Volume 459 Issue 7249, 18 June 2009

The 2009 flu pandemic highlights the urgent need for an independent international body for research into human diseases that originate in animals.

Reactions to UK government changes are an example of how researchers should not behave in a downturn.

Technology is founded on precision measurements, and scientists strive to make these ever more exact.

Once lauded as incubators of high-tech jobs, science parks find themselves struggling in the new financial environment.

Satellite information on incoming meteors is blocked.

University cuts are the latest in a series of government actions that have researchers seeing red.

Author withdraws claim that ancient jawbone is human ancestor.

Some question whether grants should be decided in-country.

Metrologists are on a path to redefine the unit of temperature. The freezing point of water will never be the same again, finds Nicola Jones.

While conservation biologists debate whether to move organisms threatened by the warming climate, one forester in British Columbia is already doing it. Emma Marris reports.

Fossil finds of early humans in southeast Asia may actually be the remains of an unknown ape. Russell Ciochon says that many palaeoanthropologists — including himself — have been mistaken.

A slew of publications examines our changing attitudes to the things we eat, so what lies behind our need for mutant maize or locally grown organic food, asks Jascha Hoffman?

When Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse restaurant in 1971, she used fresh ingredients from local suppliers and sparked a culinary revolution in Berkeley, California, that has spread worldwide. For the past decade she has been taking that revolution into education. Waters talks about teaching science in the garden, and the true cost of a school lunch.

Global warming and food shortages are renewing interest in urban agriculture, finds John Whitfield.

With palladium catalysts, chemists can manipulate ordinarily inert carbon–hydrogen bonds to build useful molecules from simple building blocks. How the catalysts guide this process has just become a bit clearer.

A molecular machine used by the malaria parasite to export its protein armoury into the host cell has at last been identified, providing researchers with a potentially invaluable therapeutic target.

Combine theoretical modelling, friction measurements and observations of serpentine slithering. Together, they show that snakes are in effect just taking a walk even when moving at high speed.

According to the latest study, our witnessing of the volcanic splendour of Jupiter's moon Io might just be a lucky circumstance. The odds are that the satellite will become quiescent on its escape from orbital custody.

What is the first signal that directs the rapid influx of immune cells to a wound to stave off potential infection? A study in the zebrafish reveals an unusual but well-qualified candidate.

Demonstrating that macroscopic objects can display quantum behaviour, which is usually associated with the microscopic world of atoms, is a long-standing goal in physics. That goal is now within closer reach.

It seems that many misfolded proteins can act like prions — spreading disease by imparting their misshapen structure to normal cellular counterparts. But how common are bona fide prions really?

Despite the successes of genomics, little is known about how genetic information produces complex organisms. A look at the crucial functional elements of fly and worm genomes could change that.

The bird hand is thought to derive from the second, third and fourth digits of an ancestral five-digit hand. However, the three-fingered hand of theropod dinosaurs, which are the closest extinct relatives of birds, are thought to derive from the first, second and third digits. The discovery of a small, primitive herbivorous theropod from the Jurassic period of China with a stub of the first digit alongside more developed second, third and fourth digits, sheds light on this problem.

Malaria parasites reside in vacuoles during intracellular infection of erythrocytes and export many proteins into the host cell, a process that is essential for the virulence and viability of Plasmodium. Whereas transport across the parasite membrane is known to rely on the secretory pathway, the transporter responsible for the translocation of proteins across the vacuole membrane is now identified.

Listeria monocytogenes is responsible for severe food-borne infections. The first global comparative transcriptome analysis of this species reveals successive and coordinated global transcriptional changes during infection and points to previously unknown regulatory mechanisms in bacteria.

The geological activity on Io, volcanically the most active body in the Solar System, is thought to be the result of tides raised by Jupiter, but it is not known whether the current tidal heat production is sufficiently high to generate the observed surface heat flow. Here, a determination of the tidal dissipation in Io and Jupiter is reported; for Io, this is in good agreement with the observed surface heat flow, whereas for Jupiter, dissipation is found to be close to the upper bound of its average value expected from the long-term evolution of the system.

Fabricating tiny mechanical structures where the vibrational motion is purely quantum mechanical is a long-standing goal in physics, and a parallel goal is the development of a scheme for observing and controlling such tiny motions. By coupling a tiny mechanical resonator to a superconducting two-level quantum system (qubit), the state of the superconducting qubit can be measured through its influence on the vibrations of the resonator, a demonstration of nanomechanical read-out of quantum interference.

