Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
At last nanotechnology is moving from the realm of hype and hope into the real world, with jobs and funding appearing on both sides of the Atlantic. Paul Smaglik considers the options.
Opportunities in nanotechnology are opening up in Japan — especially for young researchers willing to cooperate across disciplines, says Robert Triendl.
France's new research minister faces tough challenges in introducing much-needed changes into the research system. Her difficulties are compounded by impending budgetary constraints.
The oceans around the United States suffer from overfishing and pollution, but current government regulatory structures only hamper attempts to fix these problems. Can two high-level commissions put things right? Mark Schrope investigates.
By recording animal movements that are too fast for the human eye to follow, high-speed digital video is transforming studies at the interface of biomechanics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Rex Dalton reports.
Efficient and sensitive methods to determine whether, and to what extent, a person is infected with malaria should help to improve treatment. A high-tech approach, using mass spectrometry, may be the answer.
When cells move, they alter their internal skeleton to push membrane out at the front and pull it in at the back. New work fills in some of the gaps in our knowledge of how this process is regulated.
Magnesium diboride superconducts at an unexpectedly high temperature. It is now clear that the material also has an unusual, but long-sought, 'double energy gap' structure that influences its superconductivity.
Caffeine acts on our nerve cells to wake us up. It turns out that it does so through a molecular signalling pathway that involves a positive feedback loop, boosting caffeine's effects from inside the cell.
Seismic images suggest that oceanic plates in the northwest Pacific broke apart as they descended into Earth's mantle. That might explain the high magma output of some volcanoes in the region, and why others are extinct.
Until now, the signals that control the development of the legs in insects and vertebrates have been thought to be different. But new work reveals similarities, which might have evolutionary implications.
The Higgs boson has eluded discovery, so are physicists starting to doubt it exists? A reworking of ideas has produced the ‘Little Higgs’ theory, an attractive solution that suggests a discovery is almost within reach.
There are two distinct types of particles in nature: fermions and bosons. But it seems bosons may assume similar characteristics to fermion systems in the low-temperature regime typical of Bose–Einstein condensation.
A protein has been discovered that converts ‘fast-twitch’ muscle fibres into ‘slow-twitch’ fibres in mice. That enables isolated mouse muscles to sustain contraction for much longer than normal.
