Volume 450 Issue 7166, 1 November 2007

A government that asks for independent scientific advice had best be ready to take it.

An Asian Moon race is neither particularly worrying nor especially inspiring.

The brain is no longer the black box it used to be, and neuroscientists are starting to put new knowledge to good use, developing better animal models for psychiatric disorders. Alison Abbott reports.

Scribbles on the margins of science.

Plans to approach ExxonMobil spark angry response.

Companies prepare to offer a very personal service.

Chang'e mission heads for the Moon.

Underground physics facility gets the green light.

A survey shows positive trends for private-sector research and development in the European Union. But as Andrea Chipman reports, there's more to the data than meets the eye.

California biotech wins patent case.

Steel makers plan to log emissions.

UK biotech flagship absorbed.

Is blasting into a river bluff any way to do palaeontology? Alison Abbott reports on an unusual expedition into the Alaskan wilderness in search of the bones of polar dinosaurs.

When most people look at lobsters, they see dinner. Eve Marder saw a key to the theoretical underpinnings of animal behaviour. Ishani Ganguli reports.

The Japanese make few charitable donations. David Cyranoski meets a patient advocate and scientist working to change a cultural reticence about giving.

Is language the key to thought? Neuroscience suggests it is probably more complicated than that.

Researchers and policy-makers need ways for accommodating the partiality of scientific knowledge and for acting under the inevitable uncertainty it holds.

The worm Caenorhabditis elegans has many advantages as an experimental organism. These have been exploited to investigate how, at a single-neuron level, neural circuits transform sensory signals into behaviour.

The properties of flat aromatic molecules are well known to chemists, but some non-planar aromatics remain a mystery. A molecule that can twist into a Möbius band on command might shed light on their features.

Scaffolding proteins are so named because they function as platforms for the assembly of molecular signalling complexes. But at least one such protein is more than a passive bystander and has its own signalling role.

The idea of 'random walks' pops up in areas from biochemical reaction pathways to animals' foraging strategies. A central question — how likely is it that a walker is somewhere for the first time? — now has a simpler answer.

When attacking a plant, pathogens must deliver proteins into their victim's cells. The causal agent of potato late blight uses a system that is remarkably similar to that used by the malaria parasite in red blood cells.

In the silence that precedes the onset of hearing in the developing auditory system, it seems that the cells of a transient structure known as Kölliker's organ are capable of generating their own 'virtual' music.

Neutral theory, in which species do not interact, has been used to try to understand the relative species abundance of tropical forests, although its validity been questioned. A non-interacting theory with similarities and differences to conventional neutral theory is developed. The approach provides a unified and quantitatively accurate description of relative species abundance data from both tropical forests and coral reefs.

Acoustic information is detected by inner hair cells in mammalian cochlea and is transmitted to the brain via the auditory nerve. But auditory nerve activity is evident before the cochlear machinery develops the ability to process information. The mechanism that underlies this effect has been uncovered in a series of experiments, showing that supporting cells located in Kölliker's organ spontaneously release ATP, activating inner hair cells and thus auditory nerve fibres.

A combination of genetic tricks and fancy fluorescent proteins is used to develop the Technicolor version of Golgi staining, 'Brainbow', in which hundreds of individual neurons are painted, each with a distinctive hue. This technology should not only boost mapping efforts in normal or diseased brains, but could also be applied to other complex cell populations, such as the immune system.

A combination of genetics and calcium imaging is used to detail the neuronal circuitry in Caenorhabditis elegans that allows odour-sensing neurons to activate or inhibit downstream interneurons controlling crawling and turning behaviours. The nerve cell connectivity and molecules used by this nematode to process olfactory information shows striking homologies with those used to sense light in mammalian retina

Structures observed in polarized light across the broad Hα emission line in the quasar PG 1700+158 originate close to the accretion disk in a wind. The wind has large rotational motions (4,000km s⁻¹), providing direct observational evidence that outflows from active galactic nuclei are launched from the disks.