Thermoelectric materials, which can convert heat into electricity, are of great interest for energy sustainability. The problem is the low efficiency of these materials, quantified by a coefficient, ZT, which for mid-temperature materials is usually around 1. The realization of a material, In₄Se_3–δ, which achieves the ZT value of 1.48 at 705 K, could open up a new avenue in the research to generate high ZT materials.

About 33.5 million years ago, at the Eocene–Oligocene transition, the Earth's climate switched from greenhouse to icehouse conditions. The analysis of terrestrial spore and pollen evidence deposited in ocean sediments in the Norwegian–Greenland Sea now reveals that cold-month mean temperatures declined by about 5 °C prior to the Eocene–Oligocene transition and that seasonality increased.

Fluid migration in the middle crust is difficult to explain—the environment is considered too hot for a dynamic fracture-sustained permeability, as in the upper crust, and fluid pathways are generally too deformed to be controlled by equilibrium wetting angles that apply to hotter, deeper environments. Here, synchroton X-ray tomography and scanning electron microscopy observations are used to formulate a model for fluid migration in shear zones which may explain fluid transfer through the middle crust.

There has been a long-standing debate about the forces that drove uplift of the low-relief and tectonically-stable Colorado plateau, which experienced about 2 km of rock uplift without significant internal deformation. Warming of the thicker, more iron-depleted Colorado plateau lithosphere over 35–40 million years—following removal of the Farallon plate from beneath North America—is now proposed to be the primary mechanism for driving rock uplift.

The evolution of lowered virulence in spatially structured populations with limited dispersal has been suggested to be an example of adaptation at the group level. The extension of previous models now shows that the effect of dispersal can be understood within the framework of inclusive fitness theory, demonstrating that reduced virulence could be due to individual-level adaptation by the parasite.

Copy number variations (CNVs) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are two important potential sources of phenotypic variation in humans; however, only SNPs have been associated with cancer. Here, a CNV at 1q21.1 is shown to be associated with neuroblastoma, and a transcript within this CNV, NBPF23, is implicated in early tumorigenesis of the disease.

Self-incompatibility is an important mechanism used in many species to prevent inbreeding by ensuring rejection of 'self' pollen. The cloning of three alleles of a highly polymorphic pollen-expressed gene, PrpS (Papaver rhoeas pollen S), now provides evidence that it encodes the pollen S locus determinant and adds to our knowledge of the evolution of cell–cell recognition systems.

In animals, within minutes of wounding, leukocytes are recruited to the site of injury across distances of hundreds of micrometres. Early leukocyte recruitment after injury is now shown to be driven by the establishment of an H₂O₂ gradient from the epithelium to the vasculature in zebrafish.

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL) patients are at an increased risk of central nervous system (CNS) relapse, and yet, despite its clinical importance, little is known about the mechanism of leukaemic cell infiltration of the CNS. Here, using T-ALL animal modelling and gene-expression profiling, the chemokine receptor CCR7 is shown to be the essential adhesion signal required for the targeting of leukaemic T cells into the CNS.

Little is known about the mechanisms by which breast cancer cells metastasize to the brain. By performing gene expression analysis on cells that preferentially infiltrate the brain it has now been possible to identify three genes that are involved in this process, two of which—COX2 and HBEGF—have previously been shown to mediate breast cancer metastasis to the lung.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have a role in down-regulating gene expression, and the levels of specific miRNAs are important for correct embryonic development; however, the mechanisms by which this is regulated are unknown. The splicing regulatory protein, KSRP, is now found to regulate the precursor processing of a subset of miRNAs, and its disruption leads to effects on proliferation, differentiation and apoptosis.

Although structures of single-domain BLUF proteins—a photoreceptor protein domain that senses blue light—have been determined, there have been no reports of the structure of a BLUF protein containing a functional output domain; for this reason, the mechanism of light activation has remained enigmatic. The first biochemical, structural and mechanistic characterization of a full-length, active photoreceptor containing a BLUF sensor domain and a phosphodiesterase EAL output domain is now reported.

US academies track women's success along the academic pipeline.

Being rebuffed can be a source of strength.

University-based biosafety training programme expands.

Pre-med and medical-school curricula need defined science competencies.

Venezuelan government announces grant to research universities.

Houston's Texas Medical Center is a biomedical behemoth. But it's not immune to the souring economy, as Gene Russo finds out.

Caught in a trap.