Nature
A lunar eclipse helped a group of international scientists take a snapshot of earth's chemical fingerprint, which could help to identify planets most similar to earth where life may be thriving.
University of Central Florida Associate Professor Eduardo Martin was a member of the team that made the observation, which is published in the June 11 edition of Nature magazine.
PASADENA, Calif. -- Championing the modern-day use of solar eclipses to solve a set of modern problems is the goal of a review article written by Jay Pasachoff, visiting associate at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College.
Modern materials science has been a boon for electronics, providing average consumers with palm-sized computers that would have filled a room just a few years ago for instance. But the push to create materials with radically new electronic properties has also produced a host of experimental results that textbook theories simply cannot explain. In the Dec. 16 issue of Nature magazine, a team of physicists from Rice University, Rutgers University and the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany, offers a new explanation of the way quantum effects could create some of the strange electronic properties that have been observed in the important class of ''heavy fermion'' materials.
Scientists have announced new results that change the best estimate of the mass of the postulated Higgs boson from approximately 96 GeV/c2 to 117 GeV/c2. Compared to the previous value, the new value is in better agreement with direct searches - such as those conducted by CERN experiments - that excluded a mass below 114 GeV/c2. In a paper to appear in the June 10 issue of Nature magazine, physicists of Fermilab's DZero experiment report on results obtained by applying a new analysis technique to data obtained from 1992 to 1996 during Collider Run I at the Fermilab Tevatron, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator.
Researchers are heralding an entirely new approach to the treatment of aging, inherited diseases and cancer in a review paper published in today's issue of the journal Nature. Dispelling the belief that the only way to treat such conditions is by fixing or replacing damaged genes, they are instead focusing on the field of epigenetics--the study of changes in gene silencing that occur without changes in the genes themselves.
For the first time, a distributed computing experiment has produced significant results that have been published in a scientific journal. Writing in the online edition of Nature magazine, Stanford University scientists describe how they -- with the help of 30,000 personal computers -- successfully simulated part of the complex folding process that a typical protein molecule undergoes to achieve its unique, three-dimensional shape.
