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If North Korea has nuclear weapons, its neighbours may want to develop their own. Geoff Brumfiel and David Cyranoski ask whether Japanese and South Korean scientists would answer a call to nuclear arms.
Paralysed patients are looking to scientists working on spinal-cord regeneration to help them walk again. Is this pressure causing too much faith to be placed in preliminary, inconclusive results? Helen Pearson investigates.
From the moment the mysterious illness known as SARS was declared a global threat to health, virologists were racing to develop a diagnostic test. Alison Abbott visits the tiny German lab that got there first.
The European Fireball Network has recovered a meteorite after photographing its violent entry into the Earth's atmosphere. This is only the fourth such recovery, and analysis points to a surprising past for this primitive object.
The Clay Mathematics Institute is offering a million dollars for a solution to the Poincaré conjecture, and Grisha Perelman may have found one. What is the conjecture, and why does it matter?
The stresses and strains imposed on certain cells mean that their membranes require constant repair. Study of the damage that affects muscle membranes reveals a new component of the repair process.
Liquid spreads and wets a surface, but wetting behaviour changes if the liquid contains nanoparticles. New experiments point to an explanation and a way to create effective detergents for cleaning oil from a surface.
A series of bacterial receptor proteins have been 'redesigned' by computer so that they bind molecules that are quite different from their natural ligands. The approach might be useful for designing catalytic proteins.
Science has flourished in eastern Germany since reunification, bringing researchers from far and near. But the tide of investment may be turning. Marieke Degen reports.
