As more and more of its ocean-sciences budget is eaten up by operational and maintenance costs, the US National Science Foundation should learn to take a long view when investing in major projects.
doi: 10.1038/501461a
Angela Merkel needs to tackle the issue of Germany’s uneven university funding.
doi: 10.1038/501461b
A dispute over the skull of an Italian cheese thief highlights the enduring debate over repatriation.
doi: 10.1038/501462a
US funding for research vessel uncertain as international programme reorganizes.
doi: 10.1038/501469a
Researcher baffled after his results appear in bogus paper.
doi: 10.1038/501470a
Surfeit of unlicensed intellectual property pushes research institutions into unseemly partnerships.
doi: 10.1038/501471a
Software experiment raises prospect of extra peer review.
doi: 10.1038/501472a
Devices may be the ‘healthy’ future of smoking — or a menace.
doi: 10.1038/501473a
Iron-based compound revives search for room-temperature superconductors.
doi: 10.1038/501474a
Third Rock Ventures made its name by placing big bets on the biotechnology companies it launched. Now, everyone is waiting for the pay-off.
doi: 10.1038/501476a
A mammoth undersea US project will soon start streaming data to researchers. But some wonder whether the system is worth its high price.
doi: 10.1038/501480a
doi: 10.1038/501494a
doi: 10.1038/501495a
doi: 10.1038/501496a
doi: 10.1038/nature12560
doi: 10.1038/nature12555
A heat-pipe model of Earth, whereby interior heat is brought to the surface through localized channels, yields predictions that agree with craton data and the detrital zircon record, and offers a global geodynamic framework in which to explore Earth’s evolution before the onset of plate tectonics.
doi: 10.1038/nature12473
Sequencing and deep analysis of mRNA and