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Volume 457 Issue 7228, 22 January 2009

A new reconstruction of Antarctic surface temperature trends for 1957–2006, reported this week by Steig et al., suggests that overall the continent is warming by about 0.1 °C per decade. The cover illustrates the geographic extent of warming, with the ‘hotspot’ peninsula and West Antarctica shown red against the white ice-covered ocean. [Cover image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/University of Washington/USGS]

Authors

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Editorial

  • The nation can lead the world in wind energy — but its policies need to be more coherent.

    Editorial
  • Europe's Joint Research Centre should be empowered to stimulate other EU institutions.

    Editorial
  • Titan is a slightly more appealing lunar target than Europa for the next outer-planets mission.

    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

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News Feature

  • After spurning wind power, China has swung around and embraced this clean energy. But the nation's love affair with wind may be spinning out of control, finds David Cyranoski.

    • David Cyranoski
    News Feature
  • Messages appear on Internet-based social networks within minutes of disasters occurring. Lea Winerman investigates how to harness this trend to create official community-response grids.

    • Lea Winerman
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Essay

  • Our notions of family, population and race may need revising in the age of personal genomics, argues Aravinda Chakravarti.

    • Aravinda Chakravarti
    Essay
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Books & Arts

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News & Views

  • Electrical signalling among brain cells summons the local delivery of extra blood — the basis of functional brain imaging. Yet sometimes, blood is sent in anticipation of neural events that never take place.

    • David A. Leopold
    News & Views
  • Computer simulations of the cosmos suggest that cold streams of gas could underlie the unexpectedly high star-formation activity of many massive galaxies found to exist a few billion years after the Big Bang.

    • Reinhard Genzel
    News & Views
  • How monomers of the cytoskeletal protein actin join to form the stable polymers crucial to muscle contraction and cellular motility has been a long-standing question. A state-of-the-art approach provides an answer.

    • Kenneth C. Holmes
    News & Views
  • It's cold in winter and hot in summer. But the latest analysis illustrates the need to put observational data at the forefront of attempts to achieve a more detailed understanding of the annual temperature cycle.

    • David J. Thomson
    News & Views
  • Coordination between subunits is crucial for the proper functioning of multi-component molecular machines. A single-molecule study now allows glimpses into the mechanism used by subunits of one such machine.

    • Elio A. Abbondanzieri
    • Xiaowei Zhuang
    News & Views
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Editorial

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Review Article

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Article

  • Variations in the seasonal cycle of temperatures at the Earth's surface are spatially mapped on both land and sea, and trends in the recent past (1954–2007) are compared with those occurring earlier (1900–1954). Assuming that the earlier part of the temperature record is dominated by natural variations, the recent trends seem highly anomalous: temperatures on land show a shift to earlier seasons by 1.7 days, and the amplitude of the cycle has decreased in this period.

    • A. R. Stine
    • P. Huybers
    • I. Y. Fung
    Article
  • Actin exists in two forms in cells. Monomeric globular actin (G-actin) polymerizes to form filamentous actin (F-actin), which drives several processes such as cell motility. This paper presents a high resolution structure of F-actin and describes the differences between the conformations of the two forms of actin.

    • Toshiro Oda
    • Mitsusada Iwasa
    • Akihiro Narita
    Article
  • A ring ATPase from a bacteriophage, ϕ29, helps load the dsDNA genome into the viral shell. It is shown that this motor packages the DNA in 10 base pair (bp) bursts, which are composed of four individual 2.5 bp steps, each representing hydrolysis of a single ATP. Such a non-integral step size is unexpected, and raises intriguing mechanistic questions about ATP hydrolysis within rings.

    • Jeffrey R. Moffitt
    • Yann R. Chemla
    • Carlos Bustamante
    Article
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Letter

  • Massive galaxies in the young universe (ten billion years ago) formed stars at surprising intensities. Although this is commonly attributed to violent mergers, the properties of many of these galaxies are incompatible with mergers. This paper reports that they are 'stream-fed galaxies', growing via steady, narrow, cold gas streams. Unlike destructive mergers, the smoother flows are likely to keep the rotating disc configuration intact.

    • A. Dekel
    • Y. Birnboim
    • E. Zinger
    Letter
  • This paper demonstrates a high-Q microcavity for surface plasmons that is fabricated by coating the surface of high-Q silica microresonator with a thin layer of noble metal. This structure enables room-temperature operation with a Q-factor of around 1380 in the near infrared for surface plasmon modes. The work also includes a coupling scheme where a tapered optical fibre is in near-contact with the cavity, which provides a convenient way for selectively exciting and probing confined plasmon modes.

