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As officials in Washington discuss how to tackle outbreaks of bird flu more effectively (see From rhetoric to reality ), an outbreak in humans continues in Asia. Declan Butler assesses the situation in Indonesia, and finds out how likely it is that the virus might evolve into a pandemic strain.
Forget drugs carefully designed to hit one particular molecule — a better way of treating complex diseases such as cancer may be to aim for several targets at once, says Simon Frantz.
Everyone knows about the Amazon rainforest, but Brazil's tropical savannah is arguably under greater threat. Emma Marris visits a testing ground for future conservation strategies.
With a mathematician's logic and the perfectionism of a concert pianist, Nikos Logothetis is making waves in cognitive neuroscience — and putting the German town of Tübingen on the scientific map. Alison Abbott pays him a visit.
New fossil discoveries on Flores, Indonesia, bolster the evidence that Homo floresiensis was a dwarfed human species that lived at the end of the last ice age. But the species' evolutionary origins remain obscure.
A good look at the Deep Impact cometary encounter was taken by the Rosetta mission, itself on the way to a rendezvous with a comet in 2014. So what is a comet — icy dustball or dusty iceball?
The ‘insurance hypothesis’ holds that ecosystem diversity is a good thing because diversity confers overall stability in the face of stressful conditions. Experiments on grassland support that view.
‘Silence is golden’ is a maxim of limited applicability where stochastic resonance holds sway. The effect uses noise to boost signal output in certain systems — and has just been seen in oscillators on a very small scale.
How does fertilization cause animal eggs to begin embryonic development? Following entry of the sperm, the ingeniously regulated degradation of a protein seems to kick-start the stalled cell cycle.
The age of a tree and its size tend to increase together. Disentangling the effects of these two factors on tree vitality is no easy task, but further evidence adds to the view that it is size that matters.
Biologists in Osaka think that their city's 'un-Japanese' culture makes it the ideal part of the country to become a hub for biotechnology. David Cyranoski investigates.
