IT IS a disarmingly simple idea: to find out if a drug might treat a disease it wasn’t intended for, check out whether it has an opposite effect on gene activity to the illness itself. How do you find such drugs? By mining large public biological datasets. For more than a decade, so-called DNA chips [...]

IT SMELLS, it buzzes, it even dances like a honeybee. In a field in Germany, RoboBee is making its first attempts at speaking to the insects in their own language. Bees are famous for communicating using the waggle dance – walking forward while rapidly vibrating their rear. In the 1940s, biologist Karl von Frisch realised [...]

What keeps the Milky Way’s lights on? Giant gas clouds have been found close enough to home to keep the galaxy ablaze. About one sun-sized star is born in the Milky Way’s starry disc every year, a process that requires a constant source of fuel. “The gas associated with [star formation in] galaxies would have [...]

WHAT should you do when alarms are ringing, the building is rapidly filling with smoke and the crackle of fire is just round the corner? Follow the robot, say Ayanna Howard and Paul Robinette, electrical engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who want to create smart roving exit signs. Static signs point [...]

The part of the brain we use to predict the immediate future has been identified. Jeffrey Zacks, a cognitive neuroscientist at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, carried out fMRI brain scans on volunteers watching film clips of everyday scenes, such as a person washing dishes. The participants showed increased activity in the midbrain dopamine [...]

Scientists, politicians and animal activists are rising up to defend apes. There are nearly 1000 research chimpanzees in the US – the only country other than Gabon to conduct medical research on chimps. At the behest of the National Institutes of Health and animal rights activists, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) is now deciding whether [...]