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Japan has the computer power for climate-change research — it just needs to attract people to use it, says Robert Triendl. Solving the skills shortage may involve a long-term change in strategy.
The winner of a new prize exemplifies outstanding scientific breadth. But crossing boundaries brings challenges of its own, and progress in meeting them has been mixed.
According to some ecologists, you don't need to invoke adaptation to explain biodiversity. They may sound like nihilists, but their ideas are proving remarkably resilient. John Whitfield reports.
A new observatory is about to search for the ripples in space-time that emanate from the Universe's most violent events. But despite its huge price tag, the detector might not spot anything. Geoff Brumfiel finds out why.
Following the creation of atomic Bose–Einstein condensates in the mid-1990s, a major goal has been to produce a condensate of molecules. Technical challenges remain, but that achievement is now tantalizingly close.
In order to move, cells need to push out protrusions known as lamellipods. These can vary greatly in their shapes, dynamics and contributions to motility, depending on their underlying molecular architecture.
Seismic readings suggest that a zone of weak, slippery rocks lies beneath the Pacific northwest coast of the United States. These frail layers might be limiting the violence of earthquakes.
The evolutionary trend towards high-crowned teeth in European herbivores during the Miocene was, it seems, driven by the geographically common groups, and not rare ones. That conclusion has broader implications.
It is difficult to match theoretically calculated masses of atomic nuclei to their experimentally measured values. It seems that chaotic motion inside the nucleus may be the reason for this discrepancy.
Most ion channels open and close — they are 'gated' — in response to cues in their environment. A crystal structure of a Ca2+-gated K+-ion channel provides insight into how gating works.
For the past 50 years a particular model of how animals locate the source of sounds has driven much of the research on auditory systems. It now seems, however, that this model might not apply to mammals.
Daedalus thinks that one test for the 'steady state' theory of the Universe would be to see if monatomic hydrogen is indeed continually being created, as predicted. He has a scheme for carrying out the necessary observations.
