Table of contents
Volume 449 Number 7163 pp637-754
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Editorials
Kill king corn p637
Biofuels need new technology, new agronomy and new politics if they are not to do more harm than good.
doi:10.1038/449637a
A matter of trust p637
Social scientists studying electronic interactions must take the lead on preserving data security.
doi:10.1038/449637b
How to be good? p638
Mentoring and training for ethical behaviour aren't all they're cracked up to be.
doi:10.1038/449638a
News
Biologists claim Nobel prize with a knock-out p642
Architects of mutant mice are rewarded for their work.
Alison Abbott
doi:10.1038/449642a
The physics prize inside the iPod p643
Geoff Brumfiel
doi:10.1038/449643a
Immigration institute provokes outcry from social scientists p643
French plan to research integration meets with disapproval.
Declan Butler
doi:10.1038/449643b
Data sharing threatens privacy p644
Analyses of personal information raise spectre of Big Brother.
Declan Butler
doi:10.1038/449644a
Doctors not to blame over HIV infection by tainted blood p644
Canadian court acquits medics accused of negligence.
Meredith Wadman
doi:10.1038/449644b
Sidelines p645
doi:10.1038/449645a
Congress grills officials over biosafety boom p646
Is bioterror research really making life safer?
Ewen Callaway
doi:10.1038/449646a
Europe ponders restrictions on life sciences p646
Plan for two-tier publications gets cool reception.
Daniel Cressey
doi:10.1038/449646b
Doubts raised over stem-cell marker p647
Protein may not be accurate in adult samples.
Heidi Ledford
doi:10.1038/449647a
Weapons of war scoop spoof Nobels p648
From sword swallowing to a 'gay' bomb.
Steve Nadis
doi:10.1038/449648a
Panel issues warning over mineral market tremors p648
Strategic supply should be monitored, say US academics.
Eric Hand
doi:10.1038/449648b
University of California fined over security breach p649
doi:10.1038/449649a
Blueprint drawn up for Britain's science spending p649
doi:10.1038/449649b
Council of Europe votes against creationist teaching p649
doi:10.1038/449649c
Conservationists spot flaws in plan to save owl p649
doi:10.1038/449649d
India gets high-security lab for human diseases p649
doi:10.1038/449649e
Hooke online offers minute details of Royal Society p649
doi:10.1038/449649f
Business
Patent crunch pending p651
Drug makers are fighting a rear-guard action against patent laws that are before the US Congress. Meredith Wadman reports.
Meredith Wadman
doi:10.1038/449651a
News Features
Biofuel: The little shrub that could — maybe p652
India, like many countries, has high hopes for jatropha as a biofuel source, but little is known about how to make it a successful crop. Daemon Fairless digs for the roots of a new enthusiasm.
doi:10.1038/449652a
Non-proliferation: School of Nukes p656
How do nuclear inspectors know when all is not as they are told? Geoff Brumfiel joins some inspectors-in-training as they learn the ropes at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
doi:10.1038/449656a
Correspondence
Plagiarism? No, we're just borrowing better English p658
Ihsan Yilmaz
doi:10.1038/449658a
Plagiarism: text-matching program offers an answer p658
John Bechhoefer
doi:10.1038/449658b
Need to strike balance with industry–academia rules p658
Andrew Leuchter & Gerald S. Levey
doi:10.1038/449658c
Biosafety risk in health lab move to central London p658
Ellen Nisbet
doi:10.1038/449658d
Books and Arts
An incomparable life p659
Exceptional intellect and creativity made Ernst Mayr the last century's greatest evolutionary biologist.
Jared Diamond reviews Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy: The Life and Science of Ernst Mayr 1904–2005 by Jürgen Haffer
doi:10.1038/449659a
The dark side of cancer research p660
Daniel S. Greenberg reviews The Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis
doi:10.1038/449660a
Promoting capitalism over Kyoto p661
Jonathon Porritt reviews Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility by Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus
doi:10.1038/449661a
Academic snakes and ladders p662
Pamela A. Silver reviews The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology by C. Ray Chandler, Lorne M. Wolfe & Daniel E. L. Promislow
doi:10.1038/449662a
Event: Experiment-a-thon p662
Matt Brown reviews
doi:10.1038/449662b
Essays
Science & Politics: When ministers are well primed p663
Enthusing and informing government members about science can have surprising and gratifying results.
