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Muslim countries stand to gain much from science but will fail to do so if fundamentalists repress openness. Chronic neglect by Arab leaders doesn't help either. The full Islam and Science special is available from news@nature.com.
The 57 countries in the Organization of the Islamic Conference are home to 1.3 billion people. The attendant diversity in culture, geography, economics and politics can be seen in these snapshots of five different approaches to science.
Islamist political parties are taking over from secular ones across the Muslim world. What does this mean for science at home and scientific cooperation with the West? Ehsan Masood investigates.
Mostafa Moin is a paediatrician and medical researcher who has served as Iran's minister for higher education and for science. He was a reformist candidate in Iran's presidential election last year, which was won by religious conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Declan Butler asks Moin about the prospects for science in Iran.
Building a knowledge-based society in today's Arab world depends on overcoming primarily political obstacles to progress. Nader Fergany analyses the reforms required for an Arab renaissance.
Muslim nations must take a big leap forward in developing science and technology to catch up with the rest of the world, argues Herwig Schopper, or they risk falling behind in the global economy.
Mirrors confine light, and light exerts pressure on mirrors. The combination of these effects can be exploited to cool tiny, flexible mirrors to low temperatures purely through the influence of incident light.
Coercion, not kinship, often determines who acts altruistically in an insect colony. But underlying affinities for kin emerge when coercion is removed: kin selection is what turns suppressed individuals into altruists.
Latitudes at which ancient salt deposits occur show that Earth's magnetic field has always aligned along its rotation axis. One possible implication is that ancient global glaciations were not caused by a realignment of this axis.
The mutations that cause retinoblastoma are well known, but how they enable the cancer to evade controls on cell division was unclear. Secondary mutations affecting a growth-regulatory pathway have now been identified.
A powerful combination of analytical techniques is used to shed light on the complex crystallizations of porous solids. Molecular recognition creates the seeds of order from which complex lattices grow.
Can the brain be induced to reroute neural information? Such an achievement is crucial if the function of damaged brain areas is to be taken on elsewhere. A study in monkeys explores this prospect.
Crystal imperfections known as nitrogen–vacancy defects give some diamonds a characteristic pink colour. Appropriately manipulated, these defects might have rosy prospects as the 'qubits' of a quantum computer.
Experiments where a tiny mirror, a mechanical microresonator, within an optical cavity undergoes 'self-cooling' is detailed. Under the right, finely tuned conditions, the thermal vibration of the mirror freezes out without outside influence. It cools down by a factor of 30, from room temperature to about 10 kelvin.
A micromechanical resonator is used as a mirror in a very high-finesse optical cavity, and its displacements are monitored with unprecedented sensitivity. By detuning the laser frequency with respect to the cavity resonance, a drastic cooling of the microresonator by intracavity radiation pressure is observed, down to an effective temperature of 10 kelvin.
Polyandry, where females mate with several males, can be adaptive, even when males provide no material benefits. This paper shows that for an Australian marsupial, polyandry improves female lifetime fitness in nature.
'Silver-bullet' approaches to conservation assume that conservation strategy can be based on the distribution of species in one or two well known taxonomic groups, as there is high cross-taxon congruence in large-scale patterns of biodiversity. Although birds, mammals and amphibians show similar patterns in terms of overall species richness, the distribution of threatened and rare species is found to be different in each group.
