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Volume 461 Issue 7268, 29 October 2009

The cover image is a record of the deflection of neutral helium atoms after interaction with a focused laser beam. The force causing this deflection is a newly recognized incarnation of the ponderomotive force. First reported in a Nature paper of 1957 (http://go.nature.com/LDtDIb) and known to act on electrons, new work shows it can produce ultra-strong acceleration of neutral atoms.

Authors

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Editorial

  • Initial interest in gene therapy waned after the technology failed to live up to expectation. Progress made since has received little attention, but suggests that the pervading sense of disillusionment is misplaced.

    Editorial
  • A new series of essays traces the astounding variety of reactions to the theory of evolution.

    Editorial
  • Scientists — and their institutions — should resist the ever-present temptation to hype their results.

    Editorial
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Research Highlights

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Journal Club

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News

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Correction

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News Feature

  • Can the general public learn to evaluate risks accurately, or do authorities need to steer it towards correct decisions? Michael Bond talks to the two opposing camps.

    • Michael Bond
    News Feature
  • Sean Mackey inflicts pain on people in the hope of learning how to relieve it. Erik Vance gets on the receiving end.

    • Erik Vance
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Opinion

  • People from Egypt to Japan used Darwin's ideas to reinvent and reignite their core philosophies and religions, says Marwa Elshakry in the first of four weekly pieces on how evolution was received around the world.

    • Marwa Elshakry
    Opinion
  • Forty years ago today the first message was sent between computers on the ARPANET. Vinton G. Cerf, who was a principal programmer on the project, reflects on how our online world was shaped by its innovative origins.

    • Vinton G. Cerf
    Opinion
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Autumn Books

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News & Views

  • Quantum systems habitually leak information, limiting their usefulness for practical applications. By optimally reversing the leak, this information loss has been reduced to a trickle in the solid state.

    • Bob B. Buckley
    • David D. Awschalom
    News & Views
  • Materials that combine ferroic properties — such as ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity — are highly desirable, but rare. A new class of multiferroic solids heralds a fresh approach for making such materials.

    • Ramamoorthy Ramesh
    News & Views
  • An exercise in experimental evolution using bacteria has been running for more than 20 years and 40,000 generations. The results to date provide a glimpse of a new world, and are cause for both delight and unease.

    • Paul B. Rainey
    News & Views
  • The most distant γ-ray burst yet sighted is the earliest astronomical object ever observed in cosmic history. This ancient beacon offers a glimpse of the little-known cosmic dark ages.

    • Bing Zhang
    News & Views
  • Catalysts steer reactions towards certain products — but the basis of their control is often unclear. Quantum chemical calculations reveal which parameters control bond formation in a network of catalytic reactions.

    • Jens K. Nørskov
    • Frank Abild-Pedersen
    News & Views
  • DNA-binding proteins have the daunting task of finding their binding sites among the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome. The shape of DNA, and not just its sequence, may offer proteins much-needed direction.

    • Tom Tullius
    News & Views
  • A micrometre-sized particle immersed in a liquid can be trapped by light. An experiment shows that the trapping can be accompanied by a whirling whose direction can be reversed by changing the light intensity.

    • Mark I. Dykman
    News & Views
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Progress

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Review Article

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Article

  • Here, in order to gain insight into the relationship between rates of genomic evolution and organismal adaptation, genomes sampled through 40,000 generations are sequenced from a laboratory population of Escherichia coli. The results indicate that the coupling between genomic and adaptive evolution is complex and can be counterintuitive even in a constant environment, with beneficial mutations surprisingly uniform over time whereas neutral substitutions were highly variable.

    • Jeffrey E. Barrick
    • Dong Su Yu
    • Jihyun F. Kim
    Article
  • The question of how proteins recognize specific DNA sequences in the face of vastly higher concentrations of non-specific DNA remains unclear. One suggested mechanism involves the formation of hydrogen bonds with specific bases, primarily in the major groove. The comprehensive analysis of the three-dimensional structures of protein–DNA complexes now shows that the binding of arginine residues to narrow minor grooves is a widely used mode for protein–DNA recognition.

    • Remo Rohs
    • Sean M. West
    • Barry Honig
    Article
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Letter

  • Long-duration γ-ray bursts (GRBs), thought to result from the explosions of certain massive stars, are bright enough that some of them should be observable out to redshifts of z > 20. So far, the highest redshift measured for any object has been z = 6.96, for a Lyman-α emitting galaxy. Here, and in an accompanying paper, GRB 090423 is reported to lie at a redshift of z ≈ 8.2, implying that massive stars were being produced and dying as GRBs approximately 620 million years after the Big Bang.

    • N. R. Tanvir
    • D. B. Fox
    • C. Wolf
    Letter
  • Long-duration γ-ray bursts (GRBs), thought to result from the explosions of certain massive stars, are bright enough that some of them should be observable out to redshifts of z > 20. So far, the highest redshift measured for any object has been z = 6.96, for a Lyman-α emitting galaxy. Here, and in an accompanying paper, GRB 090423 is reported to lie at a redshift of z ≈ 8.2, implying that massive stars were being produced and dying as GRBs approximately 620 million years after the Big Bang.

    • R. Salvaterra
    • M. Della Valle
    • V. Testa
    Letter
  • The force experienced by a charged particle in an oscillating electric field is proportional to the cycle-averaged intensity gradient. This 'ponderomotive' force plays a major part in a variety of physical situations. Extremely strong kinematic forces are now observed on neutral atoms in short-pulse laser fields; the ponderomotive force on electrons is identified as the driving mechanism, leading to probably the highest observed acceleration on neutral atoms in an external field to date.

