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Flexible circuits inspired by human skin offer options for health monitoring, prosthetics and pressure-sensing robots. Flexible circuits inspired by human skin offer options for health monitoring, prosthetics and pressure-sensing robots., Author(s): Katharine Sanderson Author Affiliations: Microscope image of a flexible circuit printed onto skin, which works even when stretched. Credit: John Rogers, Univ. Illinois/SPL Coloured scanning electron micrograph of an [...]

A new class of chemical instrumentation seeks to alleviate the tedium and complexity of organic syntheses. A new class of chemical instrumentation seeks to alleviate the tedium and complexity of organic syntheses., Author(s): Katharine Sanderson Author Affiliations: Automation: Chemistry shoots for the Moon A machine for synthesizing small molecules at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign relies on syringe pumps to push [...]

But a study of the publications of millions of researchers also suggests that women are less likely to continue their academic careers than their male counterparts. But a study of the publications of millions of researchers also suggests that women are less likely to continue their academic careers than their male counterparts., Author(s): Katharine Sanderson Author Affiliations: More women than ever are starting careers in science Quantum physicist Lisa Ringena makes adjustments to the Atom Trap Trace Analysis system at the Kirchhoff [...]

Take a tour through the images that defined 2009, from the murkiest depths of the oceans, where warring worms pepper their enemies with glowing bombs, to the spectacular swirling rainbows [...]

The crisis that swept across the world's financial markets this autumn is widely regarded as the worst since the 1930s. The global economic downturn that helped precipitate the crash, and [...]

A potentially vast source of renewable energy sits just out of our grasp. Each year, more than 40 million tonnes of inedible plant material, including wheat stems, corn stover (the [...]

The inedible parts of plants are feeding the next generation of biofuels. But extracting the energy-containing molecules is a challenging task., Author(s): Katharine Sanderson [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) Katharine Sanderson is a journalist based in Toulouse, France., A potentially vast source of renewable energy sits just out of our grasp. Each [...]

By the latter half of the 1980s, the worldwide chemical industry knew that it had to clean up its act: its environmental reputation was dismal. Still fresh in the public [...]

When Rui Wang saw the painted Easter eggs his ten-year old daughter had brought home from school in 1998, he was unaware of the stink they were about to create. [...]

DNA sequencing is a technology on the move. In April, 454 Life Science, based in Branford, Connecticut, sequenced the entire genome of James Watson in two months for less than [...]

Solar cells can take sunlight and produce a current, giving instant power. But as soon as the Sun goes down, the lights go dim. If you could turn sunlight into [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson [1] [illus. 1] Solids have a reputation for permanence and reliability. Astronauts and sailors rejoice in returning to solid ground. And few things are more durable than [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson [1] Critics of the US ethanol industry have long derided it as an environmentally questionable subsidy to Mid-western farmers that simply serves a transparently political purpose. Voters [...]

Would you put such trust in your bones to hold you up and move you around if you knew they were made from jelly and chalk? Hydroxyapatite is the inorganic, [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson A giant molecular bauble, by far the largest single-molecule metal-cluster ever made, is confounding chemists. Involving almost 500 silver atoms, the crystals are so large and complex [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson [illus. 1] For the past three months Joerg Schaefer, a physicist at the University of Wrzburg in Germany, has been waiting for a group of theoretical spectroscopists [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson [illus. 1] ?One of the continuing scandals in the physical sciences is that it remains impossible to predict the structure of even the simplest crystalline solids from [...]

The rich, roasted aroma of coffee or the golden-brown colour of crispy French fries are enough to set most mouths watering. But the high-temperature cooking that gives these foods their [...]

DNA is the kind of polymer that chemists dream about. Because its complementary sequences can bind to one another, individual molecules of the right sequence will assemble all by themselves [...]

For the past decade, NASA's mantra for exploring Mars has been to 'follow the water'. The agency based its aqueous obsession on the idea that finding evidence of past or [...]

THE BUSINESS OF BIOFUELS Petrol might yet survive the green revolution. Some investors are taking seriously the concept of 'green gasoline'--transforming the woody remains of plants into exact replicas of [...]

The promise of green gold is fading from Jatropha curcus, a shrub that thrives in arid conditions and whose seeds yield a diesel-like oil. Many had seen it as a [...]

