Research articles

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    • F. C. Wang
    • H. A. Wu
    • A. K. Geim
    Brief Communications Arising
  • An epigenetic mechanism in which gain-of-function IDH mutations promote gliomagenesis by disrupting chromosomal topology is presented, with IDH mutations causing the binding sites of the methylation-sensitive insulator CTCF to become hypermethylated; disruption of a CTCF boundary near the glioma oncogene PDGFRA allows a constitutive enhancer to contact and activate the oncogene aberrantly.

    • William A. Flavahan
    • Yotam Drier
    • Bradley E. Bernstein
    Letter
  • A textural examination of volcanic ash erupted from Santiaguito volcano in Guatemala coupled with an analysis of the geophysical signals indicates that rapid heating during fault friction can cause melting and vesiculation (development of bubbles) of hydrated silicic magma, thus strongly affecting magma strength and eruptive behaviour.

    • Yan Lavallée
    • Donald B. Dingwell
    • Gustavo Chigna
    Letter
  • Coronal mass ejections are driven by a sudden release of magnetic energy stored in flux ropes in the Sun’s corona, but when the ambient magnetic field that runs toroidally along an unstable flux rope is strong enough to prevent the flux rope from kinking, a dynamic magnetic tension force halts the eruption.

    • Clayton E. Myers
    • Masaaki Yamada
    • Edward E. DeLuca
    Letter
  • Matter-wave interferometers provide an opportunity to measure whether quantum superpositions exist at macroscopic length scales or only at microscopically small scales; now such instruments have demonstrated quantum interference of wave packets separated by 54 cm.

    • T. Kovachy
    • P. Asenbaum
    • M. A. Kasevich
    Letter
  • Monoclonal antibodies with broad reactivity against antigens on the parasite that causes malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, are isolated from two subjects and are found to have an unusual insertion of an immunoglobulin-like domain from a different chromosome, illustrating a new mechanism of antibody diversification.

    • Joshua Tan
    • Kathrin Pieper
    • Antonio Lanzavecchia
    Letter
  • An electronic–photonic microprocessor chip manufactured using a conventional microelectronics foundry process is demonstrated; the chip contains 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components and directly uses light to communicate to other chips.

    • Chen Sun
    • Mark T. Wade
    • Vladimir M. Stojanović
    Letter
  • The authors found that the key elements of plant form and function, analysed at global scale, are largely concentrated into a two-dimensional plane indexed by the size of whole plants and organs on the one hand, and the construction costs for photosynthetic leaf area, on the other.

    • Sandra Díaz
    • Jens Kattge
    • Lucas D. Gorné
    Article
  • To be able to control the properties of a system that has strong electron–electron interactions using only an external electric field would be ideal, but the material must be thin enough to avoid shielding of the electric field in the bulk material; here pure electric-field control of the charge-density wave and superconductivity transition temperatures is achieved by electrolyte gating through an electric-field double layer transistor in the two-dimensional material 1T-TiSe2.

    • L. J. Li
    • E. C. T. O’Farrell
    • A. H. Castro Neto
    Letter
  • Data from millions of trees in thousands of locations are used to show that certain key traits affect competitive ability in predictable ways, and that there are trade-offs between traits that favour growth with and without competition.

    • Georges Kunstler
    • Daniel Falster
    • Mark Westoby
    Letter
  • The environmental and geopolitical problems associated with fossil fuels might be alleviated if it were possible to produce synthetic multicarbon fuels efficiently from single-carbon feedstocks; here, a molybdenum compound supported by a terphenyl–diphosphine ligand is used to convert carbon monoxide into a metal-free C2O1 fragment, with the ligand both serving as an electron reservoir and stabilizing the different intermediate species.

    • Joshua A. Buss
    • Theodor Agapie
    Letter
  • Web summaryHarnessing the entanglement of different ionic species could bring new flexibility in quantum computing, and now two groups independently demonstrate entanglement between different atomic species; Ballance et al. achieve entanglement between different atomic isotopes, whereas the related paper by Tan et al. shows entanglement between different elements, together demonstrating a first step towards mixed-species quantum logic.

    • C. J. Ballance
    • V. M. Schäfer
    • D. M. Lucas
    Letter
  • Harnessing the entanglement of different ionic species could bring new flexibility in quantum computing, and now two groups independently demonstrate entanglement between different atomic species; Tan et al. achieve entanglement between different elements, whereas the related paper by Ballance et al. shows entanglement between different atomic isotopes, together demonstrating a first step towards mixed-species quantum logic.

    • T. R. Tan
    • J. P. Gaebler
    • D. J. Wineland
    Letter