Browse Articles

The evolution of venom toxins is an area of intense study but has been hampered by the lack of non-toxin protein homologues. Here, phylogenetic analyses of non-toxin genes sourced from transcriptomic studies are found placed within groups of venom toxins, revealing dynamic changes in the sites of toxin expression.

Quantum metrology employs the properties of quantum states to further enhance the accuracy of some of the most precise measurement schemes to date. Here, a method for estimating the upper bounds to achievable precision in quantum-enhanced metrology protocols in the presence of decoherence is presented.

Recent observations have uncovered a cloud of ionized gas falling into the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Murray-Clay and Loeb present a model that may explain these observations, in which the cloud is produced from the proto-planetary disc around a low-mass star orbiting the black hole.

Ultrathin inorganic materials hold promise for a variety of applications, including flexible electronics. This work presents a fabrication method that permits the synthesis of large and flexible freestanding layers of zinc selenide that display a high-photocurrent density.

The mechanical properties of structural ceramics are characterized by a high degree of fragility and brittleness. This study demonstrates that, contrary to expectation, their brittleness can be reduced substantially by introducing nanopores together with weak grain boundary phases.

The spin Hall effect and its inverse allow conversion between charge and spin currents in both magnetic and nonmagnetic materials. Weiet al.observe an anomaly in the temperature dependence of the inverse spin Hall effect, which suggests that it can also be used as a sensor for very small magnetic moments.

Inducing superconductivity in topological insulators by proximity to superconductors is a promising strategy for quantum computing. Here the authors induce high-temperature superconductivity in the topological insulators Bi₂Se₃ and Bi₂Te₃by placing them in contact with a cuprate superconductor.

The pulvinar nucleus is involved in modulating visual information. Fischer and Whitney use brain imaging to study the pulvinar during visual attention, and find that the positions and orientations of attended objects are precisely encoded in the pulvinar, while information about ignored objects is gated out.

Seizure activity in the brain is characterized by the recruitment of cortical neuronal activity. Schevon and colleagues study seizure activity in human subjects and find that the recruitment of neurons is hypersynchronous and that there is an intrinsic restraint on the propagation of this activity.

Microscopic imaging techniques have a high spatio-temporal resolution but, in living animals, are hampered by cardiac and respiratory motion. This paper describes a microscopic setup that allows fluorescent confocal imaging of the beating mouse heart over a period of several hours.

Environmental factors can influence one's susceptibility to cancer, but it is not clear whether such an influence extends beyond the directly exposed generations. Here, feeding pregnant rats with a high-fat diet or a hormone derivative, the authors observe increased breast cancer risk in up to three subsequent generations.

Cyclin B–Cdk1 is thought to be synonymous with the promoting factor that drives entry into M-phase of the cell cycle. Here, Greatwall kinase is shown to be required for the breakdown of the nuclear envelope and the assembly of the spindle on entry into M-phase, suggesting that it too is a part of the M-phase-promoting factor.

TGF-β signalling suppresses tumorigenesis in breast cancer cells but its effects on breast cancer initiating cells have not been reported. Using cells in culture, Brunaet al. show that TGF-β increases breast cancer initiating cell numbers in cells that have low levels of the tight junction protein claudin.

Methanol is an important industrial chemical and liquid fuel, and is usually produced by the syn-gas route from natural gas. Wuet al. develop a new catalytic process that directly converts ethylene glycol, derived from biomass or fossil fuels, to methanol in hydrogen using a Pd/Fe₂O₃co-precipitated catalyst.

Permanent magnets based on magnetic ferrites such as Fe₃O₄ and Fe₂O₃ are used in a wide range of applications. This study demonstrates that introducing rhodium into nanoparticles consisting of the ε phase of Fe₂O₃gives rise to a very high coercivity.

Frequency comb synthesizers are important for metrology, but they have been difficult to use as frequency rulers in the terahertz region due to their low power. Consolinoet al. phase-lock a quantum cascade laser to a free-space-propagating terahertz comb, demonstrating that they can overcome this limitation.

The iron–sulphur enzyme IspH catalyses the final step of the methylerythritol phosphate isoprenoid biosynthesis pathway. Spanet al. report that IspH can hydrate acetylenes to aldehydes and ketones, in addition to its role as a 2H⁺/2e⁻reductase.

Spin dynamics in magnetic materials can be driven by ultrafast light pulses, resulting in transient magnetization changes on femtosecond timescales. Rudolphet al. find that in magnetic trilayers the magnetization of one layer can be enhanced by superdiffusive spin currents from adjacent layers.

Blind quantum computation is a protocol that permits an algorithm, its input and output to be kept secret from the owner of the computational resource doing the calculation. Morimae and Fujii propose a strategy for topologically protected fault-tolerant blind quantum computation that is robust to environmental noise.

Reconstructing short-term plate-motion changes through time provides important geodynamical information, but data noise is a problem at fine temporal resolution. This study presents a trans-dimensional hierarchical Bayesian framework that eliminates noise without loss of temporal resolution.