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The sight of nations jockeying for position on the high seas is becoming more common. An international treaty exists to deal with such disputes and it is time for the US Senate to ratify it.
In recent years, autism has become the golden child of the fund-raising circuit. Meredith Wadman looks at a US public-relations success that is driving research funds and expertise towards this childhood condition, and asks who is missing out.
No longer just cellular janitors, cilia are making a clean sweep for biological greatness. Claire Ainsworth explores how they may hold the secret of multicellular development.
It takes too long and costs too much to bring new drugs to market. So let's beef up efforts to screen existing drugs for new uses, argue Curtis R. Chong and David J. Sullivan Jr.
By cunningly diffracting X-rays twice from an exploding nanometre-scale sphere, holographic images can be made of a tiny system evolving at lightning speed. The technique could be used to picture atomic dynamics.
Interactions among neurons in brain circuits underlie sensory perception and information storage. Work in locusts shows how the timing of different neuronal signals is synchronized to ensure effective communication.
Calcium ions act as signals between cells, but their exact locations — at the nanometre scale — have been difficult to pinpoint. The latest biosensor promises to reveal these details in dynamic living systems.
Once subducted into the mantle, material from Earth's continental crust seems to disappear. But its distinctive isotopic signature has been found back at the surface — in volcanic rocks on a Pacific island.
When it comes to understanding patterns of biodiversity, ours is a little-known planet. Large-scale sampling projects, as carried out in two investigations of insect diversity, show a way forward.
In seeking out ideal conditions for growing protein crystals, solutions have increasingly been found in the low-gravity conditions of space. But answers might be lurking in fields closer to home.
How do plant cells respond so vigorously to organisms that damage their cells? Following on from progress made in understanding hormonal control of growth and development comes news of how a plant's security system operates.
Members of the jasmonate ZIM-domain (JAZ) protein family are identified as key regulators of jasmonate signalling. Some of these function as repressors of jasmonate-responsive gene expression. The results suggest a model in which jasmonate ligands promote binding of the SCFCOI1 ubiquitin ligase complex to jasmonate repressors, resulting in their degradation.
JASMONATE-INSENSITIVE 3 (JAI3) and a family of related proteins named JAZ (jasmonate-ZIM-domain) are identified. JAI3 and some of the other JAZ proteins interact with the SCFCOI1 ubiquitin ligase complex. Additionally JAI3 and JAZ1 interact with AtMyc2, a key transcriptional activator of jasmonate-regulated gene expression.
This paper reports the realization of a chromium Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with strong anisotropic magnetic dipole–dipole interaction between the atoms, which induces a pronounced change of the aspect ratio of the cloud. The experiment opens the way for exploration of the unique properties of quantum ferrofluids.
A modern version of Newton's 'dusty 'mirror' experiment is made, whereby X-ray pulses are focused on a thin membrane with polystyrene particles placed in front of an X-ray mirror. After a pulse traverses through the sample, triggering the explosion of a particle, it is reflected back on to the sample by the mirror to probe this reaction. The resulting diffraction pattern contains accurate time and spatially resolved information about the exploding particles.
Observations from the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge suggest that passages in rift valleys and ridge-flank canyons provide the most energetic sites for oceanic turbulence. Measurements show that large diffusivities characterize the mixing downstream of a sill in a well stratified boundary layer, with mixing levels remaining of the order of 10−4m2 s−1 at the base of the main thermocline.
Enriched 87Sr/86Sr and 143Nd/144Nd isotope signatures are reported in submarine Samoan lavas. The data provide clear evidence for the presence of recycled upper continental crust in the Samoan mantle, and also support the idea that recycled continental material is involved in the formation of one of the mantle's isotopically-distinct geochemical reservoirs, the so-called enriched mantle 2.
Two new cranial fossils found in Kenya have bearing on the relationship between Homo habilis and Homo erectus. Descriptions of a small H. erectus skull, and jaw material from a late-surviving specimen of Homo habilis demonstrate that the two species co-existed in the Lake Turkana basin in Kenya for almost half a million years.
A study of about 500 species of lepidopteran caterpillars, beetles and fruit flies details that that most species of herbivorous insects are widely distributed over 75,000 km2 of contiguous lowland rain forest in Papua New Guinea. Thus, although species richness was high, the species found did not alter much even over hundreds of kilometres despite habitat discontinuities and different geological terrains.
Larval diets of tropical Lepidoptera are more specialized than those of their temperate forest counterparts: tropical species on average feed on fewer plant species, genera and families than do temperate caterpillars. This results in a greater turnover in caterpillar species composition between tree species in tropical faunas than in temperate faunas, and it is suggested that greater specialization in tropical faunas is the result of differences in trophic interactions.
The neurobiological basis of unpleasant sense of itching, or pruritus has been elusive, but this study shows that the 'gastrin releasing peptide receptor' is important for communication of itchy, but not painful, stimuli to the central nervous system. This receptor could therefore be a target for the development of antipruritic drugs that do not affect pain signalling.
Mass spectrometry is used to systematically analyse the brains of patients suffering from Huntingdon's disease, as well as several mouse models of the disease, for the presence of ubiquitin chains. In all cases, an accumulation of ubiquitin chains was found, suggesting that a general dysfunction of this system may contribute to the disease process.
Spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) is described for the first time in an invertebrate, the locust. In vivo study reveals that STDP is the key to the preservation of neural codes for olfactory information down the neuronal pathway linking sensory organs to memory centres in the insect's brain.
DNMT3L, a regulatory factor related in sequence to DNA methyltransferases, is shown to interact with the N terminus of histone H3 and this interaction is inhibited by methylation at lysine 4. This suggests DNMT3L could respond to states of histone modification to regulate de novo DNA methylation.
BHC80 is a component of the LSD1 co-repressor complex that demethylates histone H3 at lysine 4. The PHD domain of BHC80 interacts with the histone H3 tail only when lysine 4 is unmethylated, and BHC80 function is coupled to that of LSD1 in gene repression.
