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South Africa's government has removed the minister most closely associated with public discussion of the country's HIV epidemic. But it must stand by its promises to implement a fresh AIDS strategy.
Dengue fever was once a disease restricted to poor people in tropical areas. Its resurgence now threatens middle-class urbanites in cities such as Singapore. Ewen Callaway asks whether Asia's ever-growing wealth will propel a treatment or vaccine to market.
Can an expanded loan guarantee programme dispel US power companies' hesitation about resuming construction of nuclear power plants? Geoff Brumfiel investigates.
For 30 years scientists have believed that there are no organic molecules in the martian soil. Will NASA's Phoenix probe prove them right or wrong, asks Corinna Wu.
Space exploration usually means leaving Earth's orbit. But chemists are now burrowing inside solids to open new vistas. Katharine Sanderson reports from the internal frontier.
Many enzymes have a series of catalytic sites, lined up like beads on a string. A previously unknown link in one of these molecular assembly lines involves an unexpected approach to a common biochemical reaction.
The behaviour of the San Andreas fault varies along its length — it slips in some places and creeps in others. The discovery of the ultrasoft mineral talc in rocks from deep inside the fault could help to explain why.
Evolution has crafted thousands of enzymes that are efficient catalysts for a plethora of reactions. Human attempts at enzyme design trail far behind, but may benefit from exploiting evolutionary tactics.
In order to form a glass by cooling a liquid, the normal process of solid crystallization must be bypassed. Achieving that for a pure metal had seemed impossible — until pressure was applied to liquid germanium.
However parkinsonism is initiated, the progressive symptoms are similarly devastating. So insights from analyses of gene mutations linked to these disorders should aid a better general understanding of them.
Blazars are massive black holes sending out particle jets at close to the speed of light. Stupendously fast, intense bursts of highly energetic γ-rays indicate that the blazar environment is even more extreme than was thought.
Is it possible to determine the role of an enzyme from its structure? The latest findings suggest that it is, and prove the point by predicting the substrate for an enzyme of unknown function.
A computational approach is used to predict the function of an uncharacterized enzyme by docking high-energy intermediate forms of candidate metabolites into its purported binding site. The docking experiments predicted that the enzyme would be able to deaminate intermediates of 5-methylthioadenosine and S-adenosylhomocysteine, a prediction confirmed by biochemical experiments and examination of the X-ray crystal structure of the protein.
Mira is one of a class of low-to-intermediate mass stars in the late stages of stellar evolution. This paper reports the discovery of an ultraviolet-emitting bow shock and turbulent wake extending over 2 degrees on the sky, arising from Mira's large space velocity and the interaction between its wind and the interstellar medium. This wind wake is a tracer of the last 30,000 years of Mira's mass-loss history.
This paper theoretically and experimentally demonstrates a protocol that allows the generation of arbitrarily large squeezed Schrödinger cat states, using homodyne detection and photon number states as resources. The protocol was implemented with light pulses containing two photons, producing a squeezed Schrödinger cat state with a negative Wigner function.
Recent theoretical insights into the factors controlling glass formation have been used to determine the experimental conditions for successful vitrification of metallic liquid germanium. Not only has the first monatomic metallic glass been created, but evidence for a rare liquid–liquid phase transition in this system has also been found.
The impact of projected changes in ozone levels on the land-carbon sink are estimated with the help of a global carbon cycle model, which accounts for interactions between ozone and carbon dioxide through stomatal closure. A significant suppression of the global land carbon sink as increases in ozone concentrations affect plant productivity is found. The resulting indirect radiative forcing by ozone effects on plants could contribute more to global warming than the direct radiative forcing.
This paper reports the discovery of talc in cuttings of serpentinite collected during drilling of the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth main hole in 2005. The frictional strength of talc at elevated temperatures is sufficiently low to meet the constraints on shear strength of the fault, and its inherently stable sliding behaviour is consistent with fault creep. Talc may therefore provide the connection between serpentinite and creep in the San Andreas fault.
Dispersal affects lifetime reproductive success, and in group-living mammals it is usually the males that disperse. Male-biased dispersal in the spotted hyaena (Crocuta crocuta) is the result of an adaptive response of males to female mate choice associated with inbreeding avoidance.
Deciphering a 'neural code' usually requires measurement of either the rate of spike (electrical impulses) production or the spike synchrony. However, these two measures are not independent, as higher rates are associated with higher synchrony. It is further shown that the connection between rate and synchrony enhances information coding.
Mutations in the Lbk1 tumour suppressor gene are found in the squamous carcinoma subtype of non-small cell lung cancers for the first time. In a mouse model for lung cancer in which Lkb1 loss is combined with Kras mutations, more aggressive tumours arise than with Kras mutations alone and often these are classified as squamous carcinomas, thus Lkb1 loss modulates lung cancer differentiation.
Mouse lacking all interphase Cdks (Cdk2, Cdk3, Cdk4 and Cdk6) undergo organogenesis and develop to midgestation, and individual cells lacking all 3 kinases are able to proliferate. However, Cdk1 is shown to be absolutely essential for cell division during the first stages of embryonic development.
RNA molecules in virus-infected cells trigger interferon production and initiate antiviral innate immunity. This paper shows that small RNA cleavage products from 'self' RNA, generated by the antiviral endonuclease RNas L, can initiate and amplify antiviral responses.
Break-induced replication repair (BIR) of a DNA double-strand break requires Polα and Polδ to initiate replication, while Polɛ is needed to extend the replication patch. This BIR also uniquely requires Pol32, a Polδ subunit that is not necessary for normal replication.
AdmF catalyzes the formation of the first amide bond in andrimid biosynthesis, indicating that AdmF is a novel biosynthetic enzyme that acts as a stand-alone amide synthase between protein-bound, thiotemplated substrates in an antibiotic enzymatic assembly line. This constitutes the first report of a transglutaminase-like enzyme recruited for the assembly of an antibiotic.
New enzymatic activities can be evolved de novo (that is, without the need for prior mechanistic information) by using mRNA-display. Functional proteins were selected for from an in vitro translated protein library of high complexity and it was possible to isolate novel RNA ligases that exhibited rate enhancements of more than two million-fold.
