At the third science debate between the three main British political parties, it was unclear how secure the science budget will be after the upcoming general election

Organisms gradually grow apart until they become different species – right? If new research is correct, it's more often down to tricks of fate

Disease and obesity go hand in hand, but an increase in body fat may actually be part of our body's attempts to protect itself from the effects of unhealthy eating

The mathematician and self-proclaimed incurable optimist talks about his cameo in an Oscar-nominated movie and why he has no time for string theory

Prostate cancer drugs trigger the release of a molecule that makes tumours grow – the discovery could lead to a way to keep the cancer at bay

All today's stories from newscientist.com at a glance, including: the (accidental) origin of species, why food kills but flab protects, and why women with good genes might get more sex

Burying beetles have one of the more disgusting lifestyles known – but hey, they are also terribly good parents

The meat-eating marsupials are threatened by a deadly transmissible cancer – but the discovery of what makes some animals resistant could save them

The meat-eating marsupials are threatened by a deadly transmissible cancer – but the discovery of what makes some animals resistant could save them

Robots are coming out of their industrial cages and into our lives, prompting engineers to search out new kinds of safety features

Female students with a genetically diverse immune system said they had sex with more people than their peers did

Female students with a genetically diverse immune system said they had sex with more people than their peers did

Cole M. Haynes, Yun Yang, Steven P. Blais, Thomas A. Neubert, David Ron. Genetic analyses previously implicated the matrix-localized protease ClpP in signaling the stress of protein misfolding in the mitochondrial matrix to activate nuclear-encoded mitochondrial chaper....

Rebecca J. Burgess, Hui Zhou, Junhong Han, Zhiguo Zhang. Acetylation of lysine residues at the H3 N terminus is proposed to function in replication-coupled (RC) nucleosome assembly, a process critical for the inheritance of epigenetic information and ma....

Eva Petermann, Manuel Luís Orta, Natalia Issaeva, Niklas Schultz, Thomas Helleday. Faithful DNA replication is essential to all life. Hydroxyurea (HU) depletes the cells of dNTPs, which initially results in stalled replication forks that, after prolonged treatment, collapse into....

Florian Renner, Rita Moreno, M. Lienhard Schmitz. The IKK-related kinase IKKɛ contributes to the antiviral response and can function as an oncogene that is frequently amplified in breast cancer. Here we report on an additional role of IKKɛ as a m....

Jurre Hageman, Maria A. Rujano, Maria A.W.H. van Waarde, Vaishali Kakkar, Ron P. Dirks, Natalia Govorukhina, Henderika M.J. Oosterveld-Hut, Nicolette H. Lubsen, Harm H. Kampinga. Misfolding and aggregation are associated with cytotoxicity in several protein folding diseases. A large network of molecular chaperones ensures protein quality control. Here, we show that within ....

Marco Retzlaff, Franz Hagn, Lars Mitschke, Martin Hessling, Frederik Gugel, Horst Kessler, Klaus Richter, Johannes Buchner. The chaperone Hsp90 is an ATP-dependent, dimeric molecular machine regulated by several cochaperones, including inhibitors and the unique ATPase activator Aha1. Here, we analyzed the mechanism of ....

Peter J. Skene, Robert S. Illingworth, Shaun Webb, Alastair R.W. Kerr, Keith D. James, Daniel J. Turner, Rob Andrews, Adrian P. Bird. MeCP2 is a nuclear protein with an affinity for methylated DNA that can recruit histone deacetylases. Deficiency or excess of MeCP2 causes severe neurological problems, suggesting that the number ....

Martha G. Bomar, Sanjay D'Souza, Marzena Bienko, Ivan Dikic, Graham C. Walker, Pei Zhou. Translesion synthesis is an essential cell survival strategy to promote replication after DNA damage. The accumulation of Y family polymerases (pol) ι and Rev1 at the stalled replication machinery....