Hans Wigzell
doi:10.1038/449663a
Fifty years of hopes and fears p664
Atomic energy was cutting edge when the Windscale fire showed the world the effects of a nuclear accident. Fifty years on, we have more innovative ways to generate electricity.
Walt Patterson
doi:10.1038/449664a
See also: Editor's summary
News and Views
Linguistics: An invisible hand p665
Quantitative relationships between how frequently a word is used and how rapidly it changes over time raise intriguing questions about the way individual behaviours determine large-scale linguistic and cultural change.
W. Tecumseh Fitch
doi:10.1038/449665a
See also: Editor's summary
Organic chemistry: Zippier synthesis in water p667
Complex toxin molecules are the ultimate challenge for organic chemists — even successful syntheses often involve an impractical number of steps. A biologically inspired reaction might simplify things.
Masayuki Inoue
doi:10.1038/449667a
Laser physics: A phase it's going through p669
When we observe laser light, we typically measure its intensity, and so wave amplitude. The phase, which encodes further details of the laser's internal workings, was obscure — but fresh light is being shed on it.
David S. Citrin
doi:10.1038/449669a
See also: Editor's summary
Cancer: Micromanagement of metastasis p671
Although they were discovered only in the early 1990s, many regulatory functions of microRNAs — naturally occurring short RNA sequences — have already been reported. The latest news is that they mediate cancer spread.
Patricia S. Steeg
doi:10.1038/449671a
See also: Editor's summary
Evolutionary genetics: Making the most of redundancy p673
Single genes, chromosomal regions and even entire genomes can undergo duplication. What good can come of these extra copies? Evolution seems to use several tricks to take advantage of the situation.
Edward J. Louis
doi:10.1038/449673a
See also: Editor's summary
Solid-state physics: Response with a twist p674
The behaviour of ferromagnetic and ferroelectric materials in a magnetic or electric field makes them easy to spot. But for their more recently discovered counterpart, ferrotoroidic materials, things become complex.
Karin M. Rabe
doi:10.1038/449674a
See also: Editor's summary
Articles
Gene duplication and the adaptive evolution of a classic genetic switch p677
Chris Todd Hittinger & Sean B. Carroll
doi:10.1038/nature06151
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (3,943K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary | News and Views by Louis
Tumour invasion and metastasis initiated by microRNA-10b in breast cancer p682
Li Ma, Julie Teruya-Feldstein & Robert A. Weinberg
doi:10.1038/nature06174
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (963K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary | News and Views by Steeg
A histone H3 lysine 27 demethylase regulates animal posterior development p689
Fei Lan, Peter E. Bayliss, John L. Rinn, Johnathan R. Whetstine, Jordon K. Wang, Shuzhen Chen, Shigeki Iwase, Roman Alpatov, Irina Issaeva, Eli Canaani, Thomas M. Roberts, Howard Y. Chang & Yang Shi
doi:10.1038/nature06192
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (673K) | Supplementary information
Letters
Association of the jets of Enceladus with the warmest regions on its south-polar fractures p695
Joseph N. Spitale & Carolyn C. Porco
doi:10.1038/nature06217
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (1,206K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary
Phase-resolved measurements of stimulated emission in a laser p698
Josef Kröll, Juraj Darmo, Sukhdeep S. Dhillon, Xavier Marcadet, Michel Calligaro, Carlo Sirtori & Karl Unterrainer
doi:10.1038/nature06208
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (325K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary | News and Views by Citrin
Observation of ferrotoroidic domains p702
Bas B. Van Aken, Jean-Pierre Rivera, Hans Schmid & Manfred Fiebig
doi:10.1038/nature06139
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (583K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary | News and Views by Rabe
Isotopic evidence for Mesoarchaean anoxia and changing atmospheric sulphur chemistry p706
James Farquhar, Marc Peters, David T. Johnston, Harald Strauss, Andrew Masterson, Uwe Wiechert & Alan J. Kaufman
doi:10.1038/nature06202
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (291K) | Supplementary information
Attribution of observed surface humidity changes to human influence p710
