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.
Clinton's belated decision to invest heavily in basic science and engineering at the National Science Foundation deserves to win the support of his political opponents on Capitol Hill.
The European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) is planning to announce today (10 February) that it has “compelling evidence” that it has successfully created the quark–gluon state of matter predicted to have existed shortly after the Big Bang.
Austria is being accused by the European Commission of failing to adequately implement European animal welfare rules on the care of animals that are being bred for experiments.
Guidelines issued recently by the US National Institutes of Health limiting restrictions on the use of research tools have come under fire from representatives of several small biotech companies at a symposium on intellectual property.
Dan Goldin, administrator of the US space agency NASA, has ordered a sweeping review of all spacecraft missions scheduled for launch in the coming year following a spate of high-profile failures.
Legislation altering the oversight of all federally funded human clinical gene therapy trials was introduced into the US House of Representatives last week.
German genome scientists and industrial research managers have rejected accusations by a top government official that they have not been doing enough to convince the government of the political importance of genome research.
President Bill Clinton's eighth and last budget proposal — submitted to Congress on Monday — would give several US science agencies a larger increase than any of his previous budgets.
Clues to the function of a protein can be obtained by seeing whether it interacts with another protein of known function. This principle of guilt-by-association has now been applied to the entire protein complement of yeast.
Jupiter's atmosphere is famous for its storm systems, such as the Great Red Spot, which has been active for more than 300 years. What drives Jupiter's turbulent weather has long been a matter of debate. New images from the Galileo spacecraft indicate that moist convection — familiar from thunderstorms on Earth — transports energy upwards through the clouds.
When people are deprived of sleep their performance in various tasks is impaired. But the degree of impairment depends on the nature of the test — for example, the effects of sleep deprivation are far more likely to be felt if the test is boring. Assessment of performance has mainly been subjective, but one group has now examined the effects of sleep deprivation using brain-imaging techniques.
Creating new enzymes by ‘rational design’ has proved to be extremely difficult. A new approach combines structural modification with natural selection — so-called ‘directed evolution’. With this technique, one enzyme in a biosynthetic pathway can be converted into another enzyme with a completely different function.
The Hox gene family contains 39 related genes that are crucial for development in mammals. By swapping the protein-coding regions of Hox genes around, it has been shown that the function of a Hox gene may depend not on which protein it produces, but on where, when and how strongly it is expressed.
The possibility that there are regions in the Universe where time runs in the opposite direction to ours seems bizarre. But taken seriously, this idea may reveal something about the nature of dark matter.
Lake Vostok is a giant, freshwater lake hidden below the East Antarctic ice sheet. There is some evidence that the lake may contain ancient life. Radar data now confirms that ice melts and refreezes at the base of the ice sheet in a way that encourages circulation of the water. This has implications for the survival of life in the lake.
Houses have roofs and foundations which are built of different materials and require upkeep. Likewise, cells — especially for instance those that form an epithelial sheet — have a top and bottom, and the right proteins have to be directed to the right place throughout the cells' lives. A molecule called Scribble now emerges as a central player in the maintenance of cell polarity in the fruitflyDrosophila.
Blood clotting in the wrong place in the human body can be a killer. Daedalus plans to tackle the problem with an innovative use of ultrasound. A converging beam directed for a time to, say, one of the wider arteries, will agitate the blood, break up any incipient clots and keep blood safely fluid.
