Volume 449 Issue 7165, 25 October 2007

Debate about sensitive scientific issues needs to be forthright but not crass.

The likely derailment of a US–Indian nuclear deal highlights the limitations of bilateral arrangements.

Questions raised over fate of non-human remains.

Fresh light is shed on dispute over diabetes pill.

Global-warming concerns halt construction of power stations.

Scribbles on the margins of science.

Stagnant budget makes American biomedicine less attractive.

Internal conflict hampers debate on stem cells.

Latest data fail to resolve debate over safety and efficacy.

National Academies call for commission to limit restrictions.

As the battle over the US budget drags into autumn, the amount of money available for science is hostage to larger budget disputes. David Goldston explains.

'Cloud computing' is being pitched as a new nirvana for scientists drowning in data. But can it deliver? Eric Hand investigates.

M. S. Swaminathan transformed agriculture in India in the 1960s. Now Daemon Fairless finds him at the heart of another high-tech scheme to help the rural poor.

Under the rubble of war-torn Afghanistan lie natural resources worth billions. Rex Dalton reports from Kabul on the scientists risking their lives to see them developed for the good of the country.

Climate policy after 2012, when the Kyoto treaty expires, needs a radical rethink. More of the same won't do, argue Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner.

Our brains seem to be finely tuned to music, but of what use are our musical powers and passions?

Science advisers should have confidence in their data, or risk being undermined by more dogmatic and vociferous stakeholders during the policy-making process.

The results of a powerful combination of computer modelling and experimental tests can account for the establishment of gradients of the plant molecule auxin and for major patterning elements in the plant root.

For most atomic nuclei, the maximum number of neutrons that can be bound is unknown. The discovery of two neutron-rich nuclei — and the confirmed absence of others — might help solve this conundrum.

A major hurdle in treating cancer is that tumour cells acquire drug resistance. To overcome this problem, one strategy might be to fine-tune the right mixture of drugs that target specific molecules.

Ecologists have necessarily had to simplify matters in looking at predator–prey dynamics. Study of a situation in which predator and prey live in groups reveals that a key process was previously overlooked.

Measurements on the attosecond timescale had been limited to the dynamics of electrons in an atomic gas. But a record has now been set in a quite different context — the photoemission of electrons from a surface.

How do nonspecific enzymes that help to correct RNA folding identify misfolded structures among similar, properly folded RNAs? It seems that careful discrimination has little to do with it.

A literature meta-analysis of the effects of nitrogen and phosphorus on plant growth prompts a thought-provoking inference — that the supply of, and demand for, these nutrients are usually in close balance.

The Lgr5 (also known as Gpr49) gene is identified as a unique, single marker gene for adult stem cells and provides the first lineage tracing data for long-lived pluripotent stem cells in the small intestine and colon. These findings will have great impact on stem cell and cancer research.

A computational model that spans molecular and cellular levels describing diffusion and PIN-facilitated auxin transport in and across cells within the root system is experimentally tested. The model strongly supports that plant roots are able to generate an auxin maximum and a highly robust auxin gradient with morphogenic properties.

The detection of eight new propellers in Saturn's A ring is reported, indicating embedded moonlets with radii between 30–70m. The moonlets found are concentrated in a narrow 3,000 km wide annulus at 130,000km distance from Saturn.

The paper reports a significant advance in the determination of the limit of how many neutrons a given number of protons can bind to (known as the neutron drip line), with the discovery of two new neutron-rich isotopes predicted to be drip line nuclei. Nuclei at the drip line gain stability from an unpaired proton, which narrows the shell gaps and provides the opportunity to bind many more neutrons.

In solid ⁴He, a fraction of the solid seems to decouple from the motion of the surrounding lattice when subjected to oscillatory motion. However, no thermodynamic signature of the possible supersolid transition has been seen. This paper reports the finding of a heat capacity peak that coincides with the onset of mass decoupling. This complementary experimental evidence supports the existence of a genuine transition between the normal solid and supersolid phases of ⁴He.

