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Volume 450 Issue 7172, 13 December 2007

Editorial

  • Europe's handling of applications to grow genetically modified crops amounts to bad governance.

    Editorial

    Advertisement

  • More benign global AIDS statistics do not mean that the battle against HIV is being won.

    Editorial
  • The opportunities currently opening up for Venezuelan science should not be squandered.

    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

  • Geothermal power is one of the hottest prospects in the burgeoning clean-energy market. But, as Kurt Kleiner reports, it's not close enough to home for many uses.

    • Kurt Kleiner
    News
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News in Brief

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News Feature

  • Accustomed to adapting to nature's whims, gardeners are more prepared than most to take on the challenge of climate change. Emma Marris asks them what to grow in a greenhouse world.

    • Emma Marris
    News Feature
  • After decades of war, looting and destruction, Afghanistan's archaeologists are scrambling to restore their country's cultural heritage. Rex Dalton visited Kabul to see how they are faring.

    • Rex Dalton
    News Feature
  • Are their brains not wired to feel what others feel, or do they just not care? Alison Abbott joins researchers looking into normal neurobiology through the scope of psychopathy.

    • Alison Abbott
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Books & Arts

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News & Views

  • How do the freak waves that haunt seafarers' nightmares arise? We don't know, is the short answer — but the discovery of a similar phenomenon in optical waves might assist in getting to the bottom of the mystery.

    • Dong-Il Yeom
    • Benjamin J. Eggleton
    News & Views
  • Our knowledge of the inner workings of malaria parasites comes largely from lab-based studies. But parasites growing in humans may have greater metabolic flexibility than those growing in Petri dishes.

    • Giel G. van Dooren
    • Geoffrey I. McFadden

    Focus:

    News & Views
  • Simulations indicate that faint galaxies of a seemingly tranquil class were born in violent cosmic encounters. This would be good news for the prevailing model of how the Universe is constructed.

    • Curtis Struck
    News & Views
  • The function of every cell in our bodies depends on the work of proteins known as ion pumps. Several new crystal structures cast fresh light on how three different pumps deal with their distinct cargoes of ions.

    • David C. Gadsby
    News & Views
  • Decoding the information stored in DNA requires an intricate balance between processes that turn gene expression on or off. A protein that influences the packaging of DNA regulates this balance genome-wide.

    • Karen M. Arndt
    News & Views
  • A complex iron oxide has been made that has an unusual crystal structure suggesting that the oxide ions are surprisingly mobile. This finding could pave the way to other metal-oxide materials with useful properties.

    • Michael A. Hayward
    • Matthew J. Rosseinsky
    News & Views
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Correction

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News & Views

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Introduction

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Review Article

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Article

  • The halo of the Milky Way is clearly divisible into two broadly overlapping structural components, an inner and an outer halo. While the inner halo has a modest net prograde rotation, the outer halo exhibits a net retrograde rotation and a peak metallicity one third that of the inner.

    • Daniela Carollo
    • Timothy C. Beers
    • Donald G. York
    Article
  • How the Sec translocon recognises transmembrane α-helices in newly synthesised proteins is revealed by the analysis of a large number of hydrophobic segments and presentation of a quantitative analysis of the position-dependent contribution of efficiency of membrane insertion for all amino acids. The results support the idea that recognition of transmembrane helices by the Sec translocon is a lipid-partitioning process.

    • Tara Hessa
    • Nadja M. Meindl-Beinker
    • Gunnar von Heijne
    Article
  • The yeast chromatin remodelling complex Isw2 repositions nucleosomes that are adjacent to promoter regions and enforces directionality on transcription by preventing inappropriate transcription initiation from cryptic sites.

    • Iestyn Whitehouse
    • Oliver J. Rando
    • Toshio Tsukiyama
    Article
  • In plants and fungi, cellular ion homeostasis is powered by the proton pump, a member of the P-type ATPase family. The first X-ray structure of the H+-ATPase is presented, and insight into the mechanism by which protons are transported against an electrochemical gradient is provided

    • Claus Olesen
    • Martin Picard
    • Poul Nissen
    Article
  • Relatively little is known about the mechanisms that underlie the active transport of ions by Na+,K+-ATPase. A 3.5 Å X-ray structure of this fundamental protein is presented, revealing the two binding sites for potassium.

    • J. Preben Morth
    • Bjørn P. Pedersen
    • Poul Nissen
    Article
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Letter

  • The concept of rogue waves in an optical system is investigated by utilizing a new real-time detection technique to study a system that exposes extremely steep, large optical waves as rare outcomes from injection of a population of almost-identical optical pulses. Analysis of these results finds that the optical rogue waves arise when random noise perturbs the initially smooth pulses with a certain frequency shift and within a well-defined time window.

