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Under the Kyoto Protocol, 37 industrialized nations and the European Union pledged to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by 5% measured against 1990 levels by the end of 2012. As the first commitment period of the protocol draws to a conclusion, we take stock of just what has been achieved by a treaty that has patently failed in its main objective, and ask what can be done in the next decades to reboot the cause of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. Cover: Hurricane Sandy from space/NASA GOES Project
An influential US advocacy group has set a deadline to beat breast cancer by 2020. But it puts public trust at risk by promising an objective that science cannot yet deliver.
A method has been developed for predicting the stability and elasticity of certain alloys for millions of atomic configurations of the materials. This approach should help to identify materials with optimized properties. See Letter p.740
An analysis of the physiological vulnerability of different trees to drought shows that forests around the globe are at equally high risk of succumbing to increases in drought conditions. See Letter p.752
An assessment of crystallization processes occurring in magma chambers in the ocean floor finds an unexpected enrichment in trace elements, reviving an old theory of the cycling of magma in these chambers. See Article p.698
The wheat genome is large and complex, and has defied complete sequencing. But the most comprehensive analysis so far of the plant's genes will support efforts to optimize the supply of this vital food crop. See Letter p.705
The finding that derivatives of vitamin B can bind to an antigen-presenting protein that stimulates specialized immune cells suggests a novel mechanism by which the immune system detects microbial infections. See Article p.717
The field-effect transistor underlies microprocessor technology. A version of it has been demonstrated that tunes particle transport from an incoherent regime to a strongly correlated superfluid one. See Letter p.736
Considerable confusion exists as to the most likely value of climate sensitivity; by proposing a consistent framework for analysing and synthesizing research into the palaeoclimate of the past 65 million years, a value of 2.2–4.8 °C warming in response to atmospheric CO2 doubling is obtained, in agreement with IPCC estimates.
A recently released satellite data set calls into question not only our understanding of observed stratospheric climate change but also our ability to simulate it.
Global distributions of trace elements in ocean floor basalts are found to describe a systematic pattern that is due to cycling of magma through the global ensemble of magma chambers.
Sequencing of the hexaploid bread wheat genome shows that it is highly dynamic, with significant loss of gene family members on polyploidization and domestication, and an abundance of gene fragments.
An integrated high-resolution genetic, physical and shotgun sequence assembly of the barley genome, one of the earliest domesticated and most important crops, is described; it will provide a platform for genome-assisted research and future crop improvement.
The structure of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC)-class-I-like molecule MR1 in complex with a vitamin B9 derivative is determined; metabolites of vitamin B2 are shown to activate MR1-restricted mucosal-associated invariant T cells, implicating them in microbial immunosurveillance.
This study develops an NMR-based approach that can capture previously inaccessible, highly transient, low-populated ‘excited states’ in RNA; the localized rearrangements in base-pairing giving rise to these states are found to affect function by changing the exposure of residues required for a specific biological process.
Observations of the stellar dynamics of the compact lenticular galaxy NGC 1277 show that its central black hole accounts for more than half of the mass of the host galaxy’s bulge, indicating that lenticular galaxies do not follow the usual black-hole mass scaling relations.
Observations of trace gases over the south pole of Titan indicate that the moon’s middle-atmospheric circulation extends to an altitude of at least 600 kilometres, which is higher than previously thought and requires active chemistry and dynamics in the upper atmosphere.
Direct measurements of the conduction properties of strongly interacting ultracold fermions reveal the well-known drop of resistance associated with the onset of superfluidity.
First-principles calculations on a huge configuration space of four different binary alloy systems reveal that stiffness and heat of formation are negatively and linearly correlated.
A new approach to dating a continuous sea-level record, using speleothem U–Th ages, shows that past variations in global ice volume occurred within centuries of polar climate change, with rates of sea-level rise reaching at least 1 metre per century.
Synchrotron radiation X-ray tomographic microscopy of a developmental series of Compagopiscis croucheri (Arthrodira) indicates that placoderms had true teeth, but that tooth and jaw development was not developmentally or structurally integrated in placoderms.
Analysis of data from forest plants worldwide shows that margins between threshold xylem pressures at which plants suffer damage and the lowest xylem pressures experienced are small, with no difference between dry and wet forests, providing insight into why drought-induced forest decline is occurring in both arid and wet forests.
The results of sequencing the collared flycatcher genome, and re-sequencing population samples from this species and its sister species, the pied flycatcher, reveal the existence of areas of high sequence divergence compared to background levels, and suggest that complex repeat structures may drive species divergence and that sex chromosomes and autosomes are at different stages of speciation.
Examination of spatial representations in the entorhinal cortex of monkeys performing a visual memory task reveals individual neurons that emit action potentials when the monkey fixates multiple discrete locations in the visual field, and suggests that entorhinal cortex neurons encode space during visual exploration, even without locomotion.
The pancreatic lineage is used as a model for embryonic-stem-cell differentiation, and shows that co-culture with organ-matched mesenchyme permits proliferation and self-renewal of progenitors, enabling an expansion of more than a million-fold for human endodermal cells with full retention of developmental potential.
Neurons and oligodendrocytes differentiated from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) of patients with inherited TLR3 and UNC-93B deficiencies are found to be more susceptible to infection by HSV-1 than control cells because they fail to induce a normal interferon response, whereas neural stem cells and astrocytes are not susceptible.
Novel pathogenic infectious retroviruses, generated by recombination between replication-defective endogenous retroviruses in the absence of a functional antibody response, are identified; these recombinant retroviruses establish infection of mouse colonies and ultimately cause cancer.
NMR spectroscopy is used to determine the three-dimensional structure of the full-length human chemokine receptor CXCR1 in phospholipid bilayers under physiological conditions.