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Despite the pervasive tension between AIDS researchers and the South African government, last week's international AIDS conference in Durban was successful on several fronts.
Plans for an international synchrotron research facility serving 11 countries in the Middle East have taken a step forward with a formal decision that the facility should be located in Jordan.
Scientists who use facilities supported by the US Department of Energy are set to miss out on the large increases in science spending expected from this year’s budget round in Washington.
After a 24-hour delay, scientists are celebrating the successful launch of two of the four Cluster II satellites that will fly in formation around the Earth.
Former South African President Nelson Mandela, last week came as close as politically possible to chastising his successor, Thabo Mbeki, for reopening a debate on whether HIV causes AIDS.
Nevirapine's low price and simplicity of administration has made it a popular antiretroviral drug for preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV in developing countries.
Advocates of federal funding of US research using human stem cells are hoping their cause will be boosted by the reported success of an experimental treatment of type 1 diabetes.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has linked up with five private corporations to launch a programme for assessing projects for carbon sequestration.
Identifying an appropriate role for the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) has long been one of the thorniest science-related issues facing the European Union (EU).
Evolutionary trees constructed by studying biological molecules often don't resemble those drawn up from morphology. Can the two ever be reconciled, asks Trisha Gura
The textbooks say nothing can travel faster than light, not even light itself. New experiments show that this is no longer true, raising questions about the maximum speed at which we can send information.
To understand the motion of individual proteins in muscles or the cooperative motions of groups of bacteria, scientists need ideas from both biology and physics, as shown at a meeting held last month.
Rats use their whiskers, which sweep back and forth, to detect objects. The resulting information is complicated: the brain needs to work out what was touched, and where and when it was touched. A study shows that these different types of information are segregated into two sensory channels.
Water vapour in Earth's upper troposphere acts as a powerful greenhouse gas, hence the interest in monitoring variations in its concentration there. A way to do so may emerge from the finding that global lightning activity is correlated with upper tropospheric levels of water vapour.
The ultimatum game, which involves sharing a hypothetical sum of money with someone else, has been used by anthropologists to investigate cultural differences in concepts of what is fair. The results were fascinating, as emerged at a meeting held last month.
Antifreeze proteins enable certain organisms to survive cold conditions, and are best known in fish. Examples from grass and two species of insect have now also been characterized.
A new simulation provides answers to such questions as the best way to pack a long rope into a small box. Some of the optimal shapes correspond to the naturally occurring, helical structures of proteins and DNA.
Spectrin is thought be required for the integrity of cell membranes and a variety of other functions, such as cell polarization. But work with fruitflies and nematodes shows that spectrin's more likely role is as a 'protein accumulator', working to trap specific proteins at certain points beneath the plasma membrane.
If a human brain is regarded as a digital computer, it should be possible to measure its processing power from the frequency of nerve impulses. Daedalus reckons he can detect this firing rate from the magnetic activity of sodium ions in nerve cells.
