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.
As the accident that blackened the name of nuclear power fades from memory, openings present themselves for the technology to edge its way back into public favour.
The White House is looking for a new head for the National Cancer Institute. What kind of person does it take to run a $4.8-billion research powerhouse? Nature asked some top cancer researchers for their thoughts.
Twenty years after the worst nuclear accident in history, arguments over the death toll of Chernobyl are as politically charged as ever, reports Mark Peplow.
China's drug market is booming, and will soon be the fifth largest in the world. But despite this potential, global companies are being advised to approach the country with caution, as Colin Macilwain reports.
Twenty years ago, the nuclear accident at Chernobyl exposed hundreds of thousands of people to radioactive fallout. We still have much to learn about its consequences, argue Dillwyn Williams and Keith Baverstock.
The Hodgkin–Huxley theory that explains the mechanism of how neurons fire forms the cornerstone of computational neuroscience. But something it hasn't predicted is happening in the brain cortex.
It's not easy to work out what is going on beneath four kilometres of ice. But remote imaging has enabled the discovery of the long-distance discharge of water from one subglacial lake to another in Antarctica.
The repeated appearance and loss of a spot on the wings of fruitflies during their evolution is caused by mutations in one gene. This finding provides an unprecedented window on the genetics of convergent evolution.
The question of how much light the first stars produced is fundamental to models of the Universe's development. But observations have so far failed to agree: is the answer a lot, or not very much at all?
Collective behaviour in neurons in the vertebrate retina is described quantitatively by models that capture the observed pairwise correlations, but assume no higher order interactions.
The structure of full-length Hsp90 in association with an ATP analogue and a co-chaperone details for the first time how ATP binding changes Hsp90's conformation, and how the co-chaperone stabilizes the overall structure so that target proteins can bind.
Experimental characterization of entanglement — a vital resource for quantum information applications — is difficult, but this study reports a direct, quantitative measurement of entanglement in a simple linear optics set-up.
An even more extreme version of the ‘confinement’ effect — when electron charge motion in layered transition-metal oxides is highly anisotropic, ranging from metallic within the plane of the layers to near insulating in the perpendicular direction — is reported in a layered manganese oxide.
Use of large-ensemble energy balance modelling to simulate temperature response to past solar, volcanic and greenhouse gas forcing suggests a very small probability that climate sensitivity will exceed 7 degrees Celsius.
Observation of surface elevation changes over 16 months in an area of the East Antarctic ice sheet overlying subglacial lakes suggests a rapid discharge of one lake to at least two other lakes, involving a water volume of 1.8 km3 — in conflict with previous expectations that subglacial lakes have long residence times and slow circulations.
A new species of fossil snake with robust hindlimbs and a sacral region is likely to be the most primitive snake yet known — its features indicating a terrestrial, perhaps burrowing origin of snakes, rather than the marine origin that is sometimes suggested.
A computer model that lets notional organisms make their own rules as they go along results in a rich ecology of cooperative behaviour never before seen in such simulations, in which cooperative ‘starlings’ and ‘ravens’ are added to the expected ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ of game theory.
Male wing pigmentation pattern involved in courtship display has been gained and lost multiple times in a Drosophila clade, each of the cases analysed (two gains and two losses) involving regulatory changes at the pleiotropic pigmentation gene yellow.
Caspase-12 directly inhibits caspase-1 and so diminishes the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines — meaning mice without caspase-12 are therefore better equipped to combat bacteria than normal mice and become resistant to peritonitis and septic shock.
An alternative and conceptually new ‘pharmaco-metabonomic’ approach to personalizing drug treatment uses a combination of pre-dose metabolite profiling and chemometrics to model and predict the responses of individual subjects.
Creating a new drug is a long and painstaking process, involving the skills and talents of numerous types of scientist, says Hannah Hoag. Each is vital to different stages of producing a drug that's both safe and effective. Drug development draws on various kinds of scientist.