    • Bumki Min
    • Eric Ostby
    • Kerry Vahala
    Letter
  • The Antarctic Peninsula is known to be warming rapidly, but the overall pattern of climate change for the full Antarctic continent has been uncertain. This work finds that the entire continent is warming at a rate of 0.12 ± 0.07 °C per decade, with stronger warming in winter and spring and over West Antarctica.

    • Eric J. Steig
    • David P. Schneider
    • Drew T. Shindell
    Letter
  • Networks of co-operative interactions occur in both ecological and socio-economic situations, with plant pollination by animals and interactions between manufacturing and contracting companies being respective examples. This work proposes a parsimonious model for co-operative networks that predicts the specific properties of real ecological and socio-economic networks, demonstrating that similar principles of co-operation might underlie both situations.

    • Serguei Saavedra
    • Felix Reed-Tsochas
    • Brian Uzzi
    Letter
  • Natural or artificial oceanic iron supplementation induces blooms that are dominated by pennate diatoms. It is shown that these diatoms contain the iron storage protein ferritin, which may explain their success in iron-limited waters.

    • Adrian Marchetti
    • Micaela S. Parker
    • E. Virginia Armbrust
    Letter
  • Aspergillus fumigatus is an opportunistic human pathogen in immunocompromised individuals and is associated with severe asthma and sinusitis, and has only been known to reproduce asexually. This paper now shows that it can reproduce sexually, for which isolates of complementary mating type are required.

    • Céline M. O’Gorman
    • Hubert T. Fuller
    • Paul S. Dyer
    Letter
  • Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of brain activity relies on the assumption that increases in local blood flow in the brain are directly correlated with the neuronal activity in that brain region. Using simultaneous direct recording and fMRI in monkeys, this study demonstrates that this is not the whole story; some of the fMRI signal does correspond to actual brain activity, but there is also increased blood flow in less active regions of the brain in anticipation of their employment in the near future.

    • Yevgeniy B. Sirotin
    • Aniruddha Das
    Letter
  • The human microbiota has been implicated in many health-related issues. In this study, the microbiota composition of monozygotic and dizygotic twins and their mothers is examined. Although a core microbiome could not be defined on a phylogenetic level, the data suggests that core functions are conserved.

    • Peter J. Turnbaugh
    • Micah Hamady
    • Jeffrey I. Gordon
    Letter
  • This paper documents the evolutionary interaction between the innate immunity gene protein kinase R (PKR), its substrate elF2α, and its poxvirus mimic K3L. It is concluded that the rapid evolution of the PKR gene may be due to viral mimicry.

    • Nels C. Elde
    • Stephanie J. Child
    • Harmit S. Malik
    Letter
  • This paper describes an in vivo assay of haematopoietic stem cell (HSC) niche formation. A population of progenitor cells is sorted from fetal bones, and when transplanted under the adult mouse kidney capsule, the cells recruit host-derived blood vessels, produce donor-derived ectopic bones, and generate a marrow cavity populated by host-derived long-term reconstituting haematopoeitic stem cells.

    • Charles K. F. Chan
    • Ching-Cheng Chen
    • Irving L. Weissman
    Letter
  • During gastrulation in Drosophila embryo, there is apical constriction of ventral cells, which results in formation of a ventral furrow and invagination of the mesoderm. This study reports a mechanism for this process and shows that apical constriction of ventral cells is pulsed. These pulses are powered by the actin–myosin contractions and are dependent on the expression of a transcription factor, Snail, whereas the constricted state is stabilized by the transcription factor Twist.

    • Adam C. Martin
    • Matthias Kaschube
    • Eric F. Wieschaus
    Letter
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Corrigendum

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Prospects

  • Welcoming a new crop of Postdoc Journal keepers.

    • Gene Russo
    Prospects
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Movers

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Networks and Support

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Career View

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Futures

  • Welcome back.

    • Shelly Li
    Futures
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Insight

  • In the past decade, the idea that RNA is just a passive carrier of information has been overturned. Small non-coding RNA molecules are now known to be important regulators of gene expression and genome integrity. With recent technological advances, the molecular mechanisms of these RNA silencing pathways are becoming clearly defined, and their components are now being tested in clinical trials.

    Insight
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