Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Can an adult human cell be turned back to an embryonic state without the need for cloning? If so, ethical objections to personalized regenerative medicine would be swept away. Carina Dennis reports.
A new ship and a wave of funding will let scientists drill where they have never been able to drill before, from near the North Pole to the rocks lying beneath Earth's crust. Rex Dalton and David Cyranoski report.
Joan Slonczewski is a microbiologist at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and is also an acclaimed writer of science fiction (see Nature 405, 1001; 2000). Her novels include Brain Plague and A Door into Ocean.
In the developing sense organs of fruitflies, cells must signal instructions over long distances. But the signalling molecule is bound to the cell membrane, so how can it reach its targets? The answer, it seems, is by touch.
The discovery of two neutron stars tightly orbiting each other suggests that the rate of neutron-star mergers in the Universe is higher than had been thought — which is good news for seekers of gravitational waves.
The main transport vehicles inside cells are spherical vesicles that form when patches of membrane curve into buds and then pinch off. 'Coat' proteins both control, and are controlled by, this membrane curvature.
It's sometimes difficult to observe combustion in situ — inside, say, a porous material or an industrial reactor. But with the help of nuclear magnetic resonance, a new vista has opened up.
For some 40 million years, the Afro-Arabian landmass existed in splendid isolation. A newly described fossil fauna from the end of that time provides a window on the evolution of the continent's large mammals.
In fewer than three dimensions, the behaviour of electrons in metals should change to that of a 'Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid'. A photoemission study of one-dimensional carbon nanotubes supports this prediction.
Generation of a particular 'fusion' protein is characteristic of one type of leukaemia. But is it in fact the cleavage of this protein into smaller parts that is important? Provocative new findings suggest that it is.
