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Academic experts say they were all too aware of the devastation that would claim New Orleans and its surroundings in the wake of a fierce hurricane. Could they have done any more to convince politicians of the need to protect the city?
Tackling the legal and ethical minefield associated with human embryonic stem-cell research is not for the faint-hearted. Erika Check meets one man who is relishing the challenge.
Sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird believed extinct for 50 years, have fired the public's imagination. But is it really alive? Rex Dalton joins the team trying to save this elusive bird.
When proteins assemble themselves into fibres, there can be grave pathological consequences. Designing an otherwise soluble protein to make fibres provides a general mechanism for the construction process.
How does the size of a system affect its thermodynamic irreversibility? A deft experiment that observes the unfolding and refolding of a single molecule of RNA provides insights into the question at a small scale.
Whole-genome arrays have been used to reveal small islands of genetic differentiation in Anopheles mosquitoes. Analysis of these regions will identify genes involved in the initial stages of speciation.
Nature has a whole battery of dedicated enzymes to make the complex links between sugar rings — how can synthetic chemists compete? An ingenious approach fills a big gap in the synthetic tool-kit.
Sodium-coupled neurotransmitter transporters are essential for neurons to communicate. The high-resolution crystal structure of a bacterial relative hints at how this family of transporters works.
Changes in climate and land use are implicated as the main factors in the large-scale loss of carbon from soils in England and Wales over the past 25 years. The same picture is likely to apply much more broadly.