Volume 453 Issue 7195, 29 May 2008

The ambitious scope of Europe's chemicals legislation demands some innovative toxicology.

An initiative to link scientists in the poorest nations with colleagues around the world deserves support.

Britain's Royal Institution reopens for business.

Glitch in the twentieth-century climate record is explained.

Private companies are starting to test customers' DNA for gene variants linked to an increased risk of conditions such as obesity or Alzheimer's disease. Helen Pearson looks at whether knowledge really is power when it comes to disease avoidance.

The CNRS is being carved up into separate institutes.

Devonian fossilized fish contains an embryo.

Scribbles on the margins of science.

The human body teems with microbes. In this, the first of two features, Asher Mullard looks at the global efforts to catalogue this vast 'microbiome'. In the second, Apoorva Mandavilli meets the surgeons who have a rare opportunity to watch an ecosystem being established as they transplant guts from one person to another.

The human body teems with microbes. In the first of two features, Asher Mullard looks at the global efforts to catalogue this vast 'microbiome'. In this, the second, Apoorva Mandavilli meets the surgeons who have a rare opportunity to watch an ecosystem being established as they transplant guts from one person to another.

Programmed cell death is usually seen as the unique prerogative of plants and animals. So how is it that photosynthetic plankton have been killing themselves by uncannily similar methods for billions of years? Nick Lane investigates.

The United States and Australia have done away with this archaic practice. Peter Lawrence says it is time to end mandatory retirement worldwide.

The complex issue of animal experimentation should not be dumbed down in the face of violent opposition, argues Andrew Read, reviewing a new polemic on the US experience.

The Royal Institution of Great Britain in London reopens this week after two years of renovations costing £22 million (US$ 44 million). The eighteenth-century building now flaunts its heritage, spotlighting the scientists who worked there and discovered 10 chemical elements and claimed 14 Nobel prizes (see page 568). Architect Terry Farrell explains how he rethought the institution's ethos.

Advances in imaging techniques are transforming microbiology into a science that is rich in visual imagery, harking back to biology's pre-darwinian origins, explains Martin Kemp.

The exquisite obstetrics models on show in an Italian palace hint at its former multidisciplinary glories. Alison Abbott investigates the museum that was once home to a revolutionary institute of sciences.

Laurel Trainor explains how the emotional power of music depends on the structure of the ear, and on our basic encoding of information.

An unseen measurement bias has been identified in global records of sea surface temperature. The discrepancy will need correction, but will not affect conclusions about an overall warming trend.

The gut is a new frontier in microbiology, offering many opportunities for innovative investigation. The finding of one such study is that intestinal inflammation in mice can be tamed by bacterial sugars.

That genetic mutations contribute to cancer is undisputed. What now emerges is that a cancer cell's microenvironment has a much stronger hand in the course a cancer takes than previously thought.

The evolutionary theory of sex ratios should apply to all creatures, both great and small. Experimental studies of the proportions of male to female sex cells of malaria parasites deliver cheering results.

What determines how grains such as sand pack together to fill a space? A thoroughgoing investigation of how geometry and friction interact in such systems is a step towards a more general understanding.

Malaria parasites must reproduce sexually to transmit to vectors, but very little is understood about their reproductive strategies. This paper details that malaria parasites adjust their sex ratios in response to unrelated conspecifics, as predicted by evolutionary theory.

Current debate on the selection of strains for the influenza vaccine highlights the need for epidemiological understanding of human influenza A virus. This paper analyses genomic sequences from global viral isolates, and hypothesizes that the virus follows a 'sink-source' model, where new lineages keep arising from some areas and dying out in other areas.

Bacteroides fragilis is a member of the human intestinal microbiota. It is reported that a single molecule produced by this bacterium, polysaccharide A, can suppress the intestinal inflammatory response and thus protect from experimental colitis.

This paper reports the discovery of an infrared elliptical ring or shell surrounding the magnetar SGR 1900+14. It is suggested that a dust-free cavity was produced in the magnetar environment by the giant flare emitted by the source in August 1998 and concludes that SGR 1900+14 is unambiguously associated with a cluster of massive stars.

