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Politicians in the United Kingdom and United States have launched efforts to extend daylight-saving measures — hoping to save lives, cut power use and combat carbon emissions. But energy experts say that it's not that easy. Michael Hopkin reports.
Sophisticated new genetic tests face an uncertain future — unless they can win clear-cut approval from regulators, insurers and, most importantly, doctors. Virginia Gewin reports.
Next week, African leaders will come together to talk about science and technology at a summit in Ethiopia. This presents an opportunity to allot some foreign aid and, if they get it right, to launch projects that will draw further donations from abroad, says Michael Cherry.
Taking hormones to replace those lost during menopause helps many women with their symptoms, yet it may also cause cognitive decline. Could the age at which hormones are taken determine whether they will be beneficial or harmful? Tom Siegfried reports.
By 2020 the semiconductor industry wants a memory device that can store a trillion bits of information in an area the size of a postage stamp. As companies race towards this goal, chemists are coming up with an unusual approach. Philip Ball reports.
Searching for the source of a smell is hampered by the absence of pervasive local cues that point the searcher in the right direction. A strategy based on maximal information could show the way.
In a trail-blazing experiment 50 years ago, it was observed that photons from far-off stars bunch up. But in fact there's a more general distinction among free, non-interacting particles: bosons bunch, and fermions 'antibunch'.
Modifier proteins, such as ubiquitin, are passed sequentially between trios of enzymes, like batons in a relay race. Crystal structures suggest the mechanism of transfer between the first two enzymes.
Chemical analysis of a plume emanating from near the south pole of Enceladus indicates that the interior of this saturnian moon is hot. Could it have been hot enough for complex organic molecules to be made?
The natural habitat of eukaryotic genomes is the cell nucleus, where each chromosome is confined to a discrete region, referred to as a chromosome territory. This spatial organization is emerging as a crucial aspect of gene regulation and genome stability in health and disease.
The structure of the enzyme E1 bound to its four substrates is described, showing how a thioester switch toggles E1-E2 affinities. Transferring the Ubl's thioester linkage between successive conjugation enzymes induces striking conformational changes and alters interaction networks to drive consecutive steps in Ubl cascades.
A numerical model shows that the net effect of the winds driven by the polar energy inputs is not to heat, but to cool the low-latitude thermosphere. This surprising result allows us to rule out known polar energy inputs as the solution to the energy crisis at Saturn.
A stream of bosons tends to bunch together, whereas fermions avoid each other. Although evidence for each type of behaviour has been observed in various settings, no single experiment has been able to directly compare the two types of quantum statistics until now, where this paper reveals the contrasting behaviour of 3He (a fermion) and 4He (a boson) in the same apparatus.
A computational model of odour plume propagation and experimental data are used to devise a general search algorithm for movement strategies in chemotaxis, based on sporadic cues and partial information. The strategy is termed 'infotaxis' as it locally maximizes the expected rate of information gain.
A large 'magnetoresistance' signal is observed in a system that combines a carbon nanotube as the channel for spin-polarized current with electrodes made from manganite, and shows that spin-polarized electrons are efficiently injected from manganite to nanotube and also efficiently transported through the nanotube channel.
This paper describes a 160,000 bit molecular electronic memory circuit, which is roughly analogous to a projected year 2020 DRAM circuit. The circuit has a large numbers of non-working memory bits, but these are readily identified and isolated. The working bits were then configured to form a fully functional random access memory circuit for storing and retrieving information.
Transitive inference is demonstrated in fish populations by showing that they can learn the implied hierarchy among other unfamiliar fish by watching fights between rivals. Remarkably, fish can do this indirectly, as 'bystanders', without any reinforcement; they also make sophisticated use of contextual information available to them.
English is the language of science. So to what extent are researchers who are non-native English speakers at a disadvantage? Bonnie Lee La Madeleine talks to scientists hailing from Japan to Germany.