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Our earliest invertebrate ancestors did not have brains. Yet, over hundreds of millions of years, we and other vertebrates have developed amazingly complicated mental machinery

By Eric Hand of Nature magazine Who would have thought that a ringside seat at some of the Universe's most extreme events could come cheap? But by the standards of space-based astronomy, the NuSTAR telescope that NASA plans to launch as early as this month has a modest budget, US$165 million. [More]

By Jane Qiu of Nature magazine The Chinese government's promise last week that researchers will enjoy another year of increased funding was not unexpected, given the country's relatively buoyant economy and high regard for science.

Sure, a corporate gig might (initially) pay more than a startup and come with cushy benefits, but there are real, career-defining reasons to heed the siren song of a startup.

By Richard Van Noorden of Nature magazine The dozen or so brown garden snails crawling around the plastic, moss-filled terrarium in Evgeny Katz's laboratory look normal, but they have a hidden superpower: they produce electricity. Into each mollusk, Katz and his team at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, have implanted tiny biofuel cells that extract electrical power from the glucose and oxygen in the snail's blood. [More]

By Stephen Strauss of Nature magazine The hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost by a report in the journal PLoS One, showing that data gleaned from the online game Phylo are helping to untangle a major problem in comparative genomics. The game was created to address the 'multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem', which refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species.

Most light emitters, from candles to light bulbs to computer screens, look the same from any angle. But in a paper published this week on the Nature Photonics website, MIT researchers report the development of a new light source — a fiber only a little thicker than a human hair — whose brightness can be controllably varied for different viewers.

By Nina Chestney LONDON (Reuters) - The complete melt of the Greenland ice sheet could occur at lower global temperatures than previously thought, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change showed on Sunday, increasing the threat and severity of a rise in sea level. Substantial melting of land ice could contribute to long-term sea level rise of several meters, potentially threatening the lives of millions of people.

By Arran Frood of Nature magazine The powerful hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) has potential as a treatment for alcoholism, according to a retrospective analysis of studies published in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The study, by neuroscientist Teri Krebs and clinical psychologist P

From Nature magazine [More]

Joint ventures can yield tremendous results.

By Elie Dolgin of Nature magazine Graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) is a common and often deadly complication of bone-marrow transplantation that occurs when immune cells from an unrelated donor attack the transplant recipient's tissue. [More]

By Richard Monastersky of Nature magazine As soon as the shaking died down on 11 March last year, Ken-Ichi Sato stumbled back to his office and pressed the alarm button, triggering sirens throughout the city of Kesennuma in northeastern Japan. [More]

By Kerri Smith of Nature magazine Kamilah lives in San Diego, California, is 35 years old, weighs 136 kilograms and has a dark fur coat covering her skin. [More]

The ALPHA collaboration at CERN in Geneva has scored another coup on the antimatter front by performing the first-ever spectroscopic measurements of the internal state of the antihydrogen atom. Their results are reported in a forthcoming issue of Nature and are now online.