Nature News
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Climate scientists join search for alien Earths
The hunt for life beyond the Solar System is gaining new partners: NASA climatologists. After more than 30 years of studying Earth, a team at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York will adapt its global climate model to simulate conditions on potentially habitable exoplanets. The effort is part of a…
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Tails tell the tale of dinosaur sex
Researchers think they have come up with a way to tell fossils of male dinosaurs from those of females — at least for some small feathered species. The key differences between the sexes lie in bones near the base of the tail.
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Materials science: The hole story
The crystals are metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), molecular scaffolds made up of metal-containing nodes linked by carbon-based struts . The resulting pores are ideal for trapping guest molecules and, in some cases, forcing them to participate in chemical reactions. And they can be tailored with exquisite precision: researchers have created more than 20,000 types of MOF,…
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Tumour mutations harnessed to build cancer vaccine
Vaccines made from mutated proteins found in tumours have bolstered immune responses to cancer in a small clinical trial.
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Extreme cryptography paves way to personalized medicine
The dream for tomorrow’s medicine is to understand the links between DNA and disease — and to tailor therapies accordingly. But scientists working to realize such ‘personalized’ or ‘precision’ medicine have a problem: how to keep genetic data and medical records secure while still enabling the massive, cloud-based analyses needed to make meaningful associations. Now,…
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UK mapped out by genetic ancestry
Researchers have found genetic signatures among Britons that betray their historical roots in particular locales of the United Kingdom, leading to the finest-scale map of genetic variation yet created. The analysis — which shows a snapshot of clusters of genetic variation in the late 1800s, when people were less likely to migrate far from their…
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Mercury seen as never before
In its final weeks, the MESSENGER mission reveals fresh details about the planet’s scorched surface.
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Conflict resolution: Wars without end
The world is full of bloody conflicts that can drag on for decades. Some researchers are trying to find resolutions through complexity science.
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El Niño arrives later and weaker than expected
Long-awaited shift in tropical Pacific will have little effect on weather patterns.