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The recreation of one of the deadliest diseases known could help us to prevent another pandemic. Or it might trigger one, say critics. Andreas von Bubnoff investigates whether the benefits outweigh the risks.
The Arctic is a unique testing ground for studying how birds navigate long distances. Jane Qiu catches up with an expedition to unravel the signals that help birds on their migrations.
The friction that arises when a scientific society aims both to serve its members and stay commercially competitive is generating heat within the American Chemical Society. Emma Marris takes the society's temperature.
Thousands of patients are queueing to be treated by Hongyun Huang at his Beijing clinic. But no Western journal editor seems willing to publish his research. David Cyranoski talks to the neurosurgeon whose global reputation among the ailing hasn't swayed his peers.
Sixty years on, Erwin Schrödinger's prediction that quantum mechanics would solve the riddle of how life started has not been fulfilled. But the appeal of using quantum theory to solve the mystery persists.
Many pathogenic bacteria possess a secretion machine that shoots noxious proteins into host cells. But the ammunition is larger than the bore of the bacterial gun, so how is it fed into the machine?
Measurements of the X-ray afterglow of long γ-ray bursts largely clarified the origin of these bright flashes of cosmic radiation. Their shorter-lived siblings are now beginning to divulge their secrets, too.
A fungus and a bacterium have been found in a symbiotic alliance that attacks rice plants. Rice feeds more people than any other crop, but the significance of this finding extends beyond its potential agricultural use.
Two-dimensional polymers are potentially useful structures — if we could only understand their properties. Observations of one polymer's intricate, two-stage, melting transition may help us do just that.
Earth's oxygen levels increased slowly over a long and ill-defined transitional period around two billion years ago. A microbial ‘footprint’ from this era provides biological evidence to complement existing geological data.