Features

This year’s data reveal notable variation in compensation for life scientists working in different fields, sectors, and regions of the world.

Linking the human nervous system to computers is providing unprecedented control of artificial limbs and restoring lost sensory function.

Using the latest technologies, researchers are constructing novel prosthetic devices to restore vision in the blind.

Color vision as we know it resulted from one fortuitous genetic event after another.

Scientists are taking to social media to challenge weak research, share replication attempts in real time, and counteract hype. Will this online discourse enrich the scientific process?

In addition to serving as a set of instructions to build an individual, the genome can influence neighboring organisms and, potentially, entire ecosystems.

Now showing clinical progress against liver diseases, the gene-silencing technique begins to fulfill some of its promises.

Research on the human microbiome is booming, and scientists have moved from simply taking stock of gut flora to understanding the influence of microbes throughout the body.

Nearly 30 years after the discovery of tiny barrel-shape structures called vaults, their natural functions remain elusive. Nevertheless, researchers are beginning to put these nanoparticles to work in biomedicine.

Sexual selection doesn’t end when females choose a mate. Females and males of many animal species employ an array of tactics to stack the deck in their reproductive favor.

Across the animal kingdom, dominance isn’t the only way for a male to score. Colluding, sneaking around, or cross-dressing can work, too.

New technologies will make it easier to manipulate animal genomes, but food products from genetically engineered animals face a long road to market.

Scientists are creating viruses that naturally home in on tumor cells while simultaneously boosting the body’s immune system to fight cancer.

Conservationists are reintroducing large animals to areas they once roamed, providing ecologists with the chance to assess whether such “rewilding” efforts can restore lost ecosystems.

Understanding how networks of blood vessels form is key to engineering transplantable organs and tissues.

A dramatic loss of copper in key brain regions may be central to Alzheimer’s disease. Could restoring metals in the brain help?

In the face of bacterial threats that can evade modern medicines, researchers are trying every trick in the book to develop new, effective antibiotics.

The discovery of more and more viruses of record-breaking size calls for a reclassification of life on Earth.
 

Once believed to be irrevocably differentiated, mature cells are now proving to be flexible, able to switch identities with relatively simple manipulation.

Neuroscientists are automating neural imaging and recording, allowing them to monitor increasingly large swaths of the brain in living, behaving animals.