Volume 462 Issue 7270, 12 November 2009

The ad-hoc proliferation of high-security biological labs must be controlled, and should be tied in more closely to broader research and public-health goals.

Spain should not use the recession as an excuse to stall plans to boost its scientific enterprise.

The recently launched World Health Summit offers a rare chance for dialogue.

The week in science

Expectations are dropping as December's UN climate talks get closer.

People not projects are the focus of longer-term grants.

Bioterrorism and emerging diseases spur building boom, although some question the need for more facilities.

Two dedicated plants are needed to meet demand, committee says.

But initiatives meet with mixed response.

Probe tunes in to cetacean song.

Government seeks academic input on security issues.

Ruckus over call for reform at national science agency raises questions about attracting expatriate talent.

Nature reports from three laboratories scrutinizing the pandemic flu virus.

To reconcile solution-driven research and blue-skies thinking, academic institutions urgently need innovative collaborations and new funding models, says Indira V. Samarasekera.

In China, under the threat of Western imperialism, interpretations of Darwin's ideas paved the way for Marx, Lenin and Mao, argues James Pusey in the third in our series on reactions to evolutionary theory.

Two books reveal the spirit of adventure behind the history of nuclear technology, finds William J. Nuttall.

Having moved from engineering to art, Jean-Pierre Hébert applies mathematical rules to generate artworks that explore themes of chaos and determinism. As resident artist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, and with an exhibition on in Los Angeles, Hébert explains his interest in algorithms.

Computational methods that reliably predict the biological activities of compounds have long been sought. The validation of one such method suggests that in silico predictions for drug discovery have come of age.

Stars that host planets experience more mixing of their internal elements than do stars that lack such companions. This correlation may serve as a useful diagnostic in the search for planets around stars other than the Sun.

The FOXP2 gene is implicated in the development of human speech and language. A comparison of the human and chimpanzee FOXP2 proteins highlights the differences in function in the two species.

Graphene continues to surprise physicists with its remarkable electronic properties. Experiments now show that electrons in the material can team up to behave as if they are only fragments of themselves.

A tenet of drug discovery states that molecules greater than a certain size don't enter cells. But not only do certain synthetic peptides refute this idea, they also inhibit 'undruggable' biological targets.

Drugs that are chemically quite similar often bind to biologically diverse protein targets, and it is unclear how selective many of these compounds are. Because many drug–target combinations exist, it would be useful to explore possible interactions computationally. Here, 3,665 drugs are tested against hundreds of targets; chemical similarities between drugs and ligand sets are found to predict thousands of unanticipated associations.

It is notoriously difficult to target transcription factors with aberrant activity in cancer. Inappropriate activation of the NOTCH complex of transcription factors is directly implicated in the pathogenesis of several disease states, including T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. The design of synthetic, cell-permeable, stabilized α-helical peptides that disrupt protein–protein interactions in NOTCH is now described.

Although a large range of lithium (Li) abundances is observed in solar-type stars, this range has proved theoretically difficult to understand. An earlier suggestion that Li is more depleted in stars with planets was weakened by the lack of a proper comparison sample of stars without detected planets. Here, Li abundances are reported for an unbiased sample of solar-analogue stars with and without detected planets. It is found that about 50% of the solar analogues without detected planets have on average ten times more Li that those with planets.

The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) is the quintessential collective quantum behaviour of charge carriers confined to two dimensions but it has not yet been observed in graphene, a material distinguished by the charge carriers' two-dimensional and relativistic character. Here, and in an accompanying paper, the FQHE is observed in graphene through the use of devices containing suspended graphene sheets; the results of these two papers open a door to the further elucidation of the complex physical properties of graphene.

The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) is the quintessential collective quantum behaviour of charge carriers confined to two dimensions but it has not yet been observed in graphene, a material distinguished by the charge carriers' two-dimensional and relativistic character. Here, and in an accompanying paper, the FQHE is observed in graphene through the use of devices containing suspended graphene sheets; the results of these two papers open a door to the further elucidation of the complex physical properties of graphene.

Tracing the transient atomic motions that lie at the heart of chemical reactions requires high-resolution structural information on the timescale of molecular vibrations. Femtosecond stimulated Raman spectroscopy is now shown to provide sufficiently detailed and time-resolved vibrational spectra of the electronically excited chromophore of green fluorescent protein to reveal skeletal motions involved in the proton transfer that produces the fluorescent form of the protein.

The study of stable oxygen isotope ratios (δ¹⁸O) of Precambrian cherts suggests that ocean temperatures during the Archaean era (about 3.5 billion years ago) were between 55 °C and 85 °C, but uncertainty about the δ¹⁸O of the primitive ocean has led to considerable debate regarding this conclusion. Here, a combined analysis of oxygen and hydrogen istopes sampled from 3.42-billion-year-old Buck Reef Chert rocks in South Africa indicates that the ancient ocean was much cooler than previously thought.

The timescale for segregation and transport of basaltic melts, which are ultimately responsible for formation of the Earth's crust, is critically dependent on the permeability of the partly molten asthenospheric mantle, yet this permeability is known mainly from semi-empirical and analogue models. A high-pressure, high-temperature centrifuge is now used to measure the rate of basalt melt flow in olivine aggregates; the resulting permeabilities are one to two orders of magnitude larger than predicted by current parameterizations.

The transcription factor FOXP2 is the only gene implicated in human speech, and yet it differs very little from the chimpanzee orthologue. Here, the two amino acids specific to humans are shown to alter FOXP2 function in vitro by conferring differential transcriptional regulation, and these observations are extended in vivo to human and chimpanzee brain. Together, these data identify transcriptional targets that may serve critical functions in language development.

The contribution of individual circuit elements to experience-dependent synaptic plasticity in the brain remains unknown. An intracellular analysis of the changes that occur when an eye is deprived of vision in early life now reveals a counterintuitive initial shift towards the occluded eye followed by a late preference for the open eye. These results, combined with intracellular pharmacology, suggest that inhibitory neurons have a major role in shaping experience-dependent plasticity in the developing visual cortex.

Defects in human germ-cell (oocyte and sperm) development are the leading cause of infertility in men and women. A germ-cell reporter is now used to quantify and isolate primordial germ cells derived from both male and female human embryonic stem cells. Human DAZL is observed to function in primordial germ-cell formation, whereas the closely related genes DAZ and BOULE promote later stages of meiosis and development of gametes.

To evoke the mucosal immune system, which forms the largest part of the entire immune system, antigens on the mucosal surface must be transported across the epithelial barrier. The molecular mechanisms promoting this antigen uptake, called antigen transcytosis and mediated by specialized epithelial M cells, remain largely unknown. Here, glycoprotein 2, specifically expressed by M cells, is reported to serve as a transcytotic receptor for mucosal antigens.

Cohesin inhibits the transcriptional machinery's interaction with and movement along chromatin, but does not prevent replication forks from duplicating the genome in S phase. Using single-molecule analysis, a replication complex is now found to affect acetylation of a subunit of cohesin, and this acetylation appears to be a central determinant of fork processivity. Loss of this regulatory mechanism leads to the spontaneous accrual of DNA damage.

Based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Widnall is the winner of the Arthur M. Bueche Award for expanding opportunities for women and minorities in engineering.

Postdoc appreciation day has come and gone worldwide. Did anyone notice?

UK undergraduate admissions rise in physics and engineering programmes.

A new online research resources network for scientists is launched.

Chinese government launches a website aimed at sharing science and technology resources.

Graduate students who head abroad to study face any number of challenges if they hope to prosper. Virginia Gewin provides a study guide.

To any impressionable young school leavers who are considering joining the space corps.