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Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans last year, has thrust the link between climate change and extreme weather events onto the US political agenda.
The death of a French professor in a laboratory explosion in March was a shocking reminder that research can be a risky business. Mark Peplow and Emma Marris investigate whether chemistry deserves its reckless reputation.
Scientists and policymakers are battling over whether global warming is making hurricanes more destructive. Alexandra Witze ventures into the heart of the storm.
Scientists say they gas mice and rats with carbon dioxide because it is humane. It's also simple, cheap and keeps their hands clean. Emma Marris analyses the final seconds of the lab rodents' life.
Germany's best-known stem-cell researcher is leading a charge to build up more commercial acumen on the nation's university campuses. Ned Stafford reports.
The Arctic is one of the sensitive pressure points for Earth's climate. A new sediment core reveals much more about the region's role in a long-term transition from ‘greenhouse’ to ‘icehouse’ conditions.
HIV-1 replicates itself by integrating into its host cell's DNA. Studies in cell culture reveal that nuclear-membrane proteins aid engagement of the viral DNA with that of its host before integration.
The NFAT transcription factors activate the expression of many genes involved in the immune response and the development of a variety of tissues. They have now been implicated in Down's syndrome.
It is in the public interest to keep Earth's climate on an even keel — the public, in this case, being all the world's population. Are you prepared to stake your own reputation on helping to improve matters?
Given a holding material with sufficiently small and uniform pores, gaseous oxygen can be made to form regular one-dimensional chains. That gives unprecedented insight into the properties of confined gases.
Analysis of Arctic Ocean sediment core spanning more than 50 million years identifies several key features of Arctic climate history — the revised timing of the earliest Arctic cooling events implied by this record coincides with those from Antarctica, supporting arguments that climate change is symmetric about the Earth's polar regions.
A core of sediments taken from underneath the Arctic Ocean provides evidence that ocean conditions could support a free-floating fern, Azolla, during the middle Eocene epoch, roughly 50 million years ago.
Identification of the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum in a marine sedimentary sequence shows that sea surface temperatures near the North Pole increased from roughly 18 degrees Celsius to over 23 degrees Celsius — such warm values imply the absence of ice and thus exclude the influence of ice-albedo feedbacks on this Arctic warming.
Uncovering the existence of a two-dimensional quantum critical point in a material that is in other respects electronically three-dimensional elucidates the subtle collective behaviours responsible for this reduction in dimensionality.
Stylistic similarities of stone tools recovered from 800,000-year-old deposits in Flores with stone tools associated with the much later Homo floresiensis suggest continuity — calling into question claims that the brain of Homo floresiensis was too small to have accommodated technology.
Results from an experimental manipulation showed a significant survival advantage for rare genotypes in natural populations of guppies, confirming that frequency-dependent selection can act as a potent mechanism in maintaining genetic variation in natural populations.
A newly identified step in maturation of the small ribosomal particle regulated by the kinase Hrr25 is critical, for without Hrr25, immature 40S subunits accumulate.
Redesign of the I-MsoI endonuclease binds and cleaves the new recognition site ∼10,000-fold more effectively than does the wild-type enzyme, with a level of target discrimination comparable to the original endonuclease.
After years of quasi-colonial treatment from their European partners, local astronomers in Chile and South Africa are coming into their own. Dirk Steuerwald tracks the changing climate for the star-gazers of the south.
