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A two-in-one drug that modulates neural pathways involved in appetite and reward might prove to be more effective and longer lasting than current weight-loss drugs on the market.
A design principle for buildings incorporates components that can control the propagation of failure by isolating parts of the structure as they fail — offering a way to prevent a partial collapse snowballing into complete destruction.
Both parents of oldfield mice care for offspring, whereas in deer mice, mothers usually care for pups. The discovery of a type of adrenal-gland cell that is present in oldfield mice but not in deer mice helps to explain the difference.
A book cataloguing mysterious events challenges scientists to provide some answers, and Charles Darwin continues his investigations of crimes against primroses, in the weekly dip into Nature’s archive.
Some genes carry an ‘imprint’ on either the maternal or the paternal copy, which determines whether or not that copy is expressed. This 1984 discovery changed how scientists think about gene regulation and inheritance.
A genome-wide association study of metabolic biomarkers in 136,000 participants discovered more than 400 independent genomic regions affecting metabolism. The study also highlighted the importance of participant characteristics, such as fasting status, that can substantially affect the genetic associations.
Clarifying how genome duplication and triplication events shaped early vertebrate genomes has presented a challenge in evolutionary biology. The genome of the jawless hagfish provides a missing piece of this puzzle.
By using volunteers to map roads in forests across Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea, an innovative study shows that existing maps of the Asia-Pacific region are rife with errors. It also reveals that unmapped roads are extremely common — up to seven times more abundant than mapped ones. Such ‘ghost roads’ are promoting illegal logging, mining, wildlife poaching and deforestation in some of the world’s biologically richest ecosystems.
The development of high-performance organic LEDs and other devices that emit near-infrared light has been hindered by seemingly fundamental features of the light-emitting molecules. A potential solution has been identified.
The Chilean soapbark tree is the source of QS-21 — a valuable but hard-to-obtain vaccine additive. Yeast strains engineered to express all components of the QS-21 biosynthetic pathway provide an alternative route to this therapeutic.
A hallucinogenic compound secreted by toads has served as a springboard for research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. The findings suggest that these compounds exert antidepressant effects in part by binding an under-appreciated target in the brain.
The oscillating electromagnetic fields that carry light can cause electrons to tunnel back and forth through a potential energy barrier. Remarkably, this alternating current can coherently emit measurable light waves — an unexpected process that can be exploited to build an optical microscope that undercuts existing spatial and temporal limitations.
What stabilized and strengthened the oldest, most robust blocks of continental crust billions of years ago during the Archaean eon has long been a mystery. It seems that a surprise helping hand might have come from the air above.
Efforts to find renewable alternatives to fossil fuels that might enable a carbon-neutral society by 2050 are described, as well as outlining a possible roadmap towards a refinery of the future and evaluating its requirements.
Efforts to develop an electronic newspaper providing information at the touch of a button took a step forward 50 years ago, and airborne bacteria in the London Underground come under scrutiny, in the weekly dip into Nature’s archive.
Cardiovascular disease claims more lives each year than do the two next-deadliest diseases combined. An ultrasound technique that tracks tiny gas-filled bubbles could pave the way towards improved early detection.
Some fox species leap up and pounce head first into snow to capture prey that they hear below the surface. An analysis of the forces involved reveals how the shape of the skull has evolved to minimize damage from this behaviour.
In ordinary materials, electrons move too quickly for their negative electric charges to affect their interactions. But at low temperatures and densities, they can be made to crystallize into an exotic type of electron solid — a phenomenon predicted by Eugene Wigner 90 years ago and only now directly observed.
A study provides insights into how energy flows in the food webs that connect soil- and canopy-dwelling organisms in tropical ecosystems with high biodiversity. When rainforest is converted to plantations, food webs are simplified and restructured, leading to profound changes in tropical-ecosystem functioning.
