コネチカット州銃乱射事件の犯人のDNA解析が、確たる根拠なく特定の遺伝的要因の危険視につながれば、益よりも害の方が大きい。
No easy answer p.133
Demands to analyse Connecticut school shooter’s DNA are misguided and could lead to dangerous stigmatization, or worse.
doi: 10.1038/493133a
Demands to analyse Connecticut school shooter’s DNA are misguided and could lead to dangerous stigmatization, or worse.
doi: 10.1038/493133a
Health-benefit claims for Europe’s foods must at last be substantiated by science.
doi: 10.1038/493133b
We should focus on dangers that we can control, and particularly on those of our own creation.
doi: 10.1038/493134a
Funding and politics hobble CCS technology, seen as the best hope for cleaning up coal.
doi: 10.1038/493141a
Physicists borrow an old tool from geology to probe the interior layers of metamaterials.
doi: 10.1038/493143a
Nations debate how to share the costs of cutting emissions.
doi: 10.1038/493144a
Fears of immune response have been overestimated.
doi: 10.1038/493145a
As cases of misconduct rise, ethicists test an approach for reforming offenders.
doi: 10.1038/493147a
英国の認知神経科学者が、計算力障害(失計算症)の解明と患者の訓練、支援に力を注いでいる。
doi: 10.1038/493150a
地球は必ず破滅の危機に襲われるが、それがいつかは誰にもわからない。
doi: 10.1038/493154a
物理学には、時間の結晶という途方もない概念が提唱されている。この興味をそそる考えは、時間並進対称性の破れに基づくもので、全く新しい研究分野を開く可能性がある。
doi: 10.1038/493166a
禁漁海域に生息する魚の大半は、それ以外の場所にいる魚に比べて齢が高く、大型で多産だが、脅威から逃れるのは遅い。このような魚が漁場へと「漏れ出す」可能性を考えれば、禁漁区の設置への支持が増えるかもしれない。
doi: 10.1038/493167a
液晶中に懸濁したマイクロメートルスケールの粒子の研究から、粒子の「振る舞い」に対するトポロジーの影響が明らかになった。この知見は、フォトニクスやエレクトロオプティクスの分野での応用への道を開く可能性がある。
doi: 10.1038/493168a
ヌタウナギは、現生脊椎動物の中で最も原始的なものと考えられているが、胚発生の際には、この考え方と矛盾するような特徴を示すことがわかった。この知見はまた、脊椎動物の頭蓋構造の進化をたどるのを助けてくれる。
doi: 10.1038/nature11766
4,000個を超える光学アンテナが同期して働くアレイが、ミリメートルスケールのシリコンチップ上で実証された。この結果は、シリコン上での光集積が非常に高い能力を発揮することをはっきり示している。
doi: 10.1038/493170a
インスリンはヒトの生理学的性質に重要な役割を担っている。だが、インスリンが細胞表面にあるその受容体にどのようにして結合するのかという根本的な生化学的問題の答えは、現在まで得られていなかった。
doi: 10.1038/493171a
ゲルの高分子ネットワークを分析する方法の1つを使えば、ネットワーク内のループ、すなわち自分自身とつながっているストランドの数を数えることができる。これがわかると、ネットワークの形態とゲルの性質を相関させることが可能になる。
doi: 10.1038/493172a
最先端の数値モデルによって、寒冷な気候における氷河の進行は、すでに存在する地形に強く依存すること、また氷河による侵食が氷河の将来の規模をより大きくするのを助けることが明らかになった。
doi: 10.1038/493173a
An analysis of staged hagfish embryos shows that the hagfish adenohypophysis is ectodermal in origin, revealing it to be a developmental quirk unique to hagfishes that was hitherto misleading; from this and other observations a ‘pan-cyclostome’ developmental pattern is derived, indicating that it was primitive for all vertebrates.
doi: 10.1038/nature11794
An X-ray crystal structure of the bacterial cellulose synthase captures the process of cellulose synthesis and membrane translocation; the structure indicates how the synthesis of cellulose and the translocation of the nascent polysaccharide chain across the cell membrane are coupled.
