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Volume 449 Issue 7163, 11 October 2007

Editorial

  • Biofuels need new technology, new agronomy and new politics if they are not to do more harm than good.

    Editorial

    Advertisement

  • Social scientists studying electronic interactions must take the lead on preserving data security.

    Editorial
  • Mentoring and training for ethical behaviour aren't all they're cracked up to be.

    Editorial
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Research Highlights

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Journal Club

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News

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News in Brief

  • Scribbles on the margins of science.

    News in Brief
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News

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News in Brief

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Correction

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News

  • Drug makers are fighting a rear-guard action against patent laws that are before the US Congress. Meredith Wadman reports.

    • Meredith Wadman
    News
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News Feature

  • 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.

    • Daemon Fairless
    News Feature
  • 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.

    • Geoff Brumfiel
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Books & Arts

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Essay

  • Enthusing and informing government members about science can have surprising and gratifying results.

    • Hans Wigzell
    Essay
  • 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
    Essay
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News & Views

  • 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
    News & Views
  • 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
    News & Views
  • 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
    News & Views
  • 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
    News & Views
  • 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
    News & Views
  • 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
    News & Views
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Article

  • With the increasing availability of genomic sequences, it is possible to ask questions about evolution by examining closely related species and genes. This paper shows that the well-studied GAL3 and GAL1 genes in yeast evolved from one ancestral gene, via movement of transcriptional regulatory sites after a gene duplication event.

    • Chris Todd Hittinger
    • Sean B. Carroll
    Article
  • miR-10b is highly expressed in aggressive human breast cancers and mediates breast cancer cell migration, invasion and metastasis. miR-10b is transcriptionally activated by Twist and exerts its effects by regulating the target genes HOXD10 and RHOC.

    • Li Ma
    • Julie Teruya-Feldstein
    • Robert A. Weinberg
    Article
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Letter

  • Jets of material have been seen emanating from the south-polar terrain of Saturn's satellite Enceladus. Observations have shown that region is anomalously warm, with the hottest measured temperatures coinciding with four 'tiger stripe' fractures. Cassini images are used to triangulate the source locations for the most prominent jets, and find that the jets emanate from the four tiger stripes.

    • Joseph N. Spitale
    • Carolyn C. Porco
    Letter
  • Laser radiation is usually measured with intensity detectors that determine frequency and intensity, but throw away information about the phase of the radiation. But a scheme has been developed to measure amplitude as well as phase of laser radiation from so-called quantum cascade lasers, which operate in the terahertz regime.

    • Josef Kröll
    • Juraj Darmo
    • Karl Unterrainer
    Letter
  • There are currently three types of ferroic materials that are widely known; ferromagnets, ferroelectricity, and ferroelastic materials. A fourth form of ferroic order, ferrotoroidicity, has been postulated. To confirm that a material is a ferrotorodic, corresponding ferrotoroidic domains need to be observed. Spatially resolved measurements with a nonlinear optical imaging method on LiCoPO4 were carried out, and observed ferrotoroidic domains that coexist with independent antiferromagnetic domains.

    • Bas B. Van Aken
    • Jean-Pierre Rivera
    • Manfred Fiebig
    Letter
  • The observation of non-mass-dependent sulphur isotope ratios in sedimentary rocks more than 2.4 billion years old and the disappearance of this signal in younger sediments is taken as evidence for the transition from an anoxic to oxic atmosphere around 2.4 Gyr ago. But now, the preservation of a non mass-dependent signal that differs from that of preceding and following periods in the Archean is demonstrated. The findings support the original idea of an anoxic early atmosphere before 2.4 Gyr ago, and at the same time identifies variability within the isotope record that suggests changes in pre-2.4 Gya atmospheric pathways for non-mass-dependent chemistry and in the ultraviolet transparency of an evolving early atmosphere.

    • James Farquhar
    • Marc Peters
    • Alan J. Kaufman
    Letter
  • A new dataset of surface specific humidity observations is used, along with output from a coupled climate model, to identify a significant increase in global mean surface specific humidity over the late twentieth century that is mainly attributable to human influence, indicating that human-induced climate change has already had a significant influence on this important climate variable.

    • Katharine M. Willett
    • Nathan P. Gillett
    • Peter W. Thorne
    Letter
  • During language evolution, rules emerge and exceptions decline. A quantitative study measures the rate at which a human language becomes more regular over time. Specifically, the regularization of English verbs over the last 1200 years was studied, and it was found that half-life of a verb scales as the square root of its frequency, meaning that irregular verbs that are 100 times as rare regularize ten times faster.

    • Erez Lieberman
    • Jean-Baptiste Michel
    • Martin A. Nowak
    Letter
  • Statistical modelling techniques and concepts from biology are applied to linguistic data to show a general and law-like relationship between the frequency with which meanings are used in everyday language and their rate of evolution throughout Indo-European history: the more a word is used, the less likely it is to change over time. The findings demonstrate a fundamental aspect of language evolution that is predicted to apply to all languages.

    • Mark Pagel
    • Quentin D. Atkinson
    • Andrew Meade
    Letter
  • Neurotransmitter:sodium symporters (NSS) use energy derived from sodium gradients to power transport of their respective neurotransmitters. But, whereas most eukaryotic NSS transporters are chloride-dependent, the prokaryotic homologue LeuT is not. Structural and mechanistic knowledge of LeuT, and a chloride transporter from an entirely different family, is applied to mammalian NSS transporters and finds that transported chloride ions serve to neutralise the positive charge carried by the sodium ions.

    • Elia Zomot
    • Annie Bendahan
    • Baruch I. Kanner
    Letter
  • The microtubule interacting and tarnsport (MIT) domain of Vps4 binds conserved residues in the CHMP1-3 class of ESCRT-III proteins. These results reveal how Vps4 recognises substrates to facilitate membrane fission events required for viral release and endosomal vesicles

    • Melissa D. Stuchell-Brereton
    • Jack J. Skalicky
    • Wesley I. Sundquist
    Letter
  • Recent work found that overexpression of short hairpin RNAs in cells could lead to mortality in mice, this was attributed to interference with the cellular machinery that makes miRNAs. This raised the issue of whether RNA interference-mediated silencing would be therapeutically possible. This paper shows that small interfering RNAs can be systemically administered and effectively suppress gene expression without compromising the activity of various liver miRNAs.

    • Matthias John
    • Rainer Constien
    • David Bumcrot
    Letter
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Corrigendum

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Prospects

  • Working from home can be tough, no matter what the profession.

    • Gene Russo
    Prospects
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Special Report

  • For astronomers looking for maximum independence, working from home is an option. But it has its challenges. Genevive Bjorn reports.

    • Genevive Bjorn
    Special Report
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Movers

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Mentors and Protégés

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Career View

  • At long last, I've published the final part of my PhD research. Now what?

    • Chris Rowan
    Career View
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Futures

  • It's all you've ever wanted.

    • Terry Bisson
    Futures
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Authors

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