This paper presents a statistical description of jammed states in which random close packing can be interpreted as the ground state of the ensemble of jammed matter. The approach demonstrates that random packings of hard spheres in three dimensions cannot exceed a limit of ∼63.4 per cent. A phase diagram provides a common view of the hard sphere packing problem and illuminates various data, including the random loose packing state.

In contrast to bulk materials with complex electronic structure, artificial nanoscale devices could offer a new and simpler vista to the understanding of quantum phase transitions. This paper demonstrates this possibility in a single molecule quantum dot, where the quantum phase transition consists of a crossing of singlet and triplet electron spin states at zero magnetic field. The quantum dot is operated in the Kondo regime, where an uncompensated electron spin on the quantum dot is screened by metallic electrodes. This strong electronic coupling between the quantum dot and the metallic contacts provides the necessary strong electron correlations to observe quantum critical behaviour.

Extensive first principles calculations carried out show that the relative stability of facets of anatase can be switched by terminating the surfaces with fluorine. It is then demonstrated that uniform anatase single crystals with a high percentage of {001} facets can be generated using hydrofluoric acid as a structure directing agent. Subsequently, surfaces can be freed of fluorine using a simple heat treatment.

This paper reports the broadest range of oxygen isotope values yet measured in marine sediments in methane seeps in Marinoan deglacial sediments underlying a thin interval of carbonate; these deposits are thought to record widespread oceanic carbonate precipitation during postglacial sea level rise. The range of values is likely the result of mixing between ice sheet derived meteoric waters and clathrate derived fluids during the flushing and destabilization of a clathrate field by glacial meltwater.

A pronounced discontinuity in the record of global sea-surface temperatures has been identified. The marked drop in global sea-surface temperature in 1945 coincides with a significant change in the shipboard instrumentation that was used to collect the source data at that time. This discontinuity is 40% as large as the century-long upward trend in temperatures, so correcting for it is likely to change the overall record and its interpretation, particularly in the middle 20th century.

The placoderms were a large and diverse group of distinctive fossil fishes, now thought to be the most primitive known vertebrates with jaws. Placoderm fossils from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation of Australia (about 380 million years ago) show a new species of placoderm, the specimen preserved with a single, large embryo connected to the adult by a mineralized remnant of an umbilical cord.

Little is known about microbial life in the basaltic ocean crust, but this paper details a survey from two sites that reveals unexpected microbial abundance and diversity.

Eukaryotic cells store neutral lipids in cytoplasmic lipid droplets. Processes regulating the formation of these organelles are at present unknown. A genome-wide RNAi screen in Drosophila cells identifies genes involved in lipid droplet formation and utilization, finding that 1% of all genes are involved in these processes. This study will lead to an understanding of human diseases involving excessive lipid storage.

The p110α isoform of phosphoinositide 3-kinase has a critical role in angiogenesis. In particular, it is needed to mediate the migration of endothelial cells downstream of VEGF receptor activation, acting upstream of RhoA. The results suggest that pharmacological inhibition of the p110α isoform may be useful in anti-angiogenesis therapy of cancer.

This paper demonstrates the efficient generation of high-affinity human monoclonal antibodies after booster vaccination with a conventional influenza vaccine.

Dengue hemorrhagic fever is transmitted by the bite of a mosquito infected with dengue virus. The dengue virus interacts with the C-type lectin CLEC45A. The interaction promotes the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines and contributes to lethal disease in a mouse model.

Single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) in a cell is highly prone to degradation, so cells shield ssDNA from nucleases by coating it with single-strand DNA binding proteins (SSBs). In eukaryotes, the canonical SSB is a heterotrimer known as RPA. This paper characterizes a second SSB from human cells, which is called hSSB1. Unlike RPA, hSSB1 is a single protein. Its primary function seems to be in the cellular response to DNA damage.

A phosphorylation step carried out by casein kinase 2, coupled with mobilization of the chromatin factor HP1-β, helps to initiate the DNA damage response by promoting phosphorylation of histone H2AX.

Advances in sequencing technology and tools for analysis are allowing researchers to unravel the environmental diversity of microbes faster and in greater detail than ever before. Nathan Blow reports.

Oceanographer heads to an institute in the Gulf of Mexico to look after America's third coast.

Mastering soft skills helps master one's career.

Aspiring to emulate Singapore's happiest person.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Cause of most abrupt historic climate change identified in rock deposits.