The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, usually referred to as PNAS, is the official journal of the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS). PNAS is an important scientific journal that printed its first issue in 1915 and continues to publish highly cited research reports, commentaries, reviews, perspectives, feature articles, profiles, letters to the editor, and actions of the Academy. Coverage in PNAS broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences. Although most of the papers published in the journal are in the biomedical sciences, PNAS recruits papers and publishes special features in the physical and social sciences and in mathematics. PNAS is published weekly in print, and daily online in PNAS Early Edition. PNAS was established by NAS in 1914, with its first issue published in 1915. The NAS itself had been founded in 1863 as a private institution, but chartered by the US Congress, with the goal to "investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art." By 1914, the Academy was well established.
Ancient natural fission reactor offers clues on how to store modern nuclear waste
A team of researchers from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Washington University has learned more about possible ways to store modern nuclear waste by studying an ancient natural fission reactor. In their paper published ...
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Understanding the enzyme that enables bacteria to breathe arsenic
Arsenic-contaminated drinking water is a major health hazard, with chronic exposure causing illnesses and cancers. The World Health Organization estimates that in Bangladesh, for example, over 5 million people were exposed ...
Study suggests palm oil cultivation in Africa could further endanger primates
An international team of researchers has found that there are few areas where palm oil cultivation could be undertaken in Africa that would not cause harm to native primates. In their paper published in Proceedings of the ...
New zebrafish models will accelerate studies of the human skeleton and osteoporosis
Although much scientific research has been done into the development of the skeleton, the underlying mechanisms that drive the formation and maintenance of bones are still not very well understood, and research into the development ...
Mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery
If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three ...
Schwarzites: Long-sought carbon structure joins graphene, fullerene family
The discovery of buckyballs surprised and delighted chemists in the 1980s, nanotubes jazzed physicists in the 1990s, and graphene charged up materials scientists in the 2000s, but one nanoscale carbon structure—a negatively ...
New study reveals evidence of how Neolithic people adapted to climate change
Research led by the University of Bristol has uncovered evidence that early farmers were adapting to climate change 8,200 years ago.
The march toward always-on technology may hinder groups' ability to solve complex problems: study
More than a decade after the introduction of the first smartphone, we are now awash in always-on technologies—email, IM, social media, Slack, Yammer, and so on. All that connectivity means we are constantly sharing our ...
When it comes to regrowing tails, neural stem cells are the key
Cut off a salamander's tail and, in a few weeks, a near-perfect replacement grows. Do the same to a lizard and a new tail will regrow, but it won't be the same as the original. By comparing tail regeneration between the two ...
Scarlet macaw DNA points to ancient breeding operation in Southwest
Somewhere in the American Southwest or northern Mexico, there are probably the ruins of a scarlet macaw breeding operation dating to between 900 and 1200 C.E., according to a team of archaeologists who sequenced the mitochondrial ...