Protein structures are getting regular makeovers with the help of 're-refinement' software developed by Dutch structural biologists. The Protein Data Bank (PDB) holds nearly 53,000 three-dimensional structures of protein molecules [...]

Nanocrystals called quantum dots have promised to revolutionize display technologies, solar power and biological imaging for more than a decade. Yet the quantum-dot market has remained small, with a handful [...]

Lay-offs, stalled projects and grim financial forecasts are affecting the solar-energy industry, which until recently had been growing with little end in sight. In November 2008, BP Solar announced that [...]

MATERIALS Replacing all the metal in aircraft with lightweight composite materials could reduce fuel consumption by 25%, says aeronautical engineer Ian Poll of Cranfield University, UK. The fuselage of Boeing's [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson It took 22 years and involved 64 chemical transformations, but chemists have finally succeeded in making a synthetic version of the natural insecticide azadirachtin. It is the [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson [1] [illus. 1] There is a world where objects can be made invisible, where light can be bent the wrong way, and where images of incredibly small [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson; Geoff Brumfiel Over the past few days, Earthlings have been treated to some stunning images from across the Solar System. Jupiter and Mars were snapped by spacecraft [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson Can visible light ever be manipulated so that it bends the wrong way? If it could, a range of futuristic devices would be tantalizingly close to reality, [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson [illus. 1] Planetary scientists are eager to step up their search for life on Mars after news that liquid water seems to have flowed down gullies (pictured [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson Scientists said a sad goodbye last week to the orbiting spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor, which had gone missing two weeks earlier. [illus. 1] The mission has been [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson If hopes of colonizing the Moon are ever to become reality, water needs to be found there. Sizeable amounts of ice could provide Moon-dwellers with drinking water [...]

Author(s): Katharine Sanderson 'Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,' Mark Twain allegedly said after his obituary was published prematurely. High-temperature superconductivity physicists now know how he felt. If [...]

Cervical cancer is most deadly in the developing world. According to the GAVI Alliance, a group of leading organizations working to improve access to immunization, 88% of the 275,008 women [...]

An iconic but convoluted pharmaceutical synthesis received a major overhaul this week. The approach, described online in Nature, gives researchers easier access to a family of molecules that includes a [...]

An ambitious scheme to create Egypt's first science city is finally becoming a reality. Pristine glass and steel buildings are waiting for researchers and students just outside Cairo, and a [...]

Elemental Matters: Artists Imagine Chemistry Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennyslvania. Until 16 December 2011 Elements, the fundamentals of chemistry, have an almost mystical symbolism. The astounding concept that all matter [...]

Scientists have leapt to defend the predictions made by their models of volcanic ash dispersal, the results of which grounded more than 100,000 flights across Europe this month over fears [...]

At least two journals recently launched by the same publisher have duplicated papers online that had been published elsewhere. Late last year, an organization called Scientific Research Publishing reproduced the [...]

Strike one planet from the list of 400-odd found around stars in other solar systems: a proposed planet near a star some 6 parsecs from Earth may not exist after [...]

BRUSSELS Europe is inching closer to realizing its far-reaching plans for Earth-observing. Last week Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission (EC), publicly confirmed his support for the Galileo [...]

Oxonica, one of the United Kingdom's leading nanotechnology companies (see Nature 446, 963; 2007), has lost its latest legal fight over intellectual-property rights to a fuel additive. On 9 July, [...]

Recent interest in making drugs in which some of the hydrogen atoms are replaced with deuterium has caused alarm in a key medical speciality that already uses such compounds: forensic [...]

Pharmaceutical companies are beginning to bet on the idea that simply switching a hydrogen atom with a heavier isotope in a currently approved drug could create a better drug. Encouraged [...]

An unblinking eye will soon take a long stare at stars in the constellation Cygnus looking for something familiar: a small, rocky planet that takes a year or so to [...]

A simple change to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines will provide more uniform coverage at higher powers as well as more room for portly patients. In a market set to [...]

The Canadian government is about to introduce the first mandatory programme in the world for reporting the safety of manufactured nanomaterials. The scheme will require companies to provide any details [...]

European scientists and funding agencies have launched an ambitious plan to prioritize the astronomy projects they believe should be supported over the next 20 years. The ASTRONET Infrastructure Roadmap was [...]