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Neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima promotes the idea that computer games can boost the ageing brain — but others in the field remain sceptical. Ichiko Fuyuno investigates.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The X-ray crystal structure of plant photosystem I is solved to 3.4 Å resolution, revealing 17 protein subunits. This structure provides a picture of 11 out of 12 protein subunits of the reaction centre, 168 chlorophylls, two phylloquinones, three Fe4S4 clusters, and five carotenoids.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.