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An artists rendition of the NeuroRacer cognitive training video game designed for older adults. Our ability to multitask and our capacity for cognitive control decline linearly as we age. A new study shows that cognitive training can help repair this decline. In older adults aged between 60 and 85 who trained at home by playing NeuroRacer, a custom-designed 3D video game, both multitasking and cognitive control improved, with effects persisting for six months. The benefits of this training extended to untrained cognitive functions such as sustained attention and working memory. These findings suggest that the ageing brain may be more robustly plastic than previously thought, allowing for cognitive enhancement using appropriately designed strategies. Cover illustration: Matt Omernick
International weapons conventions may not be perfect, but they are a vital mechanism for making wars less barbaric and less frequent — a cause that should galvanize scientists and others.
Fifty years after a paper linked sea-floor magnetic stripes with continental drift, Naomi Oreskes explains its legacy as a lesson in achieving scientific consensus.
Topoisomerase enzymes facilitate gene transcription by resolving DNA tangles. Malfunction of these enzymes seems to compromise the expression of very long genes, potentially mediating neurodevelopmental disorders. See Article p.58
A cost-effective architecture for quantum cryptography has been demonstrated in which a single receiver positioned at a network-hub node is shared by many end users to exchange secret encryption keys. See Letter p.69
Morphological mimicry among organisms has long been recognized as an adaptive strategy, but mimicry also occurs at the molecular level. One emerging example is microbial pathogens' use of structural mimics that engage host-cell receptors.
An analysis of northern ecosystems shows that the effects on plant growth of rising night-time temperatures are opposite to those of increasing daytime temperatures — a finding that has implications for carbon-cycle models. See Letter p.88
Vision requires the continuous recycling of photobleached pigments. An atypical form of a degradative pathway called autophagy seems to participate in this process in retinal pigment epithelial cells.
B cells arise in the bone marrow and go on to produce antibodies that protect against microbial infection. Surprisingly, it seems that B-cell development also occurs in the gut, where it is stimulated by resident microbes. See Letter p.112
During infection, the inflammatory immune response can cause pain by activating nociceptor neurons. A bacterial pathogen also seems to stimulatepain directly, modulating the immune response in its favour. See Article p.52
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.
This study shows that most known mediators of immunity, such as TLR2, MyD88, T cells or B cells, and neutrophils and monocytes, are dispensable for pain produced by Staphylococcus aureus infection; instead, bacterial products, such as N-formylated peptides and α-haemolysin, induce pain by directly activating nociceptor neurons, which in turn modulate inflammation.
Reducing topoisomerase activity in mouse and human neurons is found to reduce the expression of long genes by impairing transcription elongation: among genes affected are numerous high-confidence candidates for autism spectrum disorder.
Cell-type-specific anthrax toxin receptor CMG2-null mice are generated and used to show that the Bacillus anthracis toxins lethal toxin (LT) and oedema toxin (ET) target distinct cell types; in contrast to previous suggestions, it is shown that endothelial cells are not key targets for either toxin and instead LT targets cardiomyocytes and vascular smooth muscle cells whereas ET targets hepatocytes.
An experimental demonstration of the concept of a ‘quantum access network’ based on simple and cost-effective telecommunication technologies yields a viable method for realizing multi-user quantum key distribution networks with efficient use of resources.
The ‘0.7-anomaly’ — an unexpected feature in the conductance of a quantum point contact — is shown to originate in a smeared van Hove singularity in the local density of states at the bottom of the lowest one-dimensional subband of the point contact.
Electric conductance through a narrow constriction of width comparable to the electronic wavelength is quantized in units of 2e2/h, but a shoulder at around 0.7 of the conductance quantum is often present in measurements; detailed experiments now confirm that this effect is due to the emergence of localized states that result from many-body interactions between electrons in the constriction.
Catalysis of the reduction of nitrogen to ammonia under mild conditions by a tris(phosphine)borane-supported iron complex indicates that a single iron site may be capable of stabilizing the various NxHy intermediates generated during catalytic ammonia formation.
Correlations between the maximum and minimum daily temperatures and a vegetation index in the Northern Hemisphere suggest that asymmetric diurnal warming (faster warming of the land surface during the night than during the day) produces several different vegetation and carbon storage effects.
High-resolution computed tomography is used to compare cranial volumes of extant birds, the early avialan Archaeopteryx lithographica, and non-avian maniraptoran dinosaurs that are close to the origins of Avialae and avian flight; the cranial cavity of Archaeopteryx is not distinct from that of maniraptorans, suggesting that some non-avian maniraptorans may have had the neurological equipment required for flight.
Training with a multitasking video game is shown to improve cognitive control abilities that decline with age, revealing the plasticity of the ageing brain; these behavioural improvements were accompanied by underlying neural changes that predicted the training-induced boost in sustained attention and enhanced multitasking performance 6 months later.
Biochemical and structural investigation of a model for prion-induced neurodegeneration—antibody binding to PrPC—reveals the role of the PrP flexible tail and reactive oxygen species in mediating toxicity.
Evidence of crosstalk between the Robo/Slit and Wnt signalling pathways is provided, and R-spondin signalling is shown to enhance canonical Wnt signalling and increase the proliferation of intestinal stem cells.
Primary B-cell development is thought to be restricted to the bone marrow; here it is shown to occur also in intestinal tissues of postnatal mice, that it peaks at the time of weaning and is increased upon colonization of germ-free mice, and is thus influenced by commensal microbes.
Glucosylceramide (GlcCer), a common precursor of different glycosphingolipids, is shown to be channelled to two distinct pathways in the Golgi; non-vesicular transport from the cis- to trans-Golgi network results in the synthesis of the globo series of glycosphingolipids, whereas vesicular transport is the main source of GlcCer for ganglioside synthesis in the Golgi cisternae.
A series of long molecular dynamics simulations shows that the K+ channel is sterically locked in the inactive conformation by buried water molecules bound behind the selectivity filter; a kinetic model deduced from the simulations shows how releasing the buried waters can elongate the timescale of the recovery period, and this hypothesis is confirmed using ‘wet’ biophysical experiments.