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.
A report on science and society provides a useful overview of recent controversies and ways of approaching them. More could have been said about improving researchers' anticipation of the media and lobbyists.
The European Laboratory for Particle Physics is co-ordinating a bid that could help make Europe a leading player in what will be the largest distributed computing project in history.
Two staff members have begun grievance procedures against the University of Oxford over its handling of their complaints against Roy Anderson, the Linacre professor of zoology.
Two systematic biologists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York have built themselves a powerful parallel computing system from scratch and have slashed the time needed to uncover evolutionary relationships.
Ireland's spending on basic research is set to increase by more than an order of magnitude, and a foundation is to be created to administer the new money.
Leading AIDS dissident David Rasnick has claimed that Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, requested his scientific opinion on eight questions related to HIV and AIDS last January.
European research ministers intend to reverse controversial rules which have prevented the European Union's Fifth Framework Programme of Researchfrom supporting the running costs of European research facilities.
A company claiming to have made a revolutionary breakthrough in chemistry and energy production by creating a novel form of hydrogen has threatened several prominent physicists with possible legal action unless they stop disparaging the science behind the claim.
Women scientists who lost their jobs at the US Geological Survey office in Denver, Colorado, during a major layoff have filed a discrimination complaint with federal authorities.
Quantum mechanics allows matter to be prepared in a strangely correlated way called entanglement. In future, large numbers of entangled particles may be put to work in quantum computers and precise quantum measurements.
Temperate black cherry forests may owe their diversity in part to the presence of pathogenic fungi. Black cherry seedlings do not tend to survive beneath parent trees, probably because of the presence of fungi on the roots of their parents. Seedlings survive, however, when dispersed some distance away from their parents. Other tree species do become established beneath mature black cherry trees, promoting diversity.
Hydrogen could be the ultimate clean fuel of the future, but it is expensive and difficult to handle. Fuel cells that can directly oxidize the hydrogen found in regular fuels (principally hydrocarbons) offer a real alternative to the dirty and wasteful combustion processes by which most hydrocarbons are oxidized today.
The efficiency of optic fibres is limited by impurities, such as water. The water comes from the oxygen/hydrogen torch used to heat the glass rods before pulling them into fibres. It now appears that water moves through the glass faster than expected. So optic fibres made using a ‘dry’ heat source should remain transparent to light signals.
The cetaceans — dolphins, porpoises and whales — are aquatic mammals that returned to the sea. A long-standing puzzle is which other mammals are their closest relatives, for molecular and morphological approaches to the question give conflicting answers. A study that includes analysis of ancient ‘divergent’ fossil groups shows that such groups may contain much information to help resolve the puzzle.
Over the past century the power of artificial light sources has increased exponentially from a kilowatt to a petawatt (1015watts). As a result the world's most powerful lasers can now accelerate electrons to relativistic speeds, making laser-induced nuclear fission a reality.
Molecular hydrogen is a deceptively complex system, especially at high pressures. New theoretical studies need to take into account the quantum character of the protons and electrons making up the system in order to reproduce the experimental behaviour of dense hydrogen.
Cells send messages to their neighbours through ‘junctional complexes’, which link molecules on the cell surface to the cytoskeleton beneath. One of the proteins that forms these complexes, CASK, is now shown to travel from the cell surface to the nucleus, where it regulates gene expression by binding to DNA.
When room-temperature superconductors finally emerge, Daedalus will be ready to take advantage of them. He plans to invent an efficient, silent aero-engine with no moving parts, making use of the high current density in the superconductors.
