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Accumulating evidence that the eukaryotic nuclear lineage originated from within the Archaea provides support for a tree containing only two primary domains of life—the Achaea and Bacteria—over the currently accepted ‘three-domains tree’.
The phonon is the physical particle responsible for the transmission of sound and heat; controlling the properties of phonons in materials could trigger many advances, which are reviewed here.
An alternative view of diabetes is presented in which blood glucose homeostasis is achieved via collective actions of two regulatory systems: a brain-centred glucoregulatory system (BCGS), which works together with the pancreatic islets; defects in both systems may be required for diabetes to occur, and interventions targeting both systems may have greater therapeutic potential.
The connectivity of cortical neurons relates to the way in which they encode sensory features, and integrate them with behavioural context; these factors are discussed in relation to recent research, the major questions still to be addressed, and emerging techniques that may help to answer these.
The prion paradigm – the hypothesis that the seeded aggregation of certain proteins is key to understanding age-related neurodegenerative disorders – is evaluated in relation to recent studies and disease models; the paradigm suggests a unifying pathogenic principle with broad relevance to a large class of currently intractable diseases.
A review of the past six years of research on ice-sheet mass-balance change shows that accelerated loss from Greenland is a robust finding, but that loss from Antarctica is probably far lower than previously thought.