    • D. R. Solli
    • C. Ropers
    • B. Jalali
    Letter
  • The synthesis of SrFeO2, a new compound bearing a square-planar oxygen coordination around Fe2+, is shown. SrFeO2 is isostructural with 'infinite layer' cupric oxides, and exhibits a magnetic order far above room temperature.

    • Y. Tsujimoto
    • C. Tassel
    • W. Paulus
    Letter
  • The relationship between changes in sea surface temperature and a measure called 'tropical cyclone potential intensity', which provides an upper bound on cyclone intensity, is explored. It is found that changes in potential intensity are closely related to the regional structure of warming, rather than local sea surface temperature — regions that warm more than the tropical average are characterized by increased potential intensity, and vice versa.

    • Gabriel A. Vecchi
    • Brian J. Soden
    Letter
  • Pregnancy makes the instability of upright walking even worse by its constant shifting the centre of gravity. The anatomical adaptations peculiar to female spines that balance the fetal load are detailed, and show that our australopithecine ancestors had much the same adaptations.

    • Katherine K. Whitcome
    • Liza J. Shapiro
    • Daniel E. Lieberman

    Collection:

    Letter
  • Bacterial cultures experiencing changes in environmental conditions accumulate mutator strains, presumably to enhance their capability for adaptive evolution. The presence of bacterial viruses is demonstrated to have a similar effect, as during co-evolution of Pseudomonas fluorescens and its lytic DNA phage, bacterial mutation rates significantly increase, resulting in a higher probability of phage extinction.

    • Csaba Pal
    • María D. Maciá
    • Angus Buckling
    Letter
  • The circadian regulator CLOCK has histone acetyltransferase (HAT) activity that contributes to chromatin-remodelling events during circadian control of gene expression. Here, CLOCK is shown to acetylate its heterodimerization partner BMAL1, a step which facilitates recruitment of CRY1 and promotes transcriptional repression.

    • Jun Hirayama
    • Saurabh Sahar
    • Paolo Sassone-Corsi
    Letter
  • Viral microRNAs have been shown to downregulate complementary viral mRNA targets and to bind to 3′ untranslated regions of host cell mRNAs to prevent their translation or induce their degradation. This paper shows that viral miRNAs can also function as orthologues of cellular miRNAs and downregulate the expression of cellular mRNAs via target sites that may be evolutionary conserved.

    • Eva Gottwein
    • Neelanjan Mukherjee
    • Bryan R. Cullen
    Letter
  • A combination of novel surface chemistry and fluorescence microscopy allows visualization of dynamic microtubules and plus-end tracking proteins in real time. Three microtubule binding proteins from fission yeast in the in vitro reconstitution system are used, and the results presented yield new insights into the mechanism of plus-end binding proteins in microtubule dynamics.

    • Peter Bieling
    • Liedewij Laan
    • Thomas Surrey
    Letter
  • RAG2, a component of the V(D)J recombinase, has a plant homeodomain (PHD) domain which specifically recognizes histone H3 trimethylated at lysine 4 (H3K4me3). A crystal structure of the complex is presented, and the interaction between RAG2 and H3K4me3 shown to be important for V(D)J recombination in vivo.

    • Adam G. W. Matthews
    • Alex J. Kuo
    • Marjorie A. Oettinger
    Letter
  • In plants and fungi, cellular ion homeostasis is powered by the proton pump, a member of the P-type ATPase family. The first X-ray structure of the H+-ATPase is presented, and insight into the mechanism by which protons are transported against an electrochemical gradient is provided.

    • Bjørn P. Pedersen
    • Morten J. Buch-Pedersen
    • Poul Nissen
    Letter
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Technology Feature

  • Drugs to treat diseases from cancer to AIDS could soon rely on short strands of RNA for their effects. But scientists must first work out how to navigate these fragments around the body. Nathan Blow reports.

    • Nathan Blow
    Technology Feature
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Correction

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Technology Feature

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Prospects

  • Taking ownership of your degree may be the key to a satisfying science career.

    • Gene Russo
    Prospects
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Career View

  • I've appreciated my work and my colleagues in the past year. And yet I've decided that my interests lie elsewhere. I've decided to leave science research.

    • Peter Jordan
    Career View
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Futures

  • Breathing life into the revolution.

    • Neal Asher
    Futures
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Authors

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Brief Communications Arising

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Insight

  • Proteins are the most diverse and versatile set of biological macromolecules, having crucial roles in all biological processes. Now that researchers have identified whole complements of proteins (proteomes) for many cell types, they are pushing the frontiers of protein science: from the regulation and function of single protein dynamics to the evolution and inhibition of protein-protein interactions.

    Insight
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