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Sustained high oil prices won't be enough to make coal liquefaction economically viable without large-scale public investment. Katharine Sanderson reports.
Dubious science and looming legalization of the tiger trade threaten to derail China's efforts to save the Siberian tiger. Jerry Guo goes to the world's largest tiger-breeding facility to investigate.
The whole world felt the effects of the dinosaur-killing mass extinction 65 million years ago. But a spot in Colorado may have the best record of it. Rex Dalton reports from Denver.
A Disappearing Number, a play exploring the partnership between mathematicians G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, opens in London this week. It is the latest of several astonishing works devised by leading international theatre company Complicite, marbled with science and technology. Artistic director Simon McBurney tells Nature about the results of his most recent round of collaboration and experimentation.
The main function of neutralizing antibodies is to block viral entry into host cells. But, for maximal protection against HIV, such antibodies must call upon other elements of the immune system to help with the job.
A huge collision in the asteroid belt 160 million years ago sent fragments bagatelling around the inner Solar System. One piece might have caused the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
The toothy visage of a moray eel is a fearsome sight. The discovery that morays can thrust a second pair of jaws out from their throat to wolf down prey whole increases their predatory reputation still further.
The southern oceans are generally considered as isolated systems, much like their northern counterparts. But a combination of historical data and new density profiles suggests that they may be connected on a global scale.
With its role in intracellular protein transport already known, the FAPP2 protein has now also been implicated in lipid transfer and synthesis. What is more, these two FAPP2-mediated events seem to be linked.
Whether in passports, credit cards, laptops or mobile phones, automated methods of identifying people through their anatomical features or behavioural traits are an increasing feature of modern life.
Inertial frames of reference permeate our daily life, such as the pull and push that is felt when a vehicle brakes or turns. These inertial and centrifugal forces arise because of changes in velocity relative to uniformly moving inertial frames. In the context of the theory of general relativity, a spinning mass was predicted to 'drag' inertial frames along with it. This paper reviews the current state of the measurement of frame dragging using satellites orbiting Earth.
The impact flux from kilometre-sized bodies has increased by at least a factor of two over the long-term average during the last ∼100 Myr. This surge probably was triggered by the catastrophic disruption of the parent body of the asteroid Baptistina, which broke up in the inner main asteroid belt. Fragments evolved to orbits where they could strike the terrestrial planets.
A new method, SYNERGY, has been developed to systematically map the detailed evolutionary history of gene duplication and loss. This strategy was applied to the genomes of 17 Ascomycota fungal species to provide a comprehensive overview of gene duplication and loss in the yeast lineage and the biological constraints that govern gene evolution.
FAPP2 is a key component of the glycosphingolipid synthetic pathway, mediating non-vesicular transport of glucosylceramide from its site of synthesis at the cis-Golgi to the trans-Golgi for conversion into complex glycosphingolipids. FAPP2 therefore has an important role in determining the lipid composition of the plasma membrane, which is highly enriched in glycosphingolipids.
Entanglement between two single-ion quantum memories separated by a metre has been achieved. The use of single ions, rather than atomic ensembles, has distinct advantages for subsequent quantum operations: long coherence times, enhanced stability, and ease of measurement without ejection of the ion from the trap.
Ultrafast pulses of terahertz radiation are used to excite individual vibrational modes in a magnetoresistive manganite. In a system such as this, with strongly correlated electrons, even subtle changes of crystal structure can have a profound effect on material properties, and this is indeed what they see: the activated vibration is sufficient to drive the material from a stable insulating phase to a metastable metallic one.
There is a high potential for giant earthquake activity along the coast of Myanmar. Indications that this may be the case include the tectonic environment, historical earthquake activity, and stress and crustal strain observations. These findings suggest that giant earthquakes do occur off the coast of Myanmar, and that a very large and vulnerable population is thereby exposed to a significant earthquake and tsunami hazard.
Moray eels, despite being rapacious predators, are too long and narrow for conventional fish suction mechanisms to work for ingesting prey. So instead of sucking food down to the pharyngeal jaws, these jaws project forward into the mouth cavity and seize the prey - a remarkable innovation which may have contributed to the success of morays as reef predators.
Phages have a major impact on the evolution of their bacterial hosts. Providing the first whole genome expression profiling of the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus and its T7-like cyanophage during lytic infection reveals potential mechanistic features of this co-evolutionary process.
Hair cells of the inner ear have stereocilia that protrude from their apical surface. Sound-induced stereocilial motion is thought to be coupled to mechanoelectrical transduction channels by means of the 'tip links' that connect stereocilia to one another. This paper reports the composition of mammalian tip links cadherin 23 and protocadherin 15 and show how the two molecules interact. Interestingly, mutation of these cadherins causes deafness in humans.
In the mammalian visual system, spikes evoked by visual stimuli have millisecond-scale timing, even though the relevant time scales of visual processing themselves are much slower. In cat lateral geniculate nucleus, spike timing precision is not absolute for all classes of visual stimuli, but is relative to the time scale of the stimulus. Further, it is demonstrated that this relatively high level of precision is required to construct an accurate representation of the stimulus.
The mitotic kinase Polo regulates the asymmetric localization of the tumour-suppressor protein Numb through phosphorylating Pon, the adaptor protein for Numb, and Polo acts as a tumour-suppressor through regulating Pon/Numb. This provides the first direct biochemical link between the cell cycle and asymmetric protein localization machinery and reveals a novel mechanism underlying the tumour suppressor function of Polo.
Passively administered neutralizing antibodies have been shown to protect macaques against challenge by the HIV/SIV chimeric SHIV. The antiviral effects of the monoclonal antibody b12 are crucially dependent on antibody effector mechanisms.
LSD1 reverses methylation of p53 at lysine 370 to repress p53-mediated transcriptional activation and apoptosis, and to prevent the interaction of p53 with 53BP1.
