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Let's not get carried away with the images from NASA's Spirit rover, nor despair of Britain's silent Beagle 2. The best way to explore Mars is through a programme that builds patiently on each mission's successes and failures.
Can Budapest regain its status as one of Europe's scientific hubs? Perhaps, if the generation gap between Soviet-era scientists and young, westward-looking researchers can be bridged. Quirin Schiermeier reports.
Digging in the dirt in search of clues to the past has churned up millions of pieces of pottery. Haim Watzman unearths the new technologies being developed to sift through them all.
Microscopic glass beads coated with lipid membranes provide a sensitive detector of interactions between proteins and ligands. The changing spatial order of the array of beads in solution is the key.
Embryonic stem cells can develop into many specialized cell types in culture dishes. It now seems that they can also generate primordial germ cells, which then go on to form sperm and eggs.
Global warming is altering the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species. Application of a basic law of ecology predicts that many will vanish if temperatures continue to rise.
A supernova seen in 1993 defied explanation. Astronomers suspected the dying star had lost much of its hydrogen before the explosion. The discovery of a companion to this star suggests where that gas went...
The diversity of cellular stresses that activate the 'guardian of the genome' — p53 — begs the question of how these signals all converge on one protein. Perhaps the key to this integration is the nucleolus.
Computer simulations and laboratory experiments have shed light on how an asymmetric pattern of gene expression is fixed in vertebrate embryos — an early step towards asymmetric development of the internal organs.
The US National Institutes of Health stipends are being used as de facto guidelines for postdoc salaries. But do institutions try to meet them? Karen Kreeger investigates.