Katharine M. Willett, Nathan P. Gillett, Philip D. Jones & Peter W. Thorne
doi:10.1038/nature06207
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (1,106K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary
Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language p713
Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Joe Jackson, Tina Tang & Martin A. Nowak
doi:10.1038/nature06137
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (461K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary | News and Views by Fitch
Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history p717
Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson & Andrew Meade
doi:10.1038/nature06176
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (282K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary | News and Views by Fitch
Phagocyte-derived catecholamines enhance acute inflammatory injury p721
Michael A. Flierl, Daniel Rittirsch, Brian A. Nadeau, Anthony J. Chen, J. Vidya Sarma, Firas S. Zetoune, Stephanie R. McGuire, Rachel P. List, Danielle E. Day, L. Marco Hoesel, Hongwei Gao, Nico Van Rooijen, Markus S. Huber-Lang, Richard R. Neubig & Peter A. Ward
doi:10.1038/nature06185
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (538K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary
Mechanism of chloride interaction with neurotransmitter:sodium symporters p726
Elia Zomot, Annie Bendahan, Matthias Quick, Yongfang Zhao, Jonathan A. Javitch & Baruch I. Kanner
doi:10.1038/nature06133
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (503K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary
UTX and JMJD3 are histone H3K27 demethylases involved in HOX gene regulation and development p731
Karl Agger, Paul A. C. Cloos, Jesper Christensen, Diego Pasini, Simon Rose, Juri Rappsilber, Irina Issaeva, Eli Canaani, Anna Elisabetta Salcini & Kristian Helin
doi:10.1038/nature06145
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (804K) | Supplementary information
Structural basis for selective recognition of ESCRT-III by the AAA ATPase Vps4 p735
Takayuki Obita, Suraj Saksena, Sara Ghazi-Tabatabai, David J. Gill, Olga Perisic, Scott D. Emr & Roger L. Williams
doi:10.1038/nature06171
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (2,692K) | Supplementary information
ESCRT-III recognition by VPS4 ATPases p740
Melissa D. Stuchell-Brereton, Jack J. Skalicky, Collin Kieffer, Mary Anne Karren, Sanaz Ghaffarian & Wesley I. Sundquist
doi:10.1038/nature06172
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (675K) | Supplementary information
Effective RNAi-mediated gene silencing without interruption of the endogenous microRNA pathway p745
Matthias John, Rainer Constien, Akin Akinc, Michael Goldberg, Young-Ah Moon, Martina Spranger, Philipp Hadwiger, Jürgen Soutschek, Hans-Peter Vornlocher, Muthiah Manoharan, Markus Stoffel, Robert Langer, Daniel G. Anderson, Jay D. Horton, Victor Koteliansky & David Bumcrot
doi:10.1038/nature06179
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (289K) | Supplementary information
See also: Editor's summary
Corrigendum
Southern Ocean sea-ice extent, productivity and iron flux over the past eight glacial cycles p748
E. W. Wolff, H. Fischer, F. Fundel, U. Ruth, B. Twarloh, G. C. Littot, R. Mulvaney, R. Röthlisberger, M. de Angelis, C. F. Boutron, M. Hansson, U. Jonsell, M. A. Hutterli, F. Lambert, P. Kaufmann, B. Stauffer, T. F. Stocker, J. P. Steffensen, M. Bigler, M. L. Siggaard-Andersen, R. Udisti, S. Becagli, E. Castellano, M. Severi, D. Wagenbach, C. Barbante, P. Gabrielli & V. Gaspari
doi:10.1038/nature06271
Naturejobs
ProspectProspects p749
Working from home can be tough, no matter what the profession.
Gene Russo
doi:10.1038/nj7163-749a
Special Report
Freedom of the skies p750
For astronomers looking for maximum independence, working from home is an option. But it has its challenges. Genevive Bjorn reports.
Genevive Bjorn
doi:10.1038/nj7163-750a
Career View
Elena Shevchenko, scientist, & Elena Rozhkova, assistant scientist, Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois p752
Nanotech expert and bioorganic chemist move to Argonne to collaborate.
Virginia Gewin
doi:10.1038/nj7163-752a
Awards for South Africa's best p752
Mentors receive accolades in South Africa.
Paul Smaglik
doi:10.1038/nj7163-752b
Perseverance pays off p752
At long last, I've published the final part of my PhD research. Now what?
Chris Rowan
doi:10.1038/nj7163-752c