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As politicians propose higher biofuel targets, soaring maize prices in the United States are putting new investment in ethanol production on hold. Lucy Odling-Smee reports.
Researchers have found certain stem-cell studies notoriously difficult to replicate. Erika Check finds out why, and whether it is slowing down the field.
How much can geometry and mathematics reveal about paintings? How far should hidden meanings be trusted in art? Jo Marchant investigates the latest, and possibly most controversial, interpretation of a Renaissance masterpiece.
Networks of interactions between thousands of molecules within cells seem to defy comprehension, but shared principles of design may simplify the picture.
Environmental pollutants such as dioxins affect human health. It now seems that dioxins exert their effect by forming atypical enzyme complexes that mediate the breakdown of steroid-hormone receptors.
Images of nanoscale structures can be constructed using the flow of electrons ejected from a metal probe tip by a fast laser pulse. The technique adds new dimensions to established methods of microscopy.
The conclusion that the primary divergences of the modern groups of mammals occurred in the mid-Cretaceous requires fresh thinking about this facet of evolutionary history — especially in ecological terms.
A receptor molecule in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster responds to a male pheromone in both sexes. But the effect of this response on sexual behaviour is not the same in males and females.
Electrons in one particular solid phase of plutonium are complex characters: while bound to atoms, in a quantum-mechanical mixture of two different valence states, they also roam freely throughout the crystal.
Telling if a molecule is right-handed or left-handed is a venerable problem, but traditional approaches cannot touch the subtlest cases. As so often, technical innovation has provided the way forward.
A massive compliation of molecular data to shows that not only did mammalian evolution have deep roots, but that the extant Orders of mammals did not become established until many millions of years after the dinosaurs had headed for their last round-up. In other words, the great end-Creatceous mass extinction had relatively little effect on mammal evolution.
A detailed theoretical approach is used to identify the electronic mechanisms responsible for the anomalous behaviour of late actinides, and reveals that plutonium has an unusual mixed-valent ground state.
In contrast to the conventional view, this paper reports transmission resonances in the terahertz frequency range for aperiodic aperture arrays, with quasicrystal or approximate quasicrystal structure.
Decisive instrumental advances in Raman optical activity (ROA), combined with quantum chemical computations, make it possible to determine the absolute configuration of (R)-[2H1, 2H2, 2H3]-neopentane.
The crystal structure of Sro7 and its interaction with the SNARE Sec9p is described. The structure reveals two WD40 β-propeller domains followed by a 60-residue tail. A mutant lacking the tail binds to the SNARE domain of Sec9 and inhibits assembly of the exocytic SNARE complex.
