Volume 461 Issue 7264, 1 October 2009

Central and eastern European nations still lag behind Western countries in science. But they are slowly catching up.

The US Department of Homeland Security should not be put in charge of biodefence research.

Procuring organs for transplant demands a realistic definition of life's end.

The week in science

US lawmakers and scientists at odds over how to regulate high-containment labs.

Nature investigation reveals duplications in papers by science and transport chiefs.

Researchers seek deeper understanding of crust formation.

Federal restructuring aims to lessen the influence of pork-barrel politics.

Simulation tool gives rapid feedback on implications of policy changes.

The third of four weekly articles looks at how the financial crisis is slowing efforts to commercialize next-generation ethanol.

The Obama administration has good proposals but needs a more systematic approach, David Goldston argues.

The collapse of communism opened up the world to scientists from eastern Europe. Quirin Schiermeier talks to researchers about what changed.

The acquisition of scientific and technological secrets was at the heart of East Germany's foreign espionage operations before the fall of the Berlin Wall, reveals Kristie Macrakis.

Laurence D. Hurst compares two seasoned authors' strategies for explaining the difference between evolution fact and fantasy — Richard Dawkins's thunder and Carl Zimmer's poise.

Gustav Metzger's monumental and technical artworks comment on the capacity of human society to obliterate itself. From displays that eat themselves with acid to liquid-crystal patterns projected onto performing bands such as The Who in the 1960s, he questions environmental degradation, nuclear war and capitalism. As a major retrospective of his work opens, Metzger argues that scientists should be more active in counteracting society's tendency to seek oblivion.

The Wnt signalling pathway balances the opposing activities of two proteins to transmit signals within cells. An inhibitor that stabilizes one of these proteins reveals a new target for anticancer drug development.

Fusilli pasta is made by extruding dough through an appropriately shaped hole. A new method for making similar shapes in the optical field of light involves passing laser beams through droplets of liquid crystals.

A dramatic feathered dinosaur fossil from the Jurassic of China resolves a 'temporal paradox'. But it adds intriguing complications to the debates on the evolution of feathers and flight in birds.

Sorcerers have long gazed into crystal balls to conjure up information. Chemists are also getting in on the act, using porous crystals to trap unstable reaction intermediates and to reveal their structures.

Alarm signals emitted by animals may not be all that they seem. But a good example has been identified in the whistling sound of a crested pigeon's wings when it takes flight in response to a predator.

Two experiments that produce laser light by exploiting the collective wave-like motion of free electrons on a metal surface bring the science and technology of lasers into the nanoland.

Deregulated Wnt pathway activity has been implicated in many cancers, making this pathway an attractive target for anticancer therapies. Here, a small molecule inhibitor of the Wnt pathway is identified and its direct target and mechanism of action are characterized, providing new insights into the physiological regulation of the Wnt pathway and new possibilities for targeted Wnt pathway therapeutics.

Proteasome structure is extensively conserved across a broad range of organisms, so it is not surprising that inhibitors of all chemical classes tested have blocked both eukaryotic and prokaryotic proteasomes. However, certain oxathiazol-2-one compounds are now shown to kill non-replicating Mycobacterium tuberculosis and act as selective inhibitors of the M. tuberculosis proteasome while largely sparing the human homologue.

Mean dark matter surface density within one dark-halo scale-length was recently discovered to be constant across a wide range of galaxies. Here, the luminous matter surface density is reported to also be constant within one scale-length of the dark halo, such that although the total luminous-to-dark matter ratio is not constant, within one halo scale-length it is constant.

A key challenge is to realize ultracompact lasers that can directly generate coherent optical fields at the nanometre scale, far beyond the diffraction limit. Surface plasmons could be used to tightly confine light on very short lengthscales, but so far this approach has been hampered by ohmic losses at optical frequencies. The experimental demonstration of nanometre-scale plasmonic lasers is now reported, realized using a hybrid plasmonic waveguide — these lasers can generate optical modes a hundred times smaller than the diffraction limit.

Although X-ray crystallography is the method of choice for the direct structural analysis of crystalline compounds, extending its use to the in situ mapping of chemical transformations involving unstable intermediates is challenging. Here this is achieved by using a porous network material as a 'reaction medium' to enable X-ray observations of reaction intermediates that are usually transient and non-isolable.