How long does it take a random walker to reach a given target point? This quantity, known as a first passage time, is important because of its crucial role in various situations such as spreading of diseases or target search processes. This paper develops a general theory that allows the accurate evaluation of the mean first passage time in complex media. The predictions are confirmed by numerical simulations of several representative models of disordered media, fractals, anomalous diffusion and scale free networks.

In underdoped high-T_C superconducting copper oxides a pseudogap develops well above T_C. Whether the pseudogap is a distinct phenomenon or the incoherent continuation of the superconducting gap above T_C is one of the central questions in high- T_C research. A direct and unambiguous observation of a single-particle gap tied to the superconducting transition as function of temperature is discovered in underdoped Bi₂Sr₂CaCu₂O_8+δ.

The bandwidth of the scanning tunnelling microscope has been significantly improved by designing a radio-frequency measurement circuit and demonstrate first experimental results for three possible applications; fast surface topography, thermometry at the nanometre scale and displacement sensing.

A process model with three competing vascular and nonvascular vegetation types is used to examine the effects of climate, carbon dioxide concentrations and fire disturbance on a large area of Canadian boreal forest. It finds that the carbon balance of the region was driven by changes in fire disturbance from 1948 to 2005.

A 'pseudotribosphenic' mammal from the Middle Jurassic whose teeth have a very advanced morphology for mammals of such an early date compared with the primitive nature of the rest of its body, is described. The find confirms the previously unexpected diversity of the most ancient mammals, as the same fossil beds (in Inner Mongolia) had previously revealed remains of a beaver-like swimming mammal.

Use of a model has shown that the mass mortality of a grazing urchin in 1983 has made Caribbean reefs susceptible a general loss of resilience. The reefs are now highly sensitive to parrotfish exploitation, with important consequences for reef management.

Optimism for the future is a ubiquitous human trait. In an fMRI study, Phelps and colleagues link this tendency to activity in amygdala and rostral anterior cingulate -- brain areas whose function may be disrupted in depression. Activation in these areas is higher when subjects imagine positive rather than negative future events, and activity levels also correlate with individual personality tendencies towards optimism.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging is used to examine brain areas whose activity correlates with subsequent feeding behaviour under different satiety states evoked by intravenous peptide YY_3–36 (PYY), administration. Under high PYY conditions, (mimicking the fed state) changes in orbitofrontal cortex activation better predicted subsequent feeding, whereas in low PYY conditions, hypothalamic activation predicted food intake.

Lymph nodes help clear infecting pathogens and prevent their dissemination. In the case of lymph-borne virus, this involves a particular subpopulation of macrophages that is shown to capture the viral particles and present them to B cells, leading to B cell activation.

A conserved peptide motif, RXLR-EER present in effector proteins from the oomycete Phytophthora infestans (the cause of the Irish Potato famine) is required for movement of effectors from specialized infection structures called haustoria into plant cells. This sequence has recently been reported to be required for the translocation of the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum into human erythrocytes.

Targeted disruption of the gene for the histone H3K9 demethylase JHDM2A in mouse uncovers a role for the enzyme in spermatogenesis and regulation of transition nuclear protein and protamine genes.

Thioredoxins catalyze disulphide bond reduction in all living organisms. Single-molecule force-clamp spectroscopy has revealed that there are two alternative forms of the catalytic reaction: the first requires a reorientation of the disulphide bond in the substrate and the second involves an elongation of the disulphide bond in the substrate.

'Research integrity' training has become part and parcel of being a scientist.

A bold scheme to map the entire human brain has become the mission of many scientists from a host of different fields. Paul Smaglik tracks the interdisciplinary career implications.

Imaging expert leaves Harvard for Germany.

The fruits of joining technological acumen with a theoretical mindset.

Is an industry career my calling?

You've been stung.

Imaging identifies the brain regions that make us optimistic.