Volume 453 Issue 7191, 1 May 2008

More spending on agricultural science is needed to help resolve the world's food crisis.

More researchers must record the latitude and longitude of their data.

Patients in Austria may have been misled.

Multiple marine projects under threat from cash squeeze.

Agricultural research comes in from the cold.

Unanimous vote welcomed by personal genomics companies.

It's been a good week for rat-catchers.

Theoretical physicists decamp to the countryside.

Scribbles on the margins of science.

Software makes article control a virtual reality.

ANDRILL project discovers that life at the pole wasn't so chilly 16 million years ago.

Public-private demonstration projects are a good way to test technology in the field. But the driving force is often more political than scientific, argues David Goldston.

Can a state do what a country cannot, and transform the way stem-cell research is funded? Erika Check Hayden reports on the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

How does our classical world emerge from the counterintuitive principles of quantum theory? Can we even be sure that the world doesn't 'go quantum' when no one is watching? Philip Ball talks to the theorists and experimentalists trying to find out.

International testing that is used to predict the grim future of US science and technology is being vastly misinterpreted, say Hal Salzman and Lindsay Lowell.

Evolutionary theory, study and knowledge moved on dramatically in the latter half of the twentieth century, but school teaching, curricula and teacher training are still in the primeval soup era, says Andrew Moore.

An experimental musician explores how technology has transformed our cut-and-paste culture.

Ogden Rood's textbook explaining the science of optics and colour mixing triggered an unexpectedly vivid response from the radical artists of the 1880s.

A 1920s best-seller about risky campus capitalism and early phage therapy still resonates today.

A purist approach to wavefunctions can resolve some of quantum theory's infamous murkiness.

A male fruitfly serenades his female with a courtship song produced by vibrating one wing. The female also has the neuronal circuitry to generate a song of her own, but her brain tells her not to.

Almost four decades since its existence was first proposed, a fourth basic circuit element joins the canonical three. The 'memristor' might herald a step-change in the march towards ever more powerful circuitry.

The effects of global warming over the coming decades will be modified by shorter-term climate variability. Finding ways to incorporate these variations will give us a better grip on what kind of climate change to expect.

After 20 years of hard labour, squeezed states — light and matter whose quantum fluctuations have been arduously suppressed below standard levels of quantum noise — are coming of age and are ripe for application.

Equally important as the immune system's function in fighting invaders is its ability to tolerate self. But environmental toxins could shift the equilibrium between these activities one way or the other.

Focusing on the hierarchical structure inherent in social and biological networks might provide a smart way to find missing connections that are not revealed in the raw data — which could be useful in a range of contexts.

The origin of the cosmic rays that bombard Earth has troubled physicists for nigh on a century. Supernova remnants are a favoured source — but we should keep our minds open to alternatives.

Theoretical physicist, inspired and inspiring teacher.

Leukocyte migration over two-dimensional surfaces is dependent on the integrin family of adhesion receptors, which couple the contractile force of the actomyosin cytoskeleton to the extracellular environment. In this study, all integrin heterodimers from mouse leukocytes were ablated and it is shown that integrins are not required for migration in 3D environments, in vitro and in vivo. Such non-adhesive migration renders leukocytes autonomous from the tissue environment.

This paper examines eight individual genomes using a clone-based sequencing approach, for structural variants of 8,000 nucleotides or more. One of the first high-quality inversion maps for the human genome is generated, and it is demonstrated that previous estimates of variation of this sort have been too high.

The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) is the cellular receptor for a number of environment contaminants. It is shown here to induce regulatory T cells when bound to the ligand TCCD and promote T_H17 differentiation when bound to FICZ.

Jupiter has a main ring, an inner halo and two fainter and more distant gossamer rings. Observations of dust in the outer ring region with the surprising results of a gap in the rings interior to Thebe's orbit, grains on highly-inclined paths, and a strong excess of submicron-sized dust just inside Amalthea's orbit are reported. Detailed modelling shows that the passage of ring particles through Jupiter's shadow creates the Thebe Extension.

Phase slips and dissipation in a clean and well characterized system (ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice) are studied. The results clarify the role of phase slips in superfluid systems and may be of relevance for understanding dissipation in other bosonic systems.

There are three fundamental passive circuit elements, resistors, capacitors, and inductors, but it was reasoned that there should be a fourth fundamental element, called a memristor, which has until now not been realized in a physical system. A fresh analysis of the concept shows that memristance arises naturally in nanoscale systems where solid state electronic and ionic transport are coupled under an external bias voltage.

Detailed knowledge of the North Atlantic Ocean state is not strictly necessary for producing useful predictions of climate fluctuations on decadal timescales. Instead, this approach makes use of existing sea surface temperature observations to improve the forecasting skill of climate models to predict that natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific oceans will, over the coming decade, temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.

An abrupt mantle compositional boundary exists on the the Gakkel ridge, with basalts from west of the boundary displaying affinities to the 'Dupal' isotopic province, previously observed only in the Southern Hemisphere. It is concluded that the source of the Dupal signature is subcontinental lithospheric mantle that delaminated and became integrated into the convecting Arctic asthenosphere.

Hydatellaceae is a group of water plants that are now discovered to be part of the initial emergence of flowering plants back in the Mesozoic Era. The plant shows a number of rare embryological features which, in combination, are found only in members of the equally primitive Nymphaeales (water lilies). But Hydatella has one additional feature, the provisioning of the seed from maternal rather than embryonic tissue, which is unique among flowering plants, but relatively common among gymnosperms.

Networks have recently emerged as a powerful tool to describe and quantify many complex systems, with applications in engineering, communications, ecology, biochemistry and genetics. A general technique to divide network vertices in groups and sub-groups is reported. Revealing such underlying hierarchies in turn allows the predicting of missing links from partial data with higher accuracy than previous methods.

The mammalian retina has three types of light-sensing cells: rods, cones and melanopsin-containing cells. Rods and cones are involved in vision but have also been shown to contribute to light-entrainment of the circadian clock. Rods and cones must signal through melanopsin-containing cells for the latter.

Activation of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor with the ligand FICZ regulates IL-22 expression in T_H17 cells.

This paper reports the identification of high-frequency deletions in the Ikaros gene in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia cases that are characterized by BCR-ABL1 translocations. In contrast, BCR-ABL1 CML is not associated with Ikaros deletions in chronic phase patients, but are often acquired during progression to blast crisis. These deletions lead to expression of altered transcripts. In contrast to previous models suggesting that these transcripts result from aberrant alternative splicing, it is shown that the deletions found are due to aberrant RAG-mediated recombination.

RNA localization is important in diverse biological process including establishment of polarity. This study has focused on migrating fibroblasts that polarize to form a leading edge and tail, in a process that involves assymetric distribution of RNAs. On a genome-wide scale RNAs that are localized to cell protrusions are identified. Through their 3' UTRs, these transcripts are anchored in granules concentrated at the plus end of microtubules and associate with the APC tumour suppressor.

Transfer RNAs are synthesized as longer forms that need to be processed, and ribonuclease P (RNase P) is the ribonuclease that clips off excess RNA to give the mature 5' end. It is found universally, except in Nanoarchaeum equitans, and this paper uncovers how rearrangements in the promoters of this archaeon's tRNA genes seem to have facilitated the generation of 'leaderless' tRNAs that no longer required RNase P processing.

A type II β-turn in the Escherichia coli protein EscU undergoes auto-cleavage via a mechanism involving cyclization of a conserved asparagine residue. Structural and in vivo analysis of point and deletion mutations illustrates the subtle conformational effects of auto-cleavage in modulating the molecular features of a highly conserved surface region of EscU, a potential point of interaction with other T3SS components at the inner membrane.

Crystallographer takes over at Buffalo's Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.

Training programme links Stockholm and New York.

Evaluating the metrics of my own 'success'.

It's a unique set of experiences.

Genome match maps new regions of human genetic structural variation.