Volume 454 Issue 7201, 10 July 2008

Neuroscientists and geneticists don't need to be at loggerheads over the biology of mental disorders.

Efforts to inform US military policy with insights from the social sciences could be a win–win approach.

G8 talks fail to advance fight against climate change.

Medal winner rallies French scientists.

Dispute threatens to tear physical-sciences institute apart.

To maintain profits in the face of rising development costs and slow drug pipelines, big pharmaceutical firms are trying to cut back. Heidi Ledford examines how GlaxoSmithKline has tried to adapt.

Spain's Ministry of Science and Innovation was re-established in April, four years after its dissolution in 2004. Cristina Garmendia, a former molecular biologist and chief executive of the Genetrix group of biotech companies, heads the new ministry.

Scribbles on the margins of science.

Geologists aim to provide daily hazard maps.

Theorists unlock mysteries of experimental results.

Lab equipment gets the X factor.

Armed with a map depicting a 10,000-year-old landscape submerged beneath the North Sea and fresh evidence from nearby sites, archaeologists are realizing that early humans were more territorial than was previously thought. Laura Spinney reports.

Does the difficulty in finding the genes responsible for mental illness reflect the complexity of the genetics or the poor definitions of psychiatric disorders? Alison Abbott reports.

The influenza vaccine failed this winter. Steven Salzberg suggests that future success relies on sharing data more widely and making the virus strain selection process more transparent.

Committing to a vaccine stockpile is just the beginning. Tadataka Yamada, Alice Dautry and Mark Walport offer a roadmap for heading off a global avian influenza catastrophe.

In a bid to popularize the science and ethics of human genetics, two new books fail to address developments in gene testing since completion of the Human Genome Project, says Kathy Hudson.

To understand how mirror neurons help to interpret actions, we must delve into the networks in which these cells sit, say Antonio Damasio and Kaspar Meyer.

Evolutionary biologists have floundered when trying to explain how the asymmetrical head of flatfishes came about. 'Gradually' is the answer arising from exquisite studies of 45-million-year-old fossil specimens.

Analyses of lunar volcanic glasses show that they are rich in volatile elements and water. If parts of the lunar mantle contain as much water as Earth's, does this imply that the water has a common origin?

Both oncogenes and normal genes can mediate the development and progress of cancer. What used to separate their effects was cancer's dependence on, or 'addiction' to, oncogenes but not normal genes. Not any more.

Wherever we look in the Solar System, small bodies often seem to come in twos. Simulations show how asteroids spun in the Sun can produce such pairings — one of whose members acquires a strangely familiar shape.

It's all very well predicting which forms of crystal an inorganic solid can adopt, but how can proof be obtained if these structures aren't thermodynamically stable? The answer is to build them up atom by atom.

The crystal structure of Ebola virus glycoprotein is shown in complex with a neutralizing antibody. The structure suggests that the antibody prevents infection by preventing conformational changes of GP2 required for fusion.

The crystal structure of a ligand-free opsin at 2.9 Å resolution is reported; the entrance pathway for 11-cis-retinal and the exit pathway for all-trans-retinal are apparent.

Binary asteroids are created by the slow spin up of a 'rubble pile' asteroid via the thermal YORP effect (where radiation from an irregularly shaped body exerts a net force on the body). The mass shed from the equator of a critically spinning body accretes into a satellite if the material is collisionally dissipative.

A report providing improved limits on the indigenous volatile contents of the most primitive basalts in the Moon, the lunar volcanic glasses. The best estimate of the pre-eruptive water content of the lunar volcanic glasses is 745 p.p.m. water, with a minimum of 260 p.p.m., indicating that the bulk Moon might not be entirely depleted in highly volatile elements, including water.

While electric dipole transitions at the atoms are reduced in the Borrmann effect, the more exotic electric quadrupole transitions become stronger. Analysis of the X-ray absorption spectra from a material called gadolinium gallium garnet shows that clear quadrupole features associate with absorption events, some previously unknown, in gadolinium.

Experiments on YBa₂Cu₃O_6.51 reveal more than one carrier pocket, and evidence is found for the existence of a much larger pocket of heavier mass carriers having a thermodynamically dominant role in this hole-doped superconductor.

Stress changes within seismically active fault zones are shown to be measurable by exploiting the stress dependence of seismic wave speed from an active source experiment conducted at the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth drill site, in Parkfield, California.

A re-examination of the Eocene fish Amphistium and a description of a new genus prove that they are the most primitive members of the flatfish family. In these fish, the migrating eye never gets farther than the dorsal midline, even in fully adult fishes, providing perhaps the most graphic and dramatic examples known of a transitional form spotted in the fossil record.

Humans often cooperate with each other, but the temptation to forgo the public good mostly wins over collective cooperative action. Many existing models treat individuals as equivalent, ignoring diversity and population structure; however, here it's shown theoretically that social diversity, introduced via heterogeneous graphs, promotes the emergence of cooperation in public goods games.

It is shown here that flies sense ambient warmth not via their antennae, but rather by a small set of neurons in the brain. These 'AC' neurons in Drosophila are sensitive to warmth due to the expression of the warmth-activated ion channel dTrpA1.

This paper shows that Fra-2 controls osteoclast survival and size in newborn mice, in a process involving a novel biochemical pathway that includes the protein LIF as well as hypoxia.

The transcription factor IRF4, required for lymphocyte activation and plasma cell differentiation, is shown here to be a master regulator of multiple myeloma. It controls a different network of genes in the cancer than it does in normal plasma cells or activated B cells.

This paper shows that a member of the Bcl-2 family, Nix, helps eliminate organelles by autophagy of the mitochondria. Erythrocytes in the peripheral blood of Nix^−/− mice exhibited mitochondrial retention and reduced lifespan in vivo.

This study uses several techniques based on total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy and live cells expressing fluorescent-protein-tagged derivatives of Gag, the major structural component of HIV-1, to observe and quantitatively describe the assembly of individual virus particles in real time.

This paper shows that the Trim-NHL protein Mei-P26 restricts growth and proliferation in the ovarian stem cell lineage. In mei-P26 mutants, transit-amplifying cells are larger and proliferate indefinitely, leading to the formation of an ovarian tumour.

Spain is revitalizing its science base, with Barcelona surging ahead as a Mediterranean science hub, reports Quirin Schiermeier.

Nanoscientist aims to set up a major nanotechnology centre.

Major life-science initiatives in Massachusetts and Maryland should mean thousands of science-related jobs.

Looking for that eureka moment.

Buyer beware.

Structure reveals Ebola virus' strengths and weaknesses.