Volume 460 Issue 7256, 6 August 2009

A fresh look at isotope data pushes Earth's greening further into history.

More development work is needed to help computer simulations inform economic policy.

Congress should stop playing politics with the peer-review process.

Protests greet plans to dismantle multidisciplinary institutions.

Swirling gas sets pulsar spinning in supercomputer simulation.

Questions remain over whether researchers have a coherent enough voice to influence European science policy. Natasha Gilbert reports.

World's largest optical telescope inaugurated.

US and Europe schedule rovers and orbiters for the red planet.

Top-rated research must wait until September for NIH funding decision.

An Obama gambit on space policy highlights the benefits and risks of turning to outside experts. David Goldston explains.

Could agent-based computer models prevent another financial crisis? Mark Buchanan reports.

The leaders of the world are flying the economy by the seat of their pants, say J. Doyne Farmer and Duncan Foley. There is, however, a better way to help guide financial policies.

Agent-based computational models can capture irrational behaviour, complex social networks and global scale — all essential in confronting H1N1, says Joshua M. Epstein.

Fifty years before On the Origin of Species, a confusing, tiresome and prescient book laid the foundations of modern evolutionary theory, write Dan Graur, Manolo Gouy and David Wool.

The population of some wealthy countries is shrinking because of a declining birth rate. It comes as a surprise, and one with policy implications, that after a certain point of development that trend can reverse.

A study of one galaxy's dynamics backs up previous claims that surprisingly compact galaxies existed in the early Universe. But how such objects blew up in size to form present-day galaxies remains a puzzle.

Music is a ubiquitous element in our daily lives, and was probably just as important to our early ancestors. Fragments of ancient flutes reveal that music was well established in Europe by about 40,000 years ago.

A bird's-eye view of the higher-order structure of HIV-1's entire RNA genome reveals new motifs in surprising places. Structural biologists can now zoom in on these regions to explore their functions further.

The ratios of stable isotopes, especially isotopes of carbon and oxygen, have tales to tell about Earth's history. Post-depositional alteration of the carbonate rocks being studied may radically alter the story.

Evidence for a single microRNA (miRNA) that can efficiently differentiate multipotent stem cells into a specific lineage or regulate direct reprogramming of cells into an alternative cell fate has been elusive. Two miRNAs, miR-145 and miR-143, are now shown to be co-transcribed in multipotent cardiac progenitors before becoming localized to smooth muscle cells. miR-145 was found to be necessary for myocardin-induced reprogramming of adult fibroblasts and sufficient to induce differentiation of multipotent neural crest stem cells.

Single-stranded RNA viruses are responsible for the common cold, cancer, AIDS and other serious health threats. The genomes of these viruses form conserved secondary structures that have functional and regulatory roles, but most potential regulatory elements in viral RNA genomes remain uncharacterized. Here however, the structure of an entire HIV-1 genome at single nucleotide resolution is reported.

The oldest and most luminous galaxies in the early Universe are surprisingly compact, having stellar masses similar to present-day elliptical galaxies but much smaller sizes. This suggests that massive galaxies have grown in size by a factor of about five over the past ten billion years, leading to the expectation that the stars in these galaxies have much higher velocities than those in present-day galaxies of the same mass. Here, the stellar velocity dispersion for a compact massive galaxy at redshift z = 2.186 is indeed found to be very high.

Recent observations of methane on Mars suggest that methane concentrations are locally enhanced and change with the seasons. However, methane has a photochemical lifetime of several centuries, and is therefore expected to have a spatially uniform distribution on the planet. Here, using a global climate model of Mars with coupled chemistry reveals that photochemistry as currently understood cannot explain these variations in Martian methane.

Achieving coherent quantum control over massive mechanical resonators via coupling to electrons or photons is a current research goal. Here, unambiguous evidence for strong coupling of cavity photons to a mechanical resonator is reported, paving the way for full quantum optical control of nano- and micromechanical devices.

The low ¹³C/¹²C ratio in some Neoproterozoic carbonates is considered to be evidence of carbon cycle perturbations unique to the Precambrian. Here, all published oxygen and carbon isotope data for Neoproterozoic marine carbonates are compiled. The combined isotope systematics are found to be identical to those of well-understood Phanerozoic examples, suggesting an influx of photosynthetic carbon rather than perturbations to the carbon cycle — and implying an explosion of photosynthesizing communities on late Precambrian land surfaces.

Newly forming subduction zones on Earth can provide insights into the evolution of major fault zone geometries from shallow levels to deep in the lithosphere, and into the role of fluids in promoting rock failure by several modes. The acquisition of a transect of magnetotelluric soundings across the Marlborough strike–slip fault system of the northern South Island of New Zealand now implicates three distinct processes connecting fluid generation along the upper mantle plate interface to rock deformation in the crust as the subduction zone develops.

The existence of complex musical instruments is accepted to be an indication of fully modern behaviour and advanced symbolic communication. The discovery of bone and ivory flutes that are around 35,000 years old at Hohle Fels in southwestern Germany now demonstrates the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.

The increasing wealth of nations is accompanied by a fall in fertility such that in many developed and developing nations fertility rates have dropped below replacement value (less than 2.1 children per woman). Rapid population ageing, and in some cases the prospect of significant population decline, present difficult social and political problems. However, it is now shown that above a certain degree of economic development fertility begins to rise once again.

Here, in the first of three papers on the genetics of schizophrenia, a genome-wide association study of single nucleotide polymorphisms using data from several large genome-wide scans reveals significant associations to individual loci that implicate perturbations in immunity, brain development, memory and cognition in the predisposition to schizophrenia.

In the second of three papers on the genetics of schizophrenia, a large genome-wide association study looking at common genetic variants underlying the risk of schizophrenia implicates the major histocompatibility complex — and thus, immunity — and provides molecular genetic evidence for a substantial polygenic component to the risk of schizophrenia. The latter involves thousands of common alleles of very small effect that also contribute to the risk of bipolar disorder.

In the third of three papers looking at the genetics of schizophrenia, a genome-wide association study using the Molecular Genetics of Schizophrenia case-control data set followed by a meta-analysis further implicates the major histocompatibility complex. The study also reveals that although common schizophrenia susceptibility alleles can be detected, there are probably few or no single common loci with large effects.

Glial cells have an essential role in the building and wiring of nervous systems. They generally migrate over long distances before they initiate differentiation, but the molecular pathways coordinating the switch from glial migration to glial differentiation are largely unknown. The study of glial cells in the Drosophila eye disc now implicates fibroblast growth factor (FGF) signalling proteins in this process.

Absolute protein concentration measurements of a considerable fraction of the proteome have, until now, only been derived from genetically altered Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells, using a technique that is not directly portable from yeast to other species. A mass-spectrometry-based method is now used to determine the absolute protein abundance for a significant fraction of the proteome of the human pathogen Leptospira interrogans.

We need more physician innovators, not just more physician scientists, writes Justin Chakma.

Taking the plunge into freelance writing.

Rutgers University becomes one of a handful of US universities with unionized postdocs.

Harnessing UK science could boost banking and other sectors.

International panel to review UK research on renewable and sustainable energy.

Contact has been made.