Changes in fault strength over time can increase or decrease the likelihood of failure and the ultimate triggering of seismic events. Observation of the Parkfield area at the San Andreas fault over the years 1987–2008 now reveals two occasions — the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake and the 1992 Landers earthquake — where long-term changes in fault strength have probably been induced remotely by large seismic events.

The early evolution of the major groups of derived non-avialan theropods is not well understood, resulting in the 'temporal paradox' argument against the theropod hypothesis of avian origins. Here, a small theropod specimen collected from the earliest Late Jurassic of China is recovered that is referable to the Troodontidae, which are among the theropods most closely related to birds, thus refuting the 'temporal paradox'. Furthermore, the extensive feathering of the specimen sheds new light on the early evolution of feathers.

The tendency of branches from the same neuron (self-branches) to selectively avoid one another is known as self-avoidance. The expression of different isoforms of the Down Syndrome cell adhesion molecule (Dscam) gene, which expresses a neuronal cell recognition protein of the immunoglobulin superfamily, ensures that repulsion is restricted to self-branches. Here, in Drosophila, the number of isoforms of Dscam1 required to prevent non-self branches from recognizing each other is determined.

Although induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have been generated from mouse and human somatic cells by ectopic expression of four transcription factors, the expression of one of these four, Oct4, is sufficient to directly reprogram adult mouse neural stem cells to iPS cells. The generation of one-factor human iPS cells from human fetal neural stem cells by ectopic expression of OCT4 alone is now reported, demonstrating that OCT4 is sufficient to reprogram human neural stem cells to pluripotency.

Macroautophagy is the process by which defective proteins and entire organelles are sequestered in membrane compartments called autophagosomes, which ultimately fuse with lysosomes and undergo degradation. The genes Atg5 and Atg7 are believed to be essential for mammalian macroautophagy. Here it is shown, however, that under certain stress conditions mouse cells lacking Atg5 or Atg7 can still perform autophagy-mediated protein degradation through an alternative pathway.

Fas ligand (FasL) and its receptor Fas are critical for the shutdown of chronic immune responses and prevention of autoimmunity. FasL function is regulated by deposition in the plasma membrane and metalloprotease-mediated shedding, but it is unclear what the respective roles of these secreted and membrane-bound forms are. Gene-targeted mice that selectively lack either secreted FasL or membrane-bound FasL are now generated, shedding light on this problem.

The recognition of histone post-translational modifications by effector modules such as bromodomains is a key step in many chromatin-related processes. Although effector-mediated recognition of single post-translation modifications is well characterized, combinatorial readout of histones bearing multiple modifications is poorly understood. Here, a distinct mechanism of combinatorial readout for the mouse TAF1 homologue Brdt, a testis-specific member of the BET protein family, is reported.

In several viruses and bacteriophages, DNA transport in processes such as genome packaging is dependent on a subset of the ASCE superfamily of protein enzymes consisting of multimeric ringed pumps. Little is known, however, about how these motors engage their nucleic acid substrates. Here, the genome packaging motor of the Bacillus subtilis bacteriophage is studied, revealing that the full mechanochemical cycle of the motor involves two, rather different, phases.

The mechanism of topoisomerase action involves making a transient break in DNA, which, if it occurs near another DNA lesion, can persist, with the topoisomerase attached the 3′ or 5′ end by a phosphotyrosyl bond. If the DNA termini are not liberated from the topoisomerase, cancer and neurodegenerative disease may result. A human enzyme that cleaves 3′-phosphotyrosyl bonds has already been identified; a complementary enzyme that cleaves 5′-phosphotyrosyl bonds is now reported.

Quality of peer reviewers' work slips as years pass.

The isolation of the lab makes me long for nature.

UK industry should have a hand in university science curricula, says report.

Faculty strike in India over promotion rules.

Regulations squelch European scientific innovation and collaboration, report says.

Young Eastern European scientists are returning to their home countries to set up labs — with mixed success. Claire Ainsworth tracks their progress.

A palpable hit.