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The fossil record provides a nuanced view of ecosystem collapse over intervals of mass extinction, with abundant, biomineralizing and widespread species preferentially preserved; here the authors collate evidence for ‘mass rarity’ during these intervals, and suggest that the increasing rarity of modern species, rather than their outright extinction, may be a better metric for comparing the current biodiversity crisis to the ‘Big Five’ mass extinctions in the Earth’s history.
This Review evaluates current techniques used to investigate human brain function, discusses the successes and limitations of these techniques to test hypotheses about causal mechanisms, and looks to future directions and implementation of these techniques in real-world problems.
The CRISPR-Cas systems of bacteria and archaea provide adaptive immunity against invading mobile genetic elements such as phages and plasmids; this Review describes the discovery of these systems and the mechanisms of immunity, including recent progress in establishing the molecular basis of host immunization.
In response to the need for a defined set of criteria to assess stem-cell potency, this review proposes guidelines for the evaluation of newly derived pluripotent stem cells, from functional assays to integrative molecular analyses of transcriptional, epigenetic and metabolic states.
The cumulative progress of numerical weather prediction represents one of the most remarkable successes of modern science; here the many technological and scientific advances that have brought NWP to its present level are reviewed, as are the considerable challenges for the future.
Feedback in the form of galactic-scale outflows of gas from star-forming, low-mass galaxies allowed ionizing radiation to escape from galaxies when the Universe was about 500 million years old, changing the hydrogen between galaxies from neutral to ionized.
Recent research has shown that while large fauna and flowering plants in the Antarctic are scarce, there are considerable levels of marine and terrestrial biodiversity, particularly the microbiota; what drives it, and how the Antarctic can meet conservation targets, are the subject of this review.
A review of western boundary currents in the Pacific Ocean explores their far-reaching influence on the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, the Indonesian Throughflow, Asian monsoons, and ocean circulation in the South China Sea, and concludes that major conceptual and technical progress will be needed to close the regional mass budget and provide robust projections of Pacific western boundary currents in a changing climate.
Although classical crystallography is insufficient to determine disordered structure in crystals, correlated disorder does nevertheless contain clear crystallographic signatures that map to the type of disorder, which we are learning to decipher.