    • U. Eichmann
    • T. Nubbemeyer
    • W. Sandner
    Letter
  • For the quantum coherence of electron spins in solid materials to be exploited in future technologies such as quantum computing, the problem of spin decoherence due to electron spins coupling to the noisy environment must first be solved. Here, pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance is used to demonstrate experimentally optimal dynamical decoupling for preserving electron spin coherence in irradiated malonic acid crystals at temperatures from 50 K to room temperature.

    • Jiangfeng Du
    • Xing Rong
    • R. B. Liu
    Letter
  • A large proportion of the magmas erupted at continental arc volcanoes are andesites, which are regarded as a major component in the formation of continental crust — consequently, it is important to understand andesite petrogenesis. Here, an alternative view of andesite petrogenesis is presented, based on a review of quenched glassy melt inclusions trapped in phenocrysts, whole-rock chemistry, and high-pressure and high-temperature experiments; this new view resolves several puzzling aspects of arc volcanism.

    • Olivier Reubi
    • Jon Blundy
    Letter
  • How do birds find their way home? Magnetic compass information is known to have a key role in bird orientation, but how birds are able to sense the Earth's magnetic field remains unresolved, although two hypotheses have been proposed — the iron-mineral-based hypothesis and the light-dependent hypothesis. Here, reported data from European robins strongly suggest that a vision-mediated mechanism underlies the magnetic compass in this migratory songbird.

    • Manuela Zapka
    • Dominik Heyers
    • Henrik Mouritsen
    Letter
  • Excess neurotransmitter diffuses out of the synaptic cleft, where it can activate neurotransmitter receptors outside the postsynaptic density. However, neurotransmitter reuptake is thought to limit the significance of such extrasynaptic, or 'volume', transmission. Individual neurogliaform cells are now shown to release enough GABA for volume transmission within the axonal cloud; these cells do not require synapses to produce inhibitory responses in nearby neurons.

    • Szabolcs Oláh
    • Miklós Füle
    • Gábor Tamás
    Letter
  • Recent evidence indicates that normal intestinal microbiota may positively influence immune responses and protect against the development of inflammatory diseases. One of the potential protective elements in this process are short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), which are produced by fermentation of dietary fibre by intestinal microbiota and bind the G-protein-coupled receptor 43 (GPR43). Here it is shown that SCFA–GPR43 interactions profoundly affect inflammatory responses in mice.

    • Kendle M. Maslowski
    • Angelica T. Vieira
    • Charles R. Mackay
    Letter
  • Evidence indicates that resolution of acute inflammation is an active process, and resolvins — a family of lipid mediators enzymatically generated within resolution networks — possess unique and specific functions to orchestrate catabasis, the phase in which disease declines. Resolvin D2 is now shown to reduce excessive neutrophil trafficking to inflammatory sites and to decrease leukocyte interactions with endothelial cells in a nitric-oxide-dependent manner.

    • Matthew Spite
    • Lucy V. Norling
    • Charles N. Serhan
    Letter
  • The pluripotent state is first established in the primitive ectoderm cells of blastocysts but is progressively and irreversibly lost during development. For example, the transition from primitive ectoderm cell to epiblast cell, post implantation, involves significant transcriptional and epigenetic changes. A technique for reprogramming advanced epiblast cells from embryonic day 5.5–7.5 mouse embryos to embryonic-stem-cell-like cells — representing a return to pluripotency — is now demonstrated.

    • Siqin Bao
    • Fuchou Tang
    • M. Azim Surani
    Letter
  • PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are a class of small RNAs that are known to associate with the PIWI proteins Argonaute 3, Aubergine and Piwi to silence retrotransposons in Drosophila germ lines. However, the primary processing pathway, one of two systems to produce piRNAs in Drosophila, remains incompletely characterized. Primary piRNA processing in a Drosophila ovarian somatic cell line is now analysed to reveal the large Maf gene traffic jam as a new piRNA cluster.

    • Kuniaki Saito
    • Sachi Inagaki
    • Mikiko C. Siomi
    Letter
  • Enzymes use substrate-binding energy to promote ground-state association and to selectively stabilize the reaction transition state. Mutations in the amino-terminal domain of the monomeric homing endonuclease I-AniI, which cleaves with high sequence specificity in the centre of a 20-base-pair DNA target site, are now found to have different effects on the kinetic parameters of the enzyme than those in the carboxy-terminal domain, revealing an unexpected asymmetry in the use of enzyme–substrate binding energy for catalysis.

    • Summer B. Thyme
    • Jordan Jarjour
    • David Baker
    Letter
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Careers Q&A

  • An ecologist at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, Anderson has won the first annual ProSPER.NET-Scopus Young Scientist award for agriculture and natural resources.

    • Virginia Gewin
    Careers Q&A
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Postdoc Journal

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Career Brief

  • Winners of women-in-life-sciences award announced.

    Career Brief
  • US needs more researchers to address environment and climate-change issues.

    Career Brief
  • California research institute opens Florida branch with university as co-tenant.

    Career Brief
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Regions

  • Can Brazil use its booming economy and abundant natural resources to become a life-sciences juggernaut? Gene Russo finds out.

    • Gene Russo
    Regions
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Correction

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Futures

  • Personal service.

    • rp g
    Futures
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