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Fresh laws on the regulation of medicines are working their way through the US Congress — but will they strike the right balance between public safety and innovation? Meredith Wadman investigates.
France's presidential elections are taking place at a time of deep debate over the French research community's standing and prospects. To further the debate, Nature's Declan Butler submitted a list of questions on research issues to the three leading candidates. Their full responses, in both French and English, are on our website. Here we present extracts:
You've heard what the presidential candidates think the challenges facing science in France are. Nature also canvassed opinion across the French research spectrum: from young researchers to reformers and industrialists. Declan Butler reports.
Complex engineered and biological systems share protocol-based architectures that make them robust and evolvable, but with hidden fragilities to rare perturbations.
The puzzle presented by the famous stumps of Gilboa, New York, finds a solution in the discovery of two fossil specimens that allow the entire structure of these early trees to be reconstructed.
An analysis of the distribution of helium-isotope ratios in oceanic extrusions from Earth's mantle seems to establish a connection with the spread of ages in continental crust. What mechanism might underlie this?
In fruit flies, a few very large genes generate the small RNAs that silence parasitic DNA elements. These RNAs might also participate in an amplification circuit that increases their potency.
Reason and emotion come into conflict in making all kinds of judgements. Results of work with brain-damaged patients constitute one line of evidence that the emotional component is not to be dismissed.
The experimental violation of mathematical relations known as Bell's inequalities sounded the death-knell of Einstein's idea of 'local realism' in quantum mechanics. But which concept, locality or realism, is the problem?
When a cell divides, each daughter cell inherits a complete set of chromosomes. A sophisticated inhibitory mechanism delays chromosome segregation and cell division until everything is in its place.
According to Bell's theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Here, theory and experiment agree that a class of such non-local realistic theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations, suggesting that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned.
Cooling rates for group IVA iron meteorites that range from 100 to 6,000KMyr−1 are reported. Improvements in the cooling rate model, smaller error bars, and new data from an independent cooling rate indicator show that the conventional interpretation is no longer viable. Our results require that the IVA meteorites cooled in a 300-km-diameter metallic body that lacked an insulating mantle.
Precise measurements of quantum scattering phase shifts have not been possible because the number of scattered atoms depends on phase shifts as well as the atomic density, which cannot be measured precisely. An alternative type of scattering experiment circumvents this problem, using interferometric measurements to detect phase shifts in a density-independent manner.
A new method is used to selectively protect individual hydroxyl groups of a monosaccharide. Hundreds of building blocks have been efficiently prepared starting from D-glucose, and the iterative coupling of these building blocks enabled assembly of a library of oligosaccharides based on the influenza virus-binding trisaccharide.
A study shows that the spectrum of helium ratios in ocean island basalts seems to preserve the mantle's depletion history, closely correlating with the ages of proposed continental growth pulses. The correspondence between the ages of mantle depletion events and pulses of crustal production implies that the formation of the continental crust was episodic and punctuated by large, potentially global melting events.
Description of a spectacular fossil tree from New York shows for the first time an intact crown belonging to a previously known plant taxon, the cladoxylopsid Wattieza, attached to an Eospermatopteris trunk and base. This complete fossil allows a detailed reconstruction of the appearance of the world's earliest forests.
Moral reasoning is thought of as being a mostly rational process. But it is shown that patients with lesions in an area of the brain necessary for the normal general emotions produce an abnormally 'utilitarian' pattern of judgments on certain types of moral dilemmas. The findings support an essential role for emotion in the generation of certain types of judgments.
Perceptual illusions are thought to arise from the way sensory signals are encoded, but this details how one could result from the way the brain decodes sensory information. Different pools of neurons contribute the most information in different motion discrimination tasks, and human observers display perceptual biases in the tasks that could correspond to the different neural decoding strategies.
The cytoplasmic receptor RIG-I recognizes viral RNAs and initiates a protective innate immune response against a number of important viruses. Here, it is shown that RIG-I is regulated by ubiquitination.
One of two papers that identify a new regulatory mechanism that controls the spindle checkpoint. This involves the fine-tuned ubiquitination and de-ubiquitination of a co-activator of the anaphase promoting complex APC to regulate the timing of APC activation and thereby the onset of anaphase.
A function is defined for ultraconserved elements (UCEs), extragenic regions of eukaryotic genomes can show high degrees of conservation across species. It is also found that when alternative splicing (mediated by splicing regulator proteins) leads to UCE incorporation into the splicing regulator protein's mRNA, the mRNA is targeted for degradation. Thus, the UCEs help promote negative feedback regulation of the splicing regulator gene expression.
To define the workings of cellular structures and molecules requires cutting-edge technology not only in biology and biochemistry, but also now in nanotechnology. Hayley M. Birch and Julie Clayton report.
Taking time between university and graduate school to gain more research experience is time well spent. Kendall Powell uncovers a growing trend for US students.
