Volume 452 Issue 7183, 6 March 2008

More than ever, academics in Iran and in nations hostile to it should communicate with each other.

The director of the Environmental Protection Agency is sabotaging both himself and his agency.

Ruling imminent on Pfizer's challenge to journal confidentiality.

Physicists unperturbed as Soudain mine detector draws a blank.

'Biopiracy' concerns thwart insect hunters.

Scientists and policy-makers will meet in Bonn this June to discuss one of the most pressing concerns to come out of December's United Nations climate meeting — how to manage the world's tropical forests. Jeff Tollefson examines some of the proposals.

Scribbles on the margins of science.

Fossil may be early example of hypothyroidism.

Failure to reproduce results deals blow to work on olfactory networks.

Religious resistance to science is often exaggerated, but fresh problems may lie ahead, says David Goldston.

The cosmos is thought to be awash with gravitational waves to which humanity is, as yet, deaf. Trudy E. Bell reports on LISA, an experiment on an unprecedented scale designed to put that right.

New York University is trying to establish a world-class archaeological institute — with funds from a philanthropist who has been linked to looted artefacts. Rex Dalton reports.

Algal blooms can make life miserable for coastal dwellers and wreak havoc on marine ecosystems. Mark Schrope reports on Florida's efforts to predict these red tides.

The first joint biography of the father and son who developed X-ray crystallography.

Charles Elton's 50-year-old text founded a field and is now cited more than ever.

Muscle coordination is mostly governed by motor programs built into the nervous system. But one program — the defecation cycle in a worm — has a mechanism that avoids nerves completely and uses protons as signals.

The latest quantum trick — mapping two entangled photon states onto two separate regions of an atomic cloud, and then retrieving them — could be a fillip for applications, among them quantum cryptography.

The molecular basis of psychoses such as schizophrenia remains largely mysterious. The interaction between two of the brain receptors involved adds to evidence that will help in the search for explanations.

Microbial communities seem to have inhabited tidal sediments 2.9 billion years ago much as they do today — but what organisms were involved, and how they made their living, remain intriguing questions.

What is the origin of the broadband, low-intensity radio waves thought to control the radiation belts that surround Earth? The latest suggestion sees this 'hiss' emerging from an unsuspected quarter.

Associations between plant roots and fungi are a feature of many terrestrial ecosystems. The genome sequence of a prominent fungal partner opens new avenues for studying such mycorrhizal interactions.

Somewhere between the amorphous glasses and the rigidly regimented periodic crystals lie the quasicrystals: ordered, predictable, yet non-periodic arrangements of atoms. How do these strange structures form?

Cycles of DNA methylation and demethylation are observed at the pS2 gene promoter during its activation by oestrogen, accompanied by cycling of DNA methyltransferases and other factors; this contrasts with the accepted view of DNA methylation as a stable epigenetic mark.

A series of algorithms representing a significant technical advance in determining RNA structure from sequence alone is presented; the algorithms take into account all base-pairing interactions to yield three-dimensional tructure.

The X-ray crystal structures of the cadmium-bound, zinc-bound, metal-free and acetate-bound forms of cadmium carbonic anhydrase are solved; the enzyme can incorporate either zinc or cadmium as its metal centre and can easily exchange one metal for the other.

An electromagnetic wave called chorus, previously thought to be unrelated to plasmaspheric hiss, has been shown to propagate into the plasmasphere and subsequently evolve into hiss.

A protocol where entanglement between two atomic ensembles is created by coherent mapping of an entangled state of light, effectively separating the generation of entanglement and its storage, is reported.

A report on an improved design of an optomechanical system in which a movable membrane is placed between two rigid high-quality mirrors, as opposed to previous designs where one of the mirrors has a double function as the microresonator; it's claimed that it is feasible to reach the quantum-limited ground state with this new design.

A multi-step interrupted gelation process to generate complex hydrogels with multi-membrane 'onion-like' and tubular architectures has been developed. The method allows the formation of free 'inter-membrane' spaces well suited for an easy cell or drug introduction.

Simple one-dimensional thermal models that include the effects of melt migration have been developed. The models show that long-lived plutonism results in a quasi-steady-state geotherm with a rapid temperature increase in the upper crust and nearly isothermal conditions in the middle and lower crust.

An example of complex population dynamics (the midge Tanytarsus gracilentus in Lake Myvatn, Iceland) is described and modelled.

The genome of the fungus Laccaria bicolor is described; it is of keen interest to evolutionary and plant biologists for its revelations about plant–fungus interactions shaping genomes over time.

Metabotropic glutamate receptors (downregulated in untreated schizophrenics) interact with the serotonin 2A receptor to form a functional complex in the brain; this complex triggers unique responses when activated by hallucinogenic drugs, and may represent a new target for the treatment of psychosis.

Insights into the function of Hax1 are provided by a study showing that Hax1 facilitates the processing of the mitochondrial protease HtrA2 by the mitochondrial rhomboid protease Parl. It is the protease activity of HtrA2 that is essential to suppress apoptosis in both lymphocytes and striatal neurons.

Activation of inflammasomes leads to maturation of the pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-1β; this study adds DNA to the growing list of exogenous and endogenous inflammasome activators.

This study determines how peptide deformylase interacts with the ribosome and how protein synthesis is coupled to processing of newly made proteins.

One of two papers this issue reporting cycles of DNA methylation and demethylation of CpG dinucleotides at gene promoters. Here, cyclical DNA methylation is reported at five active promoters; this contrasts with the accepted view of DNA methylation as a stable epigenetic mark.

The cellular cytosine deaminase APOBEC3G inhibits replication of HIV lacking the viral protein Vif; here the NMR structure of a mutant form of the catalytic domain of APOBEC3G is reported, and a model for the APOBEC–DNA interaction is proposed.

St Louis wants to become a hub of agricultural biotechnology. All it needs, says Emma Marris, is more start-ups and funds.

A leap into the unknown.

A mathematical model reveals the fragility of ecosystems.