Volume 451 Issue 7179, 7 February 2008

Should there be author anonymity in peer review?

Providing context for sensitive declarations is the job of industry and government.

President seeks competitive edge with final budget request.

NASA plans for manned spaceflight re-assessed.

Energy department pulls the plug on FutureGen project.

Scribbles on the margins of science.

DNA barcoding for plants comes a step closer.

Randy rodent revels in raunchy romps.

Having the US presidential candidates face off over science issues could backfire, David Goldston argues.

Scientists and politicians in New Jersey thought that they had a chance to make their state a stem-cell player. Voters thought otherwise. As proponents prepare for a second attempt, Meredith Wadman investigates what went wrong in the Garden State.

A timely tale of one man's mission to stamp out medical fraudsters in 1920s America.

As the 200th year since the great naturalist's birth begins, Kevin Padian looks forward to a season of celebration by outlining how Darwin's ideas changed scientific thinking.

Proteins from ancestral bacteria have been modelled and reconstructed. Strikingly, the heat stability of these proteins parallels the temperatures of their ocean habitats, as determined from the geological record.

Static three-dimensional images are easy to make using holographic techniques. Moving pictures are more of a problem. A palm-sized, updatable display using a specially designed polymer could be a breakthrough.

A hallmark of Alzheimer's disease is the presence in the brain of protein deposits, or plaques, which are thought to form over a long period. But studies in mice suggest that the plaques can grow overnight.

The sheer number of variables and logical conditions makes some computing problems seem intractable. Statistical physics, normally used to study huge groups of interacting particles, can supply powerful tools to crack them.

Unusual reproductive incompatibility has been discovered between two strains of a nematode worm. This finding indicates that natural selection can generate long-term divergence within self-fertilizing populations.

Pioneering climate scientist and communicator.

As life expectancy increases, a systems-biology approach is needed to ensure that we have a healthy old age.

Moves by chemists to help computers access the scientific literature have boosted the drive to make scientific information freely available to all.

Researchers must find a sustainable way of providing the power our modern lifestyles demand.

Evo-devo meets systems biology.

The emerging field of circuit quantum electrodynamics could pave the way for the design of practical quantum computers.

The 'shape selectivity' of zeolites can be rationalized using a straightforward thermodynamic analysis of how pore topology affects the free energies of formation of the reactants, intermediates and products involved in the chemical transformations for oil refining catalysed by the zeolite. It is shown that despite some drastic simplifications, the approach can even guide the search for zeolite structures that are particularly suitable for desired catalytic applications.

It is reported that measles epidemics in Niger are unexpectedly episodic, and it is shown through modelling that powerful seasonality in transmission generates high amplitude, chaotic epidemics, with potentially important consequences for vaccine-based control strategies.

A plume of water vapour and icy particles originates near the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus, but the grains are moving more slowly than the vapour, which has been difficult to understand. It is shown that repeated wall collisions of grains, with re-acceleration by the gas, induce an effective friction, offering a natural explanation for the reduced grain velocity. Particle speed and size distributions that reproduce the observed and inferred properties of the dust plume are derived.

A major controversy has surrounded the stability of superfluidity in spin-polarized Fermi gas systems with resonant interactions when the 'up' and 'down' spin components are imbalanced. This problem is explored for a Fermi gas of ⁶Li atoms, using tomographic techniques to map out the superfluid phases as the temperature and density imbalance are varied. Evidence is found for various types of phase transitions, enabling quantitative tests of theoretical calculations on the stability of resonant superfluidity.

A recording medium based on specially designed photorefractive polymers that combines a number of favourable properties is used to demonstrate an updateable holographic 3-dimensional display that is capable of recording and displaying new images every few minutes, has a significant size and can be viewed for several hours without the need for refreshing, as well as being able to be erased and updated with new images when desired.

A fossil erosive subduction channel (the shear zone marking the plate boundary) preserved in the Northern Apennines of Italy is identified. The fossil zone records the presence of two décollements which seem to have been simultaneously active at the top and base of the subduction channel. In modern subduction zones the onset of seismic activity is believed to occur at ∼150° C, however in the fossil channel the onset seems to have occurred at colder temperatures.

Using phylogeny to reconstruct proteins inferred to have existed in the ancestry of organisms is a powerful and provocative way to discover the evolutionary processes of life. A protein from various stages in the history of life has been reconstructed to show that life originated in a hot environment, and has tracked the cooling of Earth through time.

Experimental metagenomics is used to show that coastal communities are populated by taxa capable of metabolizing a wide variety of organic carbon compounds. It is concluded that metabolic generalists dominate coastal microbial communities, with important implications for identifying taxon–function relationships for carbon cycle-relevant processes and the construction of predictive models of ocean biogeochemistry.

The results of a multi-decadal experimental study of the environmental consequences of chronic human-caused atmospheric nitrogen deposition are presented. Chronic low-level nitrogen addition led to a gradual loss of plant species diversity, but diversity recovered over the decade after cessation of nitrogen addition, suggesting that some of the harmful effects of past deposition can be reversed by reductions in the rate of deposition.

This paper examines how fast our world's population is ageing using traditional measures based on a fixed age boundary, but also using new concepts of age — a fixed remaining life expectancy, for example, to reflect that today's 60 year old is 'younger' than a 60-year-old from 1900 and has more years left to live. No matter what way it is looked at, the world's population is ageing with increasing speed.

Senile plaques are thought to accumulate over the course of decades in brains of Alzheimer's disease patients. In vivo mutiphoton microscopy is used to follow the birth of such plaques in live Alzheimer's disease model mice. It is found that plaques form extraordinarily quickly, over 24 hours. Within 1–2 days, the microglia move in and noticeable neuritic changes ensue. These data argue that neuritic dysfunction follows, rather than precedes, amyloid deposition.

DNA vaccines induce adaptive immune responses mainly via induction of type-I interferon. This paper shows that this occurs by a mechanism that is independent of the activation of nucleic acid binding Toll-like receptors. B and CD4⁺ T cell responses require activation of the TBK pathway in hematopoietic cells, whereas TBK1 in non-hematopoietic cells is critical for the activation of CD8⁺ T cells.

The gene polar granule component (pgc) has been implicated in the global repression of transcription that occurs in Drosophila germline progenitors and was thought to act as a non-coding RNA. This paper shows that pgc encodes a small protein that represses transcription by preventing recruitment of the elongation factor P-TEFb.

RNA polymerase II transcribes heterochromatic repeat sequences preferentially during S-phase of the cell cycle, a timing that is enforced by heterochromatin restricting RNAPII access. Chromatin modifying enzymes and RNAi complexes associated with RNAPII then assemble silenced chromatin which is maintained until the next S phase.

For junior science-faculty members and staff, hiring researchers is an important way to boost career success. But without management training, it's a shot in the dark. Genevive Bjorn reports.

An accomplished career in neuroscience ends back up at Michigan.

Large survey of Japanese postdocs reveals employment trends.

I'm trying to get my priorities straight. Is doing my postdoc overseas the best choice?

It's a grey area.

Soil nitrogen's detrimental effects on plant diversity may be reversible.