Volume 458 Issue 7238, 2 April 2009

Nuclear non-proliferation's moment has come. Scientists must help governments to seize a historic opportunity to avoid future apocalypses.

The e-textbook is only one part of a bigger revolution in online learning.

Italy's Senate has approved a bill that ignores patients' wishes and the country's own constitution.

Researchers call for greater focus on surveillance and genomics.

Plans to curb greenhouse-gas emissions face political opposition.

Scrutiny also aimed at National Children's Study

Initiative aims to recruit range of vessels to locate seamounts.

US oversight of clinical trials found wanting.

German immunologist set to regain his job.

CP violation comes into focus.

Authors disagree over work aimed at gene therapy for diabetes.

Promises about job creation in the US stimulus bill may be coming home to roost, says David Goldston.

From a home lab to the Italian Senate, by way of nerve growth factor — Rita Levi-Montalcini is a scientist like no other. Alison Abbott meets the first Nobel prizewinner set to reach her hundredth birthday.

Undergraduate textbooks are going digital. Declan Butler asks how this will shake up student reading habits and the multi-billion-dollar print textbook market.

Barack Obama's choice of science advisers is cause for celebration. Yet history shows that an impressive academic record doesn't guarantee good, impartial advice, cautions Robert Dallek.

Since acquiring atomic weapons, India, Pakistan and North Korea have not engaged in major warfare. But nuclear deterrence alone does not buy peace — diplomacy must keep the balance, says George Perkovich.

James Acord is the only sculptor licensed to work with radioactive materials. Formally trained in nuclear physics, he tells Nature why he thinks contaminated nuclear sites should be marked for future generations and explains his obsession with the nuclear age.

An elaborate microcosm study has a message for the wider world: declining distributional equity among species, where the rare become rarer, and the dominant become more dominant, can put ecosystems at risk.

Electrons in semiconductors are subject to forces that make their spins flip. According to new evidence, if an ensemble of spins curls into a helix, the collective spin lifetime can be greatly enhanced.

Modifications of DNA-associated histone proteins maintain genome integrity. On damage to DNA, phosphorylation of histone H2A.X determines whether repair is justified or if the damaged cell must die.

Subsurface storage of carbon dioxide is a major option for mitigating climate change. On one account, much of the gas sequestered in this way would end up as carbonic acid in the pore waters of the host rock.

An impressive system for retrieving large numbers of antibodies from memory B cells has been developed. It has been put into practice in an investigation of immune responses to the human immunodeficiency virus.

In mediating fast synaptic communication in the brain, AMPA receptors require TARP auxiliary proteins. It seems that another distinct class of proteins also bind to AMPA receptors and regulate their function.

Observations continue to indicate that the Universe is dominated by invisible components — dark matter and dark energy. Shedding light on this cosmic darkness is a priority for astronomers and physicists.

The protein tyrosine phosphatase EYA is shown to be recruited to DNA double-strand breaks after genotoxic stress and to remove a tyrosine phosphorylation modification on histone H2AX. The tyrosine phosphorylation state of H2AX helps to determine whether DNA repair or pro-apoptotic factors are recruited to chromatin, with tyrosine dephosphorylation by EYA promoting repair rather than apoptosis.

This paper presents the X-ray crystal structure of a gap junction channel at 3.5 Å resolution. The structure shows how human connexin 26 connexons interact, in an apparently open conformation, and provides insight into channel gating by the transjunctional voltage.

Galaxies are thought to grow gradually from the early Universe by star formation and mergers, according to huge recent galaxy formation simulations. But here Collins et al. report that Brightest Cluster Galaxies, the most luminous stellar objects, have not increased much in mass over the past 9 billion years or so: they were already almost fully grown 4 or 5 billion years after the Big Bang.

Cosmic ray positrons are known to be produced by interactions in the interstellar medium, but they might also originate in primary sources, such as pulsars, micro-quasars or through dark matter annihilation. Adriani et al. report that the positron fraction increases sharply over much of the energy range 1.5–100 GeV, which appears to be completely inconsistent with secondary sources—they therefore conclude that a primary source is necessary.

The axis of a spinning electron tends to remain fixed in direction: in contrast, an electron moving in a semiconductor sees a lattice of charged atoms flying past, causing its spin direction to fluctuate. Koralek and colleagues demonstrate that an electric field applied to the semiconductor can balance this spin-destabilizing effect; the collective spin of the entire gas of electrons is conserved, a property well-suited for 'spintronics' applications.

Injecting industrial CO₂ into deep geological strata could be a safe and economical means of storing it, either dissolved in solution or absorbed by carbonate minerals. Chris Ballentine and colleagues used noble gas and isotope tracers to identify what happens to CO₂ in gas fields in North America, China and Europe that provide a natural model of geological storage of anthropogenic CO₂ over millennia. They find that dissolution in water is the main mechanism.

Oceanic island basalts have much lower eruption rates than lavas from large igneous provinces, but a quantitative petrological comparison of lava sources has not been made. Claude Herzberg and Esteban Gazel have examined the composition of Galápagos-related lavas, and conclude that the mantle plumes that generated large igneous provinces in the Permian to Palaeocene periods were hotter and melted more extensively than the plumes that produced modern oceanic islands.

Ecosystem functioning is well known to be affected by species richness (the number of species), but species evenness (relative abundance of species) has been much less studied. Boon et al. investigated the effect of species unevenness in 1,260 denitrifying bacterial microcosms and found that initial evenness strongly improved ecosystem functioning, especially under stress.

Using two-photon calcium imaging these authors map the response of nearly every neuron in a small region of the cat visual cortex, and find that the responses to ocular dominance and binocular disparity exist on defined axes within the brain that are independent and orthogonal to each other.

This study shows that early visual areas can retain specific information about features held in working memory even when there is no physical stimulus present. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging decoding methods, visual features could be predicted from early visual area activity with a high degree of accuracy.

This study clones and characterizes antibodies present in six HIV-infected subjects with low-to-intermediate viral loads.

This paper traces the adaptation of HIV to HLA alleles in 2,500 HIV-infected subjects and demonstrates a strong correlation between the prevalence of escape mutations within well characterized epitopes and the prevalence of the respective HLA alleles, thereby providing evidence that the virus is indeed adapting to effective immune responses.

This paper reports the high-resolution structure of the double-stranded DNA bacteriophage HK97 procapsid, providing insight into the capsid assembly process leading to infectious virions. The knowledge gained from this structure is relevant for related viruses such as human herpesviruses.

These authors show that fibroblast growth factor (FGF) signalling regulates cilia length and function in diverse epithelia during zebrafish and Xenopus development. They propose that some developmental defects and diseases ascribed to FGF signalling are due in part to loss of cilia function.

This papers shows that inositol-1,4,5-trisphosphate (InsP₃) receptors aggregate in responses to InsP₃, resulting in a lower probability of channel opening, and that increases in intracellular Ca²⁺ can effectively relieve this inhibition and enhance the coupling between receptors in a cluster. This mechanism probably serves to enhance the sensitivity to changes in intracellular Ca²⁺.

Report calls on forensic scientists to increase credibility

When can I pursue my own research and leave part-time work behind?

Getting results from experiments can be difficult, especially if the materials you work with decide to fight back. Amber Dance investigates some of the unappreciated risks of being at the bench.

Future-proof.