News
- Computing
Building ‘The Matrix’
Simulating new materials could help in building them — but only quantum simulators could fully model reality. A team reports a first step in realizing quantum simulation.
- Health & Medicine
A chink in flu’s armor
Finding the shape of a protein that enables the flu virus to replicate points to ways to combat the disease.
- Ecosystems
Nomadic ants hunt mushrooms
A species of ants not well understood surprises researchers with a nomadic lifestyle, roaming the rainforest on fungal forays.
- Psychology
Core calculations
Number words may serve as mental tools for expanding on basic, nonverbal numerical knowledge rather than as determinants of such knowledge.
- Humans
Toddlers triumphant
In new studies, toddlers display dramatic advances in object recognition that may underlie verbal and symbolic achievements.
- Health & Medicine
Protein links metabolism and circadian rhythms
Scientists have known for ages that metabolism is tied to the body’s daily rhythms. Two new studies suggest how.
- Physics
Watching the northern lights form
Scientists may have solved the mystery of what triggers the events that spark the northern and southern lights.
- Life
Choose your own splicer
Zinc-finger proteins can cut, splice or tweak a targeted gene, and a new “open source” method for making customized zinc-finger proteins aimed at specific genes will give scientists easier access to this powerful genetic tool.
- Plants
Fugitives spread bumblebee diseases
Pathogens hitchhike on commercial bees that escape from greenhouses. These escapees bring disease to wild bumblebees.
- Health & Medicine
New HIV inhibitor
A new HIV drug can, when combined with other therapies, suppress even the most drug-resistant strains of the virus that causes AIDS, scientists report in two papers in the July 24 New England Journal of Medicine.
- Health & Medicine
Statin snag
A gene variant explains why some people get muscle pains from cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins.
- Plants
Parasitic plant gets more than a meal
The parasitic vine known as dodder really sucks. It pierces the tissue of other plants — some of which are important crops — extracting water and nutrients needed for its own growth. But it also consumes molecules that scientists could manipulate to bring on the parasite’s demise.
