reports the discovery of a shell an order of magnitude more extended than those detected around many other classical novae surrounding the prototypical dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis, thereby observationally linking the objects.
The sought-after exotic two-channel Kondo effect has now been observed in quantum dots. This effect, where electrons in two electrodes are entangled with each other through their interaction with a single localized spin in a quantum dot, has so far been difficult to observe, as unlike the conventional Kondo effect, this new effect cannot be described within the conventional picture for electron behaviour of Fermi liquids.
This paper reports the 'low temperature' chemical reduction of silica microshells of the diatom Aulacoseira into silicon replicas. Structural and chemical analysis reveals an interconnected network of silicon nanocrystals, maintaining the original intricate three-dimensional microporous structure of the frustules.
This paper reports stratigraphically extensive ice-rafted debris, including macroscopic dropstones, in late Eocene to early Oligocene sediments from Norwegian-Greenland Sea, that were deposited between ∼ 38 and 30 million years ago. The data suggest the existence of at least isolated glaciers on Greenland about 20 million years earlier than previously documented, at a time when temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were substantially higher.
A correlate of flight in vertebrates is a reduction of the genome. But does flight cause genome loss, or does genome loss predispose animals to take flight? Histology and statistical techniques shows that genome reduction can be traced deep into the lineage of saurischian dinosaurs. Genome reduction thus joins the morphological features we now associate with birds that can be traced far back into the dinosaurian ancestry.
An alternative model for the homeostasis of adult epidermis posits posits only one type of stem cell undergoes both symmetric and asymmetric divisions to ensure epidermal homeostasis. A genetic approach of marking single cells in the adult mouse tail epidermis shows that the clones of labelled cells that arise from their inducible labelling approach are most likely to come from a single compartment of proliferating cells, which may undergo an unlimited number of divisions.
Plant shoots are derived from three tissue types, but which tissues drive or restrict growth has long been debated. A targeted expression of steroid genes in their corresponding dwarf mutant backgrounds is used to conclude that the epidermis both drives and restricts shoot growth.
The structure of a putative molybdate transporter (ModB2C2) is presented in complex with its cognate binding protein ModA. These results help provide the structural basis for the ATP-driven transport mechanism of both clinically relevant multi-drug ABC exporters and of ABC importers facilitating bacterial nutrient uptake.
Even though the pace of drug discovery is hotting up, many candidate drugs fail late in development. Caitlin Smith looks at some of the tools used early in drug discovery that could help improve the situation.
There's more than one way to do postdoctoral research, and unconventional routes can lead to international collaboration, intellectual or personal freedom and better job prospects. Kendall Powell explores the roads less travelled.
