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US judges are starting to acknowledge that lethal injection could be an excruciating way to die. Emma Marris investigates whether the medical community's refusal to assist could help end the practice.
Elias Zerhouni has one of the biggest jobs in biomedical research — running the massive US National Institutes of Health. But is he leading the agency up the right path? Erika Check examines his tenure.
For almost 30 years, the hunt has been on for a ghostly particle proposed to plug a gap in the standard model of particle physics. The detection of a tiny optical effect might be the first positive sighting.
Tumour cells tend to carry many gene mutations, but at a potential cost to their overall fitness. Studying the interactions between genes on a large scale could be a way of identifying the chinks in the tumour cell armour.
Measuring the rotation of a gaseous planet is no easy task. For Saturn, do observations of its magnetic field — which indicate that it is spinning more slowly than thought — mark a revolution in our understanding?
Curiously, in cell division the proper separation of chromosomes into daughter cells needs set periods when they are stuck together. So how do they come apart at the right time and place? Their ‘guardian spirits’ intercede.
Although certain polymers have long been known to conduct electricity, they seemed to differ from metals in other electronic and optical properties. A new form of polymer turns that relation on its head.
True metallic conductivity in a much-studied conducting polymer (polyaniline) is demonstrated, but synthesized by a route that minimizes the density of structural defects believed responsible for the earlier deviations from classical metallic behaviour.
A relatively simple method to fabricate stable, reproducible molecular junctions with large areas from self-assembled monolayers of alkanethiols has been developed — this approach could offer a cheap and promising way forward for molecular electronics.
The examination of changes in tropical Pacific atmospheric circulation since the mid-nineteenth century using observations and a suite of global climate model experiments reveals a weakening of the Walker circulation, consistent with theoretical predictions.
A class of conserved regions in the tetrapod genome is derived from a SINE retroposon family that was active as much as 400 million years ago, and has retained recent activity in the coelacanth.
Caenorhabditis elegans has the potential to be used to discover new, biologically active small molecules in a high-throughput fashion and also to identify the protein targets of those small molecules.
Systemically administered modified siRNAs can be used in monkeys to achieve long-lasting silencing of a gene — previously, this had been established only in mice.
Single-molecule microscopy reveals that the kinesin-13 protein MCAK undergoes a one-dimensional random walk on the microtubule surface, unlike the unidirectional movement of other kinesins.
Thinking about scientific misconduct before tangling with a real case will help you protect your own career and promote research integrity. Kendall Powell investigates a few case studies.