doi: 10.1038/nature11744
A new ultraluminous X-ray source has been discovered in M 31, whose variability and associated bright, compact radio emission identify it as a stellar-mass black hole accreting close to the Eddington limit.
doi: 10.1038/nature11697
Observations of the young star HD 142527, whose disk is separated into inner and outer regions by a gap suggestive of the formation of a gaseous giant planet, show that accretion onto the star is maintained by a flow of gas across the gap, in agreement with dynamical models of planet formation.
doi: 10.1038/nature11769
A large-scale silicon nanophotonic phased array with more than 4,000 antennas is demonstrated using a state-of-the-art complementary metal-oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) process, enabling arbitrary holograms with tunability, which brings phased arrays to many new technological territories.
doi: 10.1038/nature11727
Topologically distinct colloidal particles introduced into a nematic liquid crystal align and generate topology-constrained three-dimensional director fields and defects in the liquid crystal fluid that can be manipulated with a variety of methods, opening up a new area of exploration in the field of soft matter.
doi: 10.1038/nature11710
Previously glaciated landscapes tend to have large areas concentrated at the same elevation; here it is shown that small climate changes can trigger massive glacial expansions for these landscapes, explaining long-term patterns of erosion in the Quaternary period.
doi: 10.1038/nature11786
Carbon-dioxide-rich kimberlitic melt explains the low velocity and high electrical conductivity of the mantle asthenosphere and controls the flux of incompatible elements at oceanic ridges.
doi: 10.1038/nature11731
Resequencing of genes from individuals of European and African American ancestry indicates that approximately 73% of all protein-coding SNVs and approximately 86% of SNVs predicted to be deleterious arose in the past 5,000–10,000 years, and that European Americans carry an excess of deleterious variants in essential and Mendelian disease genes compared to African Americans.
doi: 10.1038/nature11690
Mechanotransduction channels studied to date are mainly involved with sensing noxious mechanical stimuli; here NOMPC, a member of the TRP ion channel family, is identified as a pore-forming subunit of an ion channel essential to the sensation of gentle touch in Drosophila.
doi: 10.1038/nature11685
Adult neural stem and progenitor cells (NSPCs) show high levels of fatty acid synthase (Fasn)-dependent de novo lipogenesis, a process that is controlled by Spot14 to regulate the rate of proliferation; this indicates a functional coupling between the regulation of lipid metabolism and adult NSPC proliferation.
doi: 10.1038/nature11689
The human long non-coding RNA TINCR binds to STAU1 and controls epidermal differentiation by stabilizing key differentiation mRNAs, by means of a TINCR-binding motif found enriched in epidermal differentiation genes.
doi: 10.1038/nature11661
A cell-autonomous role for the COUP-TFII transcription factor in prostate cancer cells is identified, in which COUP-TFII inhibits TGF-β signalling by binding to SMAD4; COUP-TFII promotes prostate tumorigenesis and metastasis in a mouse model, and is associated with more aggressive disease in human prostate cancers.
doi: 10.1038/nature11674
The three-dimensional structure of the insulin–insulin receptor complex has proved elusive, confounded by the complexity of producing the receptor protein; here is the first glimpse of the interaction between insulin and its primary binding site on the insulin receptor, a view based on four crystal structures of insulin bound to truncated insulin receptor complexes.
doi: 10.1038/nature11781
A new mechanism of chromosomal rearrangement is identified through the observation that broken or collapsed DNA replication forks restarted by homologous recombination have a high propensity for U-turns at short inverted repeats; the error-prone nature of this mechanism is suggested to contribute to gross chromosomal rearrangements and copy-number variations present in cancer and other genomic disorders.
doi: 10.1038/nature11676
Cohesin, which tethers sister chromatids together, is found to be cleaved by separase after DNA damage, resulting in cohesin dissociation and allowing for post-replicative repair of DNA double-strand breaks.
doi: 10.1038/nature11630
The crystal structure of the inner-membrane urea channel HpUreI from Helicobacter pylori, the causative organism of peptic ulcers, reveals how the channel selectively transports urea across the membrane and buffers the pathogen’s periplasmic pH against the acidic gastric environment.
doi: 10.1038/nature11684