Cellular Architecture

Highlights from a webinar held by The Scientist to celebrate 30 years of PCR: the technique's invention, quantitative real-time PCR, and digital PCR

Tigers Forever, High Moon Over the Amazon, Earth from Space, and Medicine's Michelangelo

Researchers construct lipid-encapsulated compartments within synthetic cells.

How to prepare your lab for natural disasters and cope with unavoidable consequences

Turbulence interacts with the stabilizing efforts of motile phytoplankton to create small-scale patches of toxic, bloom-forming organisms.

Changing ion channel densities allows fish to tune their hearing to male reproductive calls during breeding periods. 

Membrane twists connect stacked endoplasmic reticulum sheets.

Pointers for keeping your cell cultures free of mycoplasma contamination

Assistant Professor, Arizona State University. Age: 36

Joel Cohen uses the tools of mathematics to deconstruct questions of life.

Researchers hunt for biomarkers of Asperger's syndrome, a condition that officially no longer exists.

South African termites can relay vibrational alarm signals through their enormous nests by pounding their heads against the ground.

Researchers take advantage of rapid and cheap DNA sequencing technologies to map the bacterial microbiome of New York City.

A century’s worth of collected butterflies shed light on how climate change threatens the survival of early-emerging species.

On creating communal, equitable discourse to broaden participation in genetics research

A two-way bridge between science and policy is desperately needed.

Humans evolved the ability to walk on two legs because it allowed them to more accurately size up prospective mates. Or did they?

Three members of Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova Antarctic expedition team trudged 225 kilometers in the dead of winter to retrieve emperor penguin eggs in an effort to establish an evolutionary link between birds and reptiles.

December 2013's selection of notable quotes

Meet some of the people featured in the December 2013 issue of The Scientist.

There’s beauty in a cell’s marriage of structure and function.