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Volume 447 Issue 7140, 3 May 2007

Editorial

  • A strategic plan has been developed to tackle the nation's HIV crisis — at last.

    Editorial

    Advertisement

  • The use of electronic laboratory notebooks should be supported by all concerned.

    Editorial
  • US missile defence plans require scrutiny.

    Editorial
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Research Highlights

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News

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News in Brief

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Business

  • A patent ruling has delivered a serious blow to one US state's hopes of a biotechnology boom. Erika Check reports.

    Business
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News Feature

  • Neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima promotes the idea that computer games can boost the ageing brain — but others in the field remain sceptical. Ichiko Fuyuno investigates.

    • Ichiko Fuyuno
    News Feature
  • Archaeologists are unearthing remarkable finds in Jerusalem. But the digs have sparked an argument over who should run the site and present the results to the public. Haim Watzman reports.

    • Haim Watzman
    News Feature
  • Two institutes on opposite sides of South Africa are intent on tackling HIV. But they are separated by more than geographical distance, finds Michael Cherry.

    • Michael Cherry
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Spring Books

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Connections

  • Optimality is a key organizing principle of science, but the patterns of connections within real-world networks do not always respect it.

    • Mark Buchanan
    Connections
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News & Views

  • The mapping of the largest exceptional Lie group, E8, is a milestone for enthusiasts for the aesthetics of mathematics. But this embodiment of complex symmetry could be of interest to fundamental physics, too.

    • Hermann Nicolai
    News & Views
  • A small molecule forces the protein-translation machinery to overlook the signals that would otherwise result in its premature termination. Genuine stop signs are, however, read and obeyed.

    • Anton Schmitz
    • Michael Famulok
    News & Views
  • Neutrinos seem to oscillate: they change back and forth between one type and another and, by extension, have a tiny mass. But one experiment that predicted a particularly large mass looks to have been mistaken.

    • David Wark
    News & Views
  • What are neural networks doing when the brain is at rest? It turns out that in primates, even under conditions of deep anaesthesia, some of these networks undergo highly organized patterns of activity.

    • Mark A. Pinsk
    • Sabine Kastner
    News & Views
  • The chemical identification of two atoms of element 112 — scooped from the helium stream they were suspended in using a gold pan — brings the superheavy elements' fabled island of stability into sharper focus.

    • Andreas Türler
    News & Views
  • The size and duration of disparate, slow, low-amplitude earthquake processes seem to obey a single scaling law. The relationship is very different from that which governs their more violent and impulsive cousins.

    • Heidi Houston
    • John E. Vidale
    News & Views
  • When it comes to having their conduction properties tweaked, carbon nanotubes are bothersome customers. One way to do it is to incorporate a photosensitive dye into the nanotubes' walls.

    • Dirk M. Guldi
    News & Views
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Correction

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News & Views

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Article

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Letter

  • The seasonal temperature response of the Martian surface is used to map local surface heterogeneities (such as rocks, slopes and thermal inertia of ground cover) at subkilometre scale. These observations show significant regional and local water-ice depth variability, and indicate that the depth to the water-ice table is highly variable in the potential Phoenix spacecraft landing ellipses.

    • Joshua L. Bandfield
    Letter
  • A new X-ray-based technique, X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy, is developed to directly measure magnetic noise. Its use is demonstrated for elemental chromium, an antiferromagnet that displays a nanometre-scale superstructure of spin- and charge-density. Fingerprints of a particular magnetic domain configuration are obtained, and after the temporal evolution of the patterns, magnetic domain walls advancing and retreating over micron distances are observed.

    • O. G. Shpyrko
    • E. D. Isaacs
    • A. R. Sandy
    Letter
  • An experiment has scrutinized two atoms of element 112, finding that it is very volatile and forms a metallic bond with a gold surface. These characteristics establish element 112 as a typical element of group 12.

    • R. Eichler
    • N. V. Aksenov
    • A. V. Yeremin
    Letter
  • A diverse array of unusual earthquake phenomena occurring at relatively long periods, 'slow' events, follow a unified scaling relationship that clearly differentiates their behaviour from that of regular earthquakes, indicating that they comprise a new earthquake category.

    • Satoshi Ide
    • Gregory C. Beroza
    • Takahiko Uchide
    Letter
  • Water availability directly shapes local and regional species distributions in tropical forests. This mechanistic understanding of the factors shaping species distributions is critical for improving vegetation–climate models used to project shifts in tropical forest composition, diversity and ecosystem function under changing precipitation patterns associated with past and future global climate change.

    • Bettina M. J. Engelbrecht
    • Liza S. Comita
    • Stephen P. Hubbell
    Letter
  • A small molecule, PTC124, enables the translation machinery for mRNA into proteins to bypass sites that cause premature termination, but still terminate normally at the end of the mRNA. In human and mouse cells, this drug restores normal translation of the gene that is mutated in muscular dystrophy, and restores muscle function in mdx mice that model the human disease.

    • Ellen M. Welch
    • Elisabeth R. Barton
    • H. Lee Sweeney
    Letter
  • The biopolymer chitin is one of the main components in the cell walls of fungi, the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans and the bodies of some parasitic worms. This paper describes how chitin elicits an innate allergic response in mice, which is controlled by a host chitinase.

    • Tiffany A. Reese
    • Hong-Erh Liang
    • Richard M. Locksley
    Letter
  • On cells with motile cilia, cilia not only generate flow along a specific axis, but are involved in sensing and responding to that flow in a way that influences cell polarity. This model suggests a new paradigm for how polarity can be generated in a developing tissue, which will be of general interest to all developmental biologists.

    • Brian Mitchell
    • Richard Jacobs
    • Chris Kintner
    Letter
  • One way of repairing a DNA break is through invasion of an end into a homologous, intact duplex, which can set up a replication fork. However, this work shows that the initial invasion events are unstable in the vicinity of the break, so that multiple rounds of invasion and dissociation can take place.

    • Catherine E. Smith
    • Bertrand Llorente
    • Lorraine S. Symington
    Letter
  • A nuclear magnetic resonance technique is developed that allows early atomic interactions to be read out later, in the more homogeneous folded state. When this is applied to an ultrafast folding designer protein, it discovers an early hydrophobic core that had been overlooked by computational models.

    • K. Hun Mok
    • Lars T. Kuhn
    • P. J. Hore
    Letter
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Prospects

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Movers

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Networks and Support

  • The merits of using biological circuits to get students excited about synthetic biology.

    • Michael Strong
    • George Church
    Networks and Support
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Career View

  • Postdocs are the ultimate circus performers.

    • Maria Ocampo-Hafalla
    Career View
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Recruiters

  • Where are the women in science? And what would attract them from other sectors?

    • Jan Bogg
    Recruiters
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Authors

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Brief Communications Arising

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