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Many medium-sized university departments feel they are engaged in an unequal struggle against larger and more-entrenched rivals. But there is a way in which they can fight back.
As a BP project to capture carbon dioxide from a power station bites the dust, supporters argue that a major opportunity for Britain has been lost. Andrea Chipman reports.
Smoking was banned in Californian bars a decade ago, and this week England follows suit. But Kris Novak finds that epidemiologists are still arguing about the effects of second-hand smoke.
In Parkinson's disease, dopamine-secreting neurons die — perhaps because unrelenting calcium entry during spontaneous electrical activity puts them under unusual pressure.
What elements, besides iron, make up Earth's core? Discrepancies in the isotopic ratios found in rocks from Earth's mantle and in undisturbed meteoritic material indicate strongly that one answer is silicon.
Vanilla or chocolate? Fight or flight? A career in academia or in industry? The neural processes of probabilistic decision-making provide clues about the 'common currency' through which decisions are made.
Carbon-rich stars are known to be prolific producers of molecules. Against expectations, astronomers have identified an old, oxygen-rich star that can also synthesize a chemically varied molecular cocktail.
A carbon revolution has occurred — carbon atoms can be coaxed into several topologies to make materials with unique properties. Nanotubes are the vanguard of this innovation, and are on the cusp of commercial exploitation as the multifunctional components of the next generation of composite materials.
The distribution of long-lived radiogenic isotopes along the world's mid-ocean ridges can be used to map geochemical domains, reflecting contrasting refilling modes of the upper mantle. Refilling of the upper mantle in the Atlantic and Indian domains is slow and confined to localized upwellings, whereas in the Pacific, upwellings are comparatively much wider and more rapid.
Humans frequently combine probabilities about possible outcomes to reach decisions, but monkeys can also make decisions based on probabilistic information about rewards. Neurons in the parietal cortex reveal the addition and subtraction of probabilistic quantities underlying these decisions.
Dopaminergic neurons heavily rely on Ca2+ channels to maintain their rhythmic activity, and this reliance increases with age. But adult neurons can be tempted to revert to using the Na+/HCN channels, as younger neurons do, by treatment with a commonly used drug.
Previous work has identified several genes where mutations lead to breast cancer, but other genetic and environmental factors must still be accounted for. A large study of genetic association with breast cancer points to four novel genes and many more genetic markers that should be pursued for their link to cancer susceptibility.
A variety of unexpected chemical compounds in the oxygen-rich shell of the red supergiant star VY Canis Majoris is reported. The molecules can be distinguished as arising from three distinct kinematic regions: a spherical outflow, a tightly-collimated, blue-shifted expansion and a directed, red-shifted flow, suggesting that oxygen-rich shells may be as chemically diverse as their carbon counterparts.
This paper reports the development of a source of visible light based on an inorganic nanowire made from potassium niobate, which as it has nonlinear optical properties, can convert light from one frequency to another. The nanowire light source is held with optical tweezers and scanned over a sample to make images of a test structure with sub-wavelength resolution.
The silicon isotopic compositions of basaltic rocks from the Earth and Moon are distinctly 'heavy'. The similar isotopic composition of the bulk silicate Earth and the Moon are consistent with large-scale isotopic equilibration during the 'giant impact', indicating that Si was already a light element in the Earth's core before the Moon formed.
Use of a long-term data set demonstrates the existence of sexually antagonistic fitness variation in a long-lived, sexually-dimorphic species in the wild — genes that make a good male do not make a good female, and vice versa. This sexually antagonistic effect results in selection against males that carry genes for high female fitness.
Neurons in the primate lateral habenula are shown to have reward-related activity that apparently signals the inverse to the dopamine response. Stimulation of lateral habenula suppresses dopamine neurons, suggesting that this area plays a role in shaping reward signals.
The identification of the large protein Ambra-1, which regulates autophagy and plays a crucial role in embryogenesis is described. The absence of Ambra-1 function during development results in severe neural tube defects associated with autophagy impairment, accumulation of ubiquitinated proteins, unbalanced cell proliferation and excessive apoptotic cell death.
As siRNAs and miRNAs have only been found in multicellular organisms, it was proposed that RNAi evolution was driven by the need to regulate expression of genes in different tissues. But both siRNAs and miRNAs are present in the unicellular alga, Chlamydomonas, suggesting that the evolutionary history of RNAi will need to be reassessed.
The tumour suppressor p53 directly activates the transcription of family of microRNAs, miR-34 family, which themselves suppress cell proliferation. The study also identifies miR-34 target genes that have roles in cell cycle progression.
A divergent E1 in vertebrates and sea urchin, Uba6, is identified, which specifically activates ubiquitin but not other ubiquitin-like proteins in vitro and in vivo. Human Uba6 and Ube1 have distinct preferences for E2 charging in vitro, and their specificity depends in part on their C-terminal ubiquitin-fold domains, which recruit E2s.
