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Japan is building a superb vessel for ocean drilling but seems reluctant to provide the necessary resources for using it. It is missing an opportunity to take a scientific lead.
The lethal toxins produced by cone snails are in hot demand for neuroscience research, and are being developed as potent drugs. Laura Nelson visits a would-be snail ‘farmer’, for whom milking time is fraught with danger.
Single-hulled ships are being rushed to the scrapyard in the wake of oil spills such as that of the Prestige. But will breaking them up cause environmental havoc too? Duncan Graham-Rowe finds out.
A large-scale survey of the diversity and abundance of plankton in different marine environments around the world has produced some thought-provoking similarities and contrasts with other ecosystems.
The orbital period of Mercury and its period of rotation are known to be in a 3/2 ratio, but the chances of the planet reaching this state seemed so small as to be unfeasible — until now.
Plasmas are usually a hot soup of dissociated electrons and ions. There are, however, techniques for cooling plasmas, and simulations show that an ultracold plasma could be made to crystallize.
Cells destroy misshapen proteins; viruses use the same methods to destroy healthy cellular proteins that are involved in antiviral defences. A long-sought intermediary in the process has now been uncovered.
The Stardust mission has made the closest approach ever to a comet. Its ‘fly-through’ of the gas and dust surrounding Wild 2 presents a unique opportunity to investigate the evolution of such bodies.
Babies born with physical defects in their hearts may survive, but they often suffer defects in heart function as adults. The physical and functional problems might, it seems, have the same genetic cause.
The electric field generated in the sedimentation or centrifugation of charged colloidal particles could be exploited to determine the charge and the mass of macromolecules in a single experiment.
