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North Korea's nuclear test raises more questions than answers. Despite the small size of the blast, Jim Giles and Geoff Brumfiel get little reassurance from the weapon watchers.
What can pirates' journals and centuries-old cookbooks teach modern-day ecologists? Mark Schrope meets the researchers who trawl history books for deeper insights into marine ecosystems.
AIDS treatment in South Africa is often a tug-of-war between clinicians and traditional healers. Natasha Bolognesi meets a woman who is uniquely qualified to heal the rift.
It started life as an anaesthetic, then became a psychedelic club drug. Now researchers think ketamine could hold the key to understanding and treating depression, says Erika Check.
Standard theories tell us that, at some point in the Universe's evolution, free quarks and gluons must have become bound together into the hadronic matter we see today. But was this transition abrupt or smooth?
The compound eyes of ancestral flies picked up only one picture point in each facet. The evolution of a means to split up the light-sensitive cells increased this number to seven, boosting the eye's resolution greatly.
An effective but counter-intuitive trick to obtain highly ordered protein crystals is to 'seed' particles on disordered, porous surfaces. Computer simulations provide an explanation for the success of this strategy.
The finest scale of blood flow through the brain occurs in capillaries. Suspicions that capillary flow is regulated by cells that put the squeeze on these vessels are now borne out by detailed experiments.
The latest models suggest that atmospheric oxygen could have fluctuated between high and low concentrations once photosynthesis had evolved. But does the geological evidence really support this?
Pike move between two basins of a British lake to maximize their evolutionary fitness. This adaptive behaviour suggests that habitat selection is more significant in population dynamics than was thought.
Mitochondria are central to the process of programmed cell death that kills damaged or superfluous cells. Surprisingly, components of the death machinery turn out to be essential for keeping these organelles in shape.
The crystal structures and cryo-electron microscopy reconstructions of eEF3 on its own and attached to the ribosome are resolved, providing an insight into how eEF3 functions as a translation factor on the A and E sites on a ribosome.
The mysterious absence or rarity of liquid ethane on Titan is explained by its condensation onto the smog particles in the atmosphere at the cold temperatures. This dusty combination of smog and ethane forms deposits several kilometres thick on the surface, named 'smust'.
Experiments investigating strong interactions of light and matter at the single-photon level usually involve single atoms in mirrored cavities, but these are technically complex. This paper reports an alternative approach, demonstrating strong coupling between individual caesium atoms and the fields of a high-quality toroidal microresonator.
The standard model of particle physics predicts two transitions that are relevant for the evolution of the early Universe. Computationally demanding calculations now reveal that a real phase transition did not occur, but rather an analytic crossover, involving a rapid change (as opposed to a jump) as the temperature varies.
New theoretical work nails down the microscopic origin of 'dead layers' in nanometre-scale capacitors and demonstrates that it is an intrinsic effect. The results provide practical guidelines for minimizing the deleterious effects of the dielectric dead layer, for example regarding the choice of electrode.
A vaccination strategy against rabies in the endangered Ethiopian wolf aims to control the spread of disease through habitat corridors between subpopulations using only low vaccination coverage. This approach reduces the extent of rabies outbreaks, and should significantly enhance the long-term persistence of the population.
A secreted protein, nesfatin-1, is expressed in the hypothalamus and induces the feeling of being full. In rats, its injection into the brain decreases food intake, but blocking its action stimulates appetite.
Aprataxin cleans up unfinished DNA ligation intermediates. By cleaving off an adenylate group at the site of a ligatable nick, aprataxin generates ends that can then be re-ligated. This suggests that neurodegeneration results from the accumulation of these intermediates in post-mitotic neuronal cells.
