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The current security crisis will lead to the restoration of an intimate relationship between science and the US federal government, in which money-grubbing will take a back seat.
For over a quarter of a century, planetary scientists have believed that water helped to shape the surface of Mars. Now one geophysicist is trying to prove them wrong. Larry O'Hanlon reports.
Researchers working on molecular self-assembly have never lacked ambition, but their dreams of producing commercially viable devices always looked like a distant goal. That may be about to change, says Philip Ball.
Predictions of flight performance in birds rely heavily on aerodynamic theory because it is difficult to measure energy consumption in flight. Fresh data leave part of the theory up in the air.
The trail of a particle undergoing brownian motion might be unkindly described as a drunken walk. A 40-year-old conjecture related to brownian motion and such random walks has finally been proved.
Strontium isotopes have been used to identify the sources of timber in buildings around one thousand years old. The method can now help to solve a range of other problems.
Conventional wisdom says that magnetic materials have to contain some metallic atoms. So the discovery of a type of pure carbon that is magnetic at room temperature is bound to invite controversy.
Huntington's disease results from defects in the huntingtin protein, but the exact mechanism has been unclear. Researchers now have a better idea, and the knowledge has proved beneficial — for flies at least.
Icebergs could represent a source of fresh water to arid lands, if they wandered from the coast of Antarctica. A new simulation provides some answers and raises more questions about iceberg movements.
Colloids, which consist of small particles in suspension, can switch from a fluid to a crystalline state. But a careful simulation of this phase transition shows that some types of colloids cannot crystallize.
Many messenger RNAs are not functional until they are processed by a complex called the spliceosome. It seems increasingly likely that processing is catalysed by the RNA — and not the protein — parts of this complex.
Atmospheric disturbances, such as aurorae and meteorites, are sometimes noisy. If the root cause of the sound could be harnessed artificially, it would make a useful public-address system.
