This Week in Science
Research highlights from the current issue of Science Magazine



Water and Ice The water at the base of glacial ice sheets lubricates the ice-earth interface, allowing the ice sheet to slide more quickly and easily over the ground below, but its role ? [Read more]


A Not-So-Happy Anniversary This year marks a quarter-century since the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS. Over this time, enormous effort has been expended in developing a ? [Read more]


The Making of the Sahara Analysis of mid- and late Holocene environmental and climate change in northern Africa has been hampered by the extreme aridity of the Sahara during recent millennia, which has eradicated most ? [Read more]


Nanoscale Thermal Motors Powering very small devices--nanoelectromechanical systems--will require compact ways of converting electrical energy into directed motion. Barreiro et al. (p. 775, published online 10 April) describe a linear motor in which ? [Read more]


Quantum Dot Optoelectronics There is great interest in developing architectures that allow the quantum state of one part of a system to be controlled by the quantum state of another part. The ability ? [Read more]


Pre-Clovis South... Monte Verde, in Chile, provides some of the best evidence for the early inhabitation of the Americas prior to the widespread Paleo-Indian Clovis culture. Dillehay et al. (p. 784) now ? [Read more]


...and Pre-Clovis North Evidence for a human presence in North America significantly before the appearance of the widespread Clovis complex about 13,000 years ago has been enigmatic. Gilbert et al. (p. 786, published ? [Read more]


Divide and Conquer During division, the bacterial cell division machinery selects the center of the rod-shaped cell as the division site and uses a protein array to physically separate daughter cells (see the ? [Read more]


Birds of a Feather Adapt Together Recent studies of biological responses to climate change have mostly focused on changes in abundance and distribution of species and adaptive evolutionary change. Charmantier et al. (p. 800) use data ? [Read more]


Home Is Where the Hearth Is The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans can "remember" the temperature at which it was grown and will seek out that temperature if later exposed to a gradient of temperatures. In an effort ? [Read more]