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Six months into President George W. Bush's second term of office, partisan politics continues to widen the gulf between researchers and the administration.
Thanks to the influence of a powerful US senator, more than $120 million has been pumped into research on Alaska's endangered Steller sea lions in just four years. Rex Dalton asks what we've learned.
Electrodes implanted in the brain could transform the lives of psychiatric patients. Alison Abbott watched an operation to release a man from his obsessive thoughts.
Record-keeping in the lab has stayed unchanged for hundreds of years, but today's experiments are putting huge pressure on the old ways. Declan Butler weighs up the pros and cons of electronic alternatives to that dog-eared notebook.
Microchip-makers are starting to look beyond silicon, and what they see, reports Colin Macilwain, is a semiconductor industry of a very different complexion — but not for some time yet.
The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things.
Nicotine is extremely addictive, but it can also improve cognitive performance. Attempts to unravel the complex pathways underlying these effects pinpoint a single type of receptor in just one brain region.
Impurities that increase the number of electron carriers are essential in most bulk semiconductors. Introducing such foreign atoms into semiconductor nanocrystals is fiddly, and requires exact knowledge of the material's surface.
Cellular lineages are defined by master regulatory proteins that dictate their fate and ensure their survival. The dependence on such factors of tumours that are resistant to treatment may prove to be their Achilles' heel.
Grazing animals mow meadows to useful effect. From the results of experiments on newly established grassland, one such grazer, the little-considered slug, evidently has a big and beneficial influence on plant diversity.
Mathematical models that use instabilities to describe changes of weather patterns or spacecraft trajectories are well established. Could such principles apply to the sense of smell, and to other aspects of neural computation?
The twin Mars Exploration Rovers don't themselves range widely, but the observations they make do. Information on partial solar eclipses, salty rocks and magnetic dust are among the latest highlights of the rovers' findings.
