麻豆传媒

More room for the woollies: The Monkey Sanctuary at Looe in Cornwall has been so successful that it must now expand and perhaps divide. What lessons does it hold for traditional zoos?

The greening of chemistry

Sex and the single cell: In August, the first babies sexed by testing only one of a tiny cluster of eight cells are due to be born. Their births will prove that it is feasible to screen embryos for genetic diseases

Humans

Get thee to a laboratory

Natural solutions give their best: Suppose a sales rep has to visit several towns. What is the shortest, most economical route? This is just one optimisation problem that is benefiting from lessons learnt from nature

The incredible shrinking Mississippi Delta

Genes unlimited: A way of making millions of copies of any sequence of DNA has given molecular biologists a precise technique for detecting just one gene in a cell. Researchers have only begun to explore its potential in areas such as forensic science an

An antelope for all seasonings: Most large, herbivorous animals are good to eat, so why do we stick with cows, sheep and pigs? The Indian nilgai is an ideal candidate for domestication and could add variety to our diet

Astronomy takes off: Next week, NASA plans to launch the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, turning it into the world’s most powerful optical telescope. Once up there, it will look back through 14 billion years of the history of the Universe

The rise and fall of negative resistance: The idea of negative electrical resistance seems to be just as implausible as water flowing uphill. But new electronic devices working at the quantum level employ materials that sometimes reveal their negative si

Labour of death: The world is slowly waking up to a hidden tragedy – in the Third World, giving birth kills half a million mothers each year

Europe protects itself from dubious results

Earth

Guyana’s test at high tide

Is DNA fingerprinting ready for the courts?: New tests to identify criminals by their DNA were soon welcomed as a valuable forensic tool. But in the rush to introduce the tests into the courtroom, commercial and government laboratories in the US may have