Volume 450 Issue 7173, 20 December 2007

Nature is pleased to name Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian engineer and economist, and chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as our inaugural Newsmaker of the Year.

British physics faces an unnecessary squeeze.

Nature's manuscript editors made a selection of 'favourites' from the papers we published in 2007.

As an end of the year round-up, we asked Nature's editors to nominate favourite papers published elsewhere this year. For a pick of favourites from Nature itself, see page viii.

The year that saw…

Weak dollar threatens to undermine involvement in foreign projects.

Bumper cone crop

Gruelling session brings the United States back to the table.

Indonesia has been hit by more human deaths from the H5N1 bird-flu virus than any other country, yet it refuses to share its virus samples with the World Health Organization (WHO). Declan Butler talks to Indonesia's health minister.

Scribbles on the margins of science.

Most people agree that the environmental and health effects of nanoparticles need a lot more study. David Goldston looks at why so little progress has been made.

Science at the Food and Drug Administration is in need of a revamp, as Meredith Wadman reports.

Many formulations of the scientific method begin with observations. And the images here are indeed exciting observations — new pictures from Earth and space that will serve as the starting points for great science. But often the most arresting scientific images are captured at the end of the process, in the form of a solution. Such pictures represent the culmination of months of tireless work in the laboratory and have a still, completed quality. The structure of a protein or material, the high-resolution image revealing microscopic handiwork, the elegant visualization of data. Whether from the start or the end of an investigation — or from somewhere in between — these images are some of the most striking from 2007.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered its most thorough and authoritative assessment yet — and shared a Nobel prize for its efforts. Gabrielle Walker profiles its indefatigable leader.

The use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by both ill and healthy individuals raises ethical questions that should not be ignored, argue Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir.

We share many behavioural traits with our primate relatives — some disquietingly nasty.

As the average number of contributors to individual papers continues to rise, science's credit system is under pressure to evolve.

What physicists want for Christmas is a solution to the philosophical conundrums of quantum mechanics. They will be disappointed, but work that dissolves one aspect of quantum weirdness is some consolation.

Detecting cancer early and monitoring its progress non-invasively are high on oncologists' agenda. So the design of a neat device that detects and counts cancer cells shed into the blood by tumours is a welcome advance.

The most recent study of lunar rocks indicates that the Moon formed later than previously thought — a conclusion that requires our view of the early history of the inner Solar System to be revised.

Static crystal structures provide only clues about the way large biological molecules work. A recently developed spectroscopic technique also reveals details of their molecular motion, as shown for an RNA molecule from HIV.

The latest study of fluorescence in nanowires shows that it can be controlled by electric fields. This finding suggests the presence of mobile charge carriers, which could be useful for designing nanoelectronic devices.

Experiences shape our behaviour, memories and perception. Mechanistically, they also influence the brain's circuitry, and cooperativity between neuronal contacts during learning may contribute to this process.

To measure an optical frequency, you are best off using an optical frequency comb. A radical approach shakes up how these combs are produced, and will permit their closer integration into optical-fibre technology.

The discovery of many fossil plants and clues from molecular genetics is starting to shed light on the relationship between angiosperms and other plants, and the sequence in which the unique features of angiosperms evolved.

Use of neuronal imaging and photoactivation techniques on hippocampal pyramidal dendrites has shown that after long-term potentiation induction at individual synapses, neighbouring synapses become more easily potentiated, and across a broader time window. These results offer a new scale of information integration available for those modelling the cellular processes underlying brain function.

The crystal structure of the part of yeast topoisomerase II that binds DNA and catalyses breakage formation in complex with a gate DNA is solved. The enzyme sharply bends the DNA, which brings the DNA near the catalytic site and breaks a dimer interface of the protein, thereby opening a protein gate.

This paper reports a study of polarons in a GaAs crystal subject to a strong electric field. In addition to the overall drift motion of the polaron, an oscillatory internal motion is observed in which the electron is impulsively moved away from the centre of the surrounding lattice distortion. Such quantum coherent processes directly affect high-frequency transport in nanostructures.

A tiny disc-like structure on a silicon chip is simply illuminated by a conventional laser diode, and the resulting interaction between the laser light and the resonator gives rise to an optical frequency comb that emits in the infrared. The simplicity of the scheme, and the reduction in size, cost and power, should enhance the utility of optical frequency combs in a broad number of fields.

Exceptionally high resolution records of environmental change across the Palaeocene/Eocene boundary from two sediment sections in New Jersey find that the onset of environmental change and surface–ocean warming preceded the input of greenhouse gases by several thousand years. This sequence is consistent with the proposal that warming of the deep ocean caused the dissociation of submarine gas hydrates, which released massive amounts of methane.

A bioenergetic consumer–resource model is used to explore how and why only particular predator–prey body-mass ratios promote stability in tri-trophic food chains, and finds that this 'persistence domain' of ratios is constrained by bottom-up energy availability when predators are much smaller than their prey, and by enrichment-driven dynamics when predators are much larger.

The transcription factor Nanog is considered a hallmark of pluripotent cells in vivo and in vitro, and loss of Nanog an early marker of differentiation. This is now revised by the demonstration that Nanog is not essential for maintaining pluripotency, but acts in stabilizing the pluripotent state.

A microfluidic platform that is capable of efficiently and selectively separating viable circulating tumour cells (CTCs) from peripheral blood samples has been developed. Low levels of CTCs in the peripheral blood of patients with various cancers were identified, and it was shown that this device could be used to monitor an individual patient's response to anti-cancer therapy.

Even after a motor skill is overlearned, some variation remains every time it is performed. Such variation enables trial-and-error learning for adult bengalese finch song. Birds rapidly learned to make adaptive shifts in their vocalizations in response to auditory perturbations delivered to a subset of natural variations in their songs, consistent with the idea that motor variability is a form of exploration that can support continuous learning and optimization of performance.

The first intracellular recordings from presynaptic boutons in the intact mammalian brain are presented. These results contradict the prevailing views (derived from in vitro work) on how the cerebellum integrates sensory information to control movement, by revealing a hitherto unexpected sensitivity of single brain connections to stimuli from the environment.

This paper shows how noisy gene expression causes a bacterial cell to slowly lose track of time, as measured by its circadian clock. The theoretical framework thus introduced breaks the ground for the analysis of noise in other out-of-equilibrium living systems.

Autophagy contributes to host defence against infection. Toll like-receptor signals induce the recruitment of components of the autophagy pathway to phagosomes and facilitate phagosome lysosome fusion, resulting in killing of the invading organism.

At the onset of mitosis, the nuclear envelope is diassembled, and is reformed at the end of the process. A mechanistic explanation for the reformation of the nuclear envelope is provided, finding that the chaperone p97 (an AAA ATPase) binds to an ubiquitylated form of Aurora B, an inhibitor of nuclear envelope formation, on chromatin. This results in extraction of Aurora B from chromatin, allowing chromosome decondensation and nuclear envelope formation.

This paper reports an NMR approach that enables the three-dimensional movement of two linked RNA helices to be followed for a period up to milliseconds. The two helices move in a highly correlated manner, demonstrating both twisting and bending. Results with different liganded conformations demonstrate that the motions of the unstructured RNA maps out positions within the dynamic envelope described by the bound structures.

A crystal structure of the plasmid partition protein ParR bound to centromeric DNA is described. ParR binds the centromeric DNA repeats as a dimer-of-dimers, which assemble in a super-helical array to form a large segrosome with a solenoid-shaped structure.

Grant review has to evolve along with the science it scrutinizes.

Scope for improvement.

More than half a century's work on superconductivity theories.