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Physicists interested in the mechanics of single molecules are helping open one of the blackest boxes in biology. Brendan Maher discovers how the disciplines are working together.
When it was trying to catapult satellites into orbit the private launch business didn't get very far. Can it do better now that it's focused on giving the rich the ride of their life, asks David Chandler.
Tropical forests in southeast Asia are under threat from oil-palm growers. This is an opportunity to combine sustainable economic growth with biodiversity conservation, argue Lian Pin Koh and David S. Wilcove.
Is the preference to mate as a male or a female irreversibly set during development? Apparently not: a study in mice shows that pheromone perception determines how an adult female behaves sexually.
A facet of string theory, the currently favoured route to a 'theory of everything', might help to explain some properties of exotic matter phases — such as some peculiarities of high-temperature superconductors.
The chemical composition of normal DNA at the end of chromosomes does not differ from that of damaged and broken DNA within chromosomes. New findings hint at how the DNA-repair machinery distinguishes the two.
How do large objects form from the dusty gas surrounding a young star? A simulation suggests that several familiar processes, among them gas turbulence and self-gravitation, might work together to get the job done.
The encoding of two non-universal amino acids involves dynamic redefinition of 'stop' signals in the genetic code. Bacteria with multiple proteins containing these amino acids add to our appreciation of coding versatility.
Why did oxygen not appear in Earth's atmosphere until hundreds of millions of years after photosynthesizing organisms first produced it? Perhaps because reducing gases from undersea volcanoes claimed it first.
A record has been broken — the smallest-ever polymer crystals have been prepared. Their surprising shape provides crucial evidence that might help explain how polymers crystallize.
Female mice with genetic or physical lesions of the vomeronasal organ (VNO) display strikingly masculine sexual behavior, suggesting that the masculine circuitry is actually intact even in females but is normally suppressed by VNO function.
Insulin-like growth factor II (IGF-II) has a direct role in the survival and self-renewal of pluripotent human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Evidence is also provided that IGF-II is expressed by supportive hESC-derived fibroblasts that are produced by the hESC themselves, revealing that pluripotent hESCs produce their own supportive stem cell niche that is capable of supplying critical factors to maintain hESCs in culture.
The youngest protostellar objects show many signs of rapid development from their initial, spheroidal configurations. Watson et al. find in NGC1333 — IRAS4B a rich emission spectrum of H2O, at wavelengths 20–37 mm, which indicates an origin in extremely dense, warm gas. They model the emission as infall from a protostellar envelope onto the surface of a deeply embedded, dense disc. This is the only example in a sample of 30 class 0 objects, perhaps arising from a favourable orientation or this may be an early and short-lived stage in the evolution of a protoplanetary disk.
Direct, time-resolved observations of the correlated tunnelling of two interacting ultracold atoms through a barrier in a double-well potential are reported. Second-order tunnelling events, which are found to be the dominating dynamical effect in the strongly interacting regime, have not been previously directly observed with ultracold atoms.
The rise of atmospheric oxygen about 2.5 billion years ago occurred because the predominant sink for oxygen, enhanced submarine volcanism, was abruptly diminished. Submarine volcanoes are more reducing than subaerial volcanoes, so a shift from predominantly submarine to a mix of subaerial and submarine volcanism following a major tectonic episode of continental stabilization would have reduced the overall sink for oxygen and led to the rise of atmospheric oxygen.
An ensemble of experiments is used with a global climate model to assess the contribution of plant 'physiological forcing' to future changes in continental runoff. It is found that the effect increases simulated global mean runoff by 6 per cent when the concentration of carbon dioxide is doubled relative to pre-industrial levels; an increase that is comparable to that simulated in response to climate change caused by radiative forcing. This finding suggests that the risk of flooding may be greater than previously assumed under future global warming scenarios.
The antiquity of the close relationship between orchids and their pollinators is demonstrated by a 15–20 million years old fossil of an orchid pollinarium attached to the business end of a stingless bee, preserved in amber from the Dominican Republic. This spectacular find is used to constrain the evolution of orchids, suggesting that the most recent common ancestor of orchids lived in the Late Cretaceous.
This paper theoretically investigates the influence of mobility on biodiversity using a spatial 'rock–paper–scissors' game. A critical threshold of motility is identified, above which biodiversity is lost, but below which an entanglement of travelling spiral waves emerges and biodiversity is maintained.
The genomic resources for laboratory mice are greatly expanded by resequencing the genomes of 15 different strains to find single nucleotide polymorphisms. This creates a 'HapMap' for mice with 8.27 million markers.
The fruitfly is able to smell and respond to CO2, but this paper shows that they can also taste CO2 in the form of carbonated water. A population of neurons that detect carbonation are identified, and it is suggested that they allow the fly to track down nutrients from growing microorganisms.
Hyper-immunoglobulin E syndrome (HIES) is a complex primary immunodeficiency associated with inflammation, high levels of serum IgE, multiple infections and skeletal abnormalities. In this paper, the disease is linked to germline, heterozygous in-frame mutations in the DNA binding domain of the transcription activator STAT3 in eight of fifteen unrelated patients.
The acetyl-transferase Tip60 regulates transcription and is involved in the DNA damage response. Now, work from a mouse model and in-human tumours provides evidence that Tip60 is a tumour suppressor gene, and suggests that Tip60 functions in an oncogene-induced DNA damage response that restrains early tumourigenesis.
At a gross level, telomere ends resemble the ends of a double-strand break caused by DNA damage, yet telomeres do not activate the DNA damage response. An insight is offered as to how this response is suppressed. Two telomere-binding proteins, TRF2 and POT1, inhibit the activities of two upstream 'sensor' damage-responsive kinases, ATM and ATR, respectively. As these kinases initiate the signalling cascades that provoke the repair of damaged DNA, their inhibition by TRF2 and POT1 makes the telomere ends 'invisible' to the DNA repair machinery.
The crystal structure of a member of the MgtE family of Mg2+ transporters at 3.5Å resolution, and the structure of just the cytoplasmic domain in the presence and absence of Mg2+ is described. An elegant gating mechanism involving negative feedback by Mg2+ is also proposed.
