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The proposed European Data Protection Regulation will rightly preserve people’s privacy — but, without exceptions for scientific research, it could hinder or prevent medical discoveries.
If programmes to bolster STEM education are effective, they distort the labour market; if they aren’t, they’re a waste of money, argues Colin Macilwain.
William H. Schneider reflects on the centenary of the Rockefeller Foundation, which began the postdoc and the grant, and led to the World Health Organization.
Architect Rahul Mehrotra builds with social advocacy in mind. His latest project at Hathi Gaon, a village in Rajasthan, India, provides housing for 100 elephants and their mahouts. A professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he talks about urban evolution and 'impatient capital'.
An innovative use of catch statistics shows that climate change has already influenced the composition of species in fisheries around the world, and thereby the fish that we eat. See Letter p.365
Tracking the behaviour of bacteria as they group together on a surface reveals a 'rich-get-richer' mechanism in which polysaccharide deposition and cellular location amplify in a positive feedback loop. See Letter p.388
An analysis of data collected by the Voyager 2 spacecraft and by ground-based telescopes limits the depths to which winds penetrate into Uranus and Neptune, informing the debate about these planets' internal structures. See Letter p.344
Scientists have long dreamt of converting molten iron oxide to iron and oxygen using electricity. An anode material that withstands the high temperatures and corrosive chemicals involved brings the dream closer to reality. See Letter p.353
A computer model of tooth evolution designed to assess the impact of developmental dynamics on natural selection reveals that complexity reduces the likelihood of maximum fitness being attained. See Letter p.361
Determining major branches in the tree of life generally relies on concatenating as much genetic information as possible, but, as shown here, phylogenomic analysis often produces results that are incongruent with the results of concatenation; a method that gives credence to genes or internodes with high average internode support reduces the incongruence.
High-resolution imaging has traditionally required thin sectioning, a process that disrupts long-range connectivity in the case of brains: here, intact mouse brains and human brain samples have been made fully transparent and macromolecule permeable using a new method termed CLARITY, which allows for intact-tissue imaging as well as repeated antibody labelling and in situ hybridization of non-sectioned tissue.
The crystal structure of the human smoothened (SMO) receptor is presented in complex with a small-molecule antitumour agent; this represents the first example of a non-class-A, 7-transmembrane (7TM) receptor structure, revealing different conserved motifs common within class frizzled 7TM receptors and an unusually complex arrangement of long extracellular loops stabilized by disulphide bonds.
On Uranus and Neptune, the measured fourth-order gravity harmonic, J4, constrains the atmospheric dynamics to the outermost 0.15 per cent and 0.2 per cent, respectively, of the planetary mass, indicating that these dynamics are confined to a thin weather layer no more than 1,000 kilometres deep on both planets.
An electrically pumped polariton laser is constructed using a quantum well microcavity, and its polaritonic nature is demonstrated unambiguously by using a magnetic field to probe the part-light, part-matter character of the system.
Molten oxide electrolysis is considered a promising route for extractive metallurgy with much reduced carbon dioxide emissions relative to traditional routes; now a new chromium-based alloy has been developed for use as an oxygen evolving anode that remains stable in the high-temperature corrosive conditions found during iron production via electrolysis.
Xenon isotopic analysis shows that ancient pockets of water found in a mine in Timmins, Canada, have survived in the Earth’s crust for at least 1.5 billion years.
Tooth development is used as a model to examine which aspects of phenotype can be optimized by natural selection; this reveals that the complexity of the relationship between genotypic and phenotypic variation can affect adaptation
The mean temperature of the catch, an index designed to characterize the effect of climate change on global fisheries catch, increased at a rate of 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade between 1970 and 2006, showing that ocean warming has already affected global fisheries.
This paper identifies a specific population of subventricular-zone-generated astrocytes that increases in population density after cortical injury; these activated astrocytes migrate to the site of injury, unlike described properties for their counterparts residing in the cortex.
Opaque tissues provide a challenge for live imaging of Xenopus laevis development; a problem solved by in vivo time-lapse X-ray microtomography that is shown to provide a high-resolution three-dimensional view of structural changes and dynamics of gastrulation, and that is applied to identify and analyse new aspects of gastrulation in frog embryos.
MicroRNA profiling of 1,302 human breast tumour samples provides an overview of the miRNA landscape and its regulation, revealing context-dependent interactions, broad prognostic value of miRNA signatures and an important modulatory role for miRNAs in the biology of breast tumours devoid of copy-number aberrations.
Epidermal growth factor receptor, the product of a human oncogene, suppresses the maturation of specific tumour-suppressor-like microRNAs in response to hypoxic stress through phosphorylation of argonaute 2.
Cell-tracking experiments and simulations show that the Psl exopolysaccharide deposited by Pseudomonas aeruginosa guides the surface motility of subsequent cells that encounter the Psl trails, generating a ‘rich-get-richer’ effect that leads to microcolony formation.
Building on previous work that identified a mutant avian H5 virus that is transmissible between ferrets, the authors present an algorithm to predict virus avidity from the affinity of single haemagglutinin (HA)–receptor interactions; these studies predict that the mutant has a 200-fold preference for the human over the avian receptor, and crystal structures of the mutant HA in complex with human and avian receptors shed light on the molecular basis for these altered binding properties.
