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Although modern medicine is established in Asia, traditional medicine also plays a big role in people's healthcare — and is gaining in popularity in other countries too.
For the past decade, physicist Kenneth Libbrecht has been studying how ice crystals form, taking thousands of photographs of their intricate structures. He describes how he grows snowflakes in his lab at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and never tires of tracking the real thing in the far north.
The week in science: Cornell to build US$2-billion science campus in New York; Kepler finds a twin Earth; and Fukushima is declared to be in cold shutdown.
To investigate traditional Asian medicines properly, we need to rethink the way they are tested, say Liang Liu, Elaine Lai-Han Leung and Xiaoying Tian.
The editor of Nature China reports on his first visit to a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner to find out how this ancient practice is dispensed in the twenty-first century — and to see if anything can be done to relieve his back pain.
Unusual lattice vibrations have been discovered in scandium trifluoride — a simple compound that shrinks when heated. This finding may help to explain the phenomenon of negative thermal expansion.