When exposing a tungsten crystal to intense light, the travel times of emitted electrons differ by 110 attoseconds, depending on whether they were originally tightly bound to one atom in the crystal or delocalized over many atoms. This ability to directly probe fundamental aspects of solid-state electron dynamics could aid the further development of modern technologies such as electronics, information processing and photovoltaics.

Helium concentrations and elemental ratios of He/Ne and He/Ar in ocean-island basalts (such as Hawaii and Iceland) are an order of magnitude lower than in mid-ocean ridge basalts. These observations can be self-consistently explained by a higher CO₂ content of ocean-island basalts and disequilibrium, open-system degassing of the erupting magma.

Group formation by both predators and prey dramatically reduces predator search efficiency. Field data on lions and their large herbivore prey from Serengeti National Park suggest that group formation by both predators and prey has an enormous impact on Serengeti population dynamics, lending a stabilizing influence to what would be otherwise be a highly unstable situation.

Levy flights are random walks characterised by many short steps and rare long steps. They display fractal properties, have no typical scale, and occur in physical and chemical systems. On the basis of high-resolution data and new analyses, previous claims that wandering albatrosses perform Levy flights when searching for prey on the ocean surface are shown to be unfounded. A new method is proposed for use when testing for power-law distributions.

The first time-lapse analysis of individual cell movements in living chick embryos during gastrulation are reported, and details that these movements differ from those described in fish and amphibians, with important implications for embryology and evolution of gastrulation in vertebrates.

The PLETHORA (PLT) family of transcription factors are essential for defining the root stem cell niche. The PLT proteins are expressed in gradients with a high point in the stem cell area and act in a dose-dependent manner to dictate the size of the stem cell area and the size of the transit amplifying cells that make up the meristem. High levels of PLT activity promote stem cell identity and maintenance; lower levels promote division of stem cell daughters; and further reduced levels allow cell differentiation.

Understanding the signalling pathways that initiate organ development is of fundamental importance to human medicine. A mechanism that turns on the expression of the genes necessary to make the eye via the purinergic signalling has now been identified.

The retromer is a complex of Vacuolar protein sorting proteins that mediate retrieval of lysosomal hydrolases from endosomes to the trans golgi network. The human retromer complex can be separated into two smaller complexes, a membrane targeting sorting nexin dimer and a heterotrimeric cargo recognition complex. New and previously solved structures, bioinformatics, interaction studies, molecular modelling and electron microscopy of the entire complex are combined to develop a structural model of the complex.

An enzyme, Ubp-M, is identified that removes the ubiquitin modification from histone H2A. Depletion of Ubp-M leads to slower cell growth and abnormal chromosome segregation in mitosis. In addition, depletion of Ubp-M causes defects in development and dysregulation of Hox gene expression.

A genome-wide RNAi screen identifies several genes required for Ras-mediated epigenetic silencing that encode cell signalling molecules, chromatin modifiers, transcriptional activators and repressors, and the DNA methyltransferase DNMT1.

It is well known that large-scale rearrangements of domains of a protein can play an important role in ligand binding and recognition, catalysis, and regulation. Though X-ray crystal structures can provide a static picture of the apo (usually open) and holo (usually closed) states of a protein, it is not usually clear whether the apo state exists as a single species where the closed state is energetically inaccessible and interdomain rearrangement is induced by ligand or substrate binding or whether the predominantly open form already co-exists in rapid equilibrium with a minor closed species. In this paper, the authors obtained paramagnetic relaxation enhancement data that indicate that there is a rapidly exchanging mixture of a predominantly open form of the maltose-binding protein and a minor (partially-closed) form of the protein. Ensemble simulated annealing refinement was used to determine an ensemble average structure of the minor apo species and demonstrate that it is distinct from the sugar-bound state.

Similar postdoc glut, different country.

After boosting its number of postdocs by thousands, Japan is dealing with a major researcher glut. Heidi Ledford reports.

Nancy Andrews becomes one of only a handful of women to become dean at a top medical school.

A call for research growth in Spain.

Change is coming. I hope I'm ready.

A blast from the past.

Technology reveals the movements of single cells in early development.