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Volume 491 Issue 7426, 29 November 2012

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

Editorial

  • 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.

    Editorial

    Advertisement

  • With climate talks inching along, gains in energy efficiency could slow the rise in emissions.

    Editorial
  • Researchers should lobby against heavy cuts to pan-European research funds.

    Editorial
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World View

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Research Highlights

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Seven Days

  • The news in brief: Target for polio eradication missed; greenhouse-gas concentrations hit record high; and science advice to UK politicians is safe.

    Seven Days
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News

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Correction

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News Feature

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Comment

  • Abandon coal, price carbon consumption and look to new technologies for a lasting solution to global emissions, argues Dieter Helm.

    • Dieter Helm
    Comment
  • An emerging coalition is implementing carbon trading despite political obstacles. It is rewriting the map of climate diplomacy, says Michael Grubb.

    • Michael Grubb
    Comment
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Books & Arts

  • Allan McRobie enjoys a life of the audacious engineer who pioneered the windproofing of bridges and skyscrapers.

    • Allan McRobie
    Books & Arts
  • Istvan Hargittai explores a life and work of Manhattan Project leader, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

    • Istvan Hargittai
    Books & Arts
  • Death's multifarious faces in two London exhibitions exhilarate Ewen Callaway.

    • Ewen Callaway
    Books & Arts
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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • 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

    • Gus L. W. Hart
    News & Views
  • 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

    • Bettina M. J. Engelbrecht
    News & Views
  • 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

    • Albrecht W. Hofmann
    News & Views
  • 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

    • Peter Langridge
    News & Views
  • 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

    • Wei-Jen Chua
    • Ted H. Hansen
    News & Views
  • 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

    • Lincoln D. Carr
    • Mark T. Lusk
    News & Views
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Perspective

  • 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.

    • E. J. Rohling
    • E. J. Rohling
    • R. E. Zeebe
    Perspective
  • 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.

    • David W. J. Thompson
    • Dian J. Seidel
    • Roger Lin
    Perspective
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Article

  • 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.

    • Klaus F. X. Mayer
    • Robbie Waugh
    • Nils Stein
    Article Open Access
  • 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.

    • Lars Kjer-Nielsen
    • Onisha Patel
    • James McCluskey
    Article
  • 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.

    • Elizabeth A. Dethoff
    • Katja Petzold
    • Hashim M. Al-Hashimi
    Article
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Letter

  • 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.

    • Remco C. E. van den Bosch
    • Karl Gebhardt
    • Jonelle L. Walsh
    Letter
  • 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.

    • Nicholas A. Teanby
    • Patrick G. J. Irwin
    • F. Michael Flasar
    Letter
  • 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.

    • Martin Rücklin
    • Philip C. J. Donoghue
    • Marco Stampanoni
    Letter
  • 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.

    • Brendan Choat
    • Steven Jansen
    • Amy E. Zanne
    Letter
  • 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.

    • Hans Ellegren
    • Linnéa Smeds
    • Jochen B. W. Wolf
    Letter Open Access
  • 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.

    • Nathaniel J. Killian
    • Michael J. Jutras
    • Elizabeth A. Buffalo
    Letter
  • 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.

    • Julie B. Sneddon
    • Malgorzata Borowiak
    • Douglas A. Melton
    Letter
  • 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.

    • Fabien G. Lafaille
    • Itai M. Pessach
    • Luigi D. Notarangelo
    Letter
  • 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.

    • George R. Young
    • Urszula Eksmond
    • George Kassiotis
    Letter
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Corrigendum

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Column

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Career Brief

  • Non-tenure-track faculty members don't get enough mentoring or professional development.

    Career Brief
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Q&A

  • Glaciochemist aims to use ice dating to clarify effect of climate change on sea levels.

    • Virginia Gewin
    Q&A
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Futures

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Brief Communications Arising

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