Articles in 2014

The week in science: China crushes seized ivory, smuggled dinosaur skull recovered, and incoming asteroid spotted.

Ben Sheldon relishes a study of the broad-ranging impact of ornithology on modern biology.

Enterprising bioengineering PhD student is motivated by helping people.

Quinone could make flow-battery technology competitive with current storage methods.

In flow batteries, energy is produced by passing solutions of 'electroactive' materials — often, metal salts — through an electrochemical cell. A non-metallic electroactive material opens the way to large-scale energy storage. See Letter p.195

Scientists find extensive evidence of biofluorescence in marine species.

An analysis of data from forests across the planet reveals that the types of beneficial fungus with which tree roots associate determine the amount of carbon stored in soils. See Letter p.543

Practical, interdisciplinary ways of working forged during the Second World War had a lasting impact on a generation of physicists and their findings, says David Kaiser.

Welcoming lab environments and networking organizations help lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender scientists to excel.

Swarms of small satellites set to deliver close to real-time imagery of swathes of the planet.

Patients differ in their requirement for, and response to, various drug doses. A general platform that allows continuous monitoring of drug levels in the blood of rats may open the door to patient-specific dosing.

Using massive amounts of data to recognize photos and speech, deep-learning computers are taking a big step towards true artificial intelligence.

Violent incidents at academic institutions have spurred universities to adopt formal procedures designed to keep campuses safer. But do the tactics work?

Ecosystem mycorrhizal type is shown to have a stronger effect on soil carbon storage than temperature, precipitation, clay content and primary production; ecosystems dominated by ectomycorrhizal and ericoid mycorrhizal fungi contain 70% more soil carbon per unit nitrogen than do ecosystems dominated by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

Flow batteries, in which the electro-active components are held in fluid form external to the battery itself, are attractive as a potential means for regulating the output of intermittent renewable sources of electricity; an aqueous flow battery based on inexpensive commodity chemicals is now reported that also has the virtue of enabling further improvement of battery performance through organic chemical design.

Dark melanin pigment was detected in the fossilized skin of three distantly related marine reptiles (a leatherback turtle, mosasaur and ichthyosaur); benefits of thermoregulation and/or crypsis may have contributed to this melanisation, which therefore has implications for our understanding of how these animals may have lived.

A new method for identifying genetic loci that influence protein expression in budding yeast reveals considerable complexity in how genetic variation shapes the proteome.

This study provides a crystal structure of the Vif–CBF-β–CUL5–ELOB–ELOC complex, which shows that Vif mimics the action of SOCS2 to interact with CUL5 and ELOC.

UvrD acts in nucleotide excision repair by using its helicase/translocase activity to induce RNA polymerase backtracking, enabling repair enzymes to access DNA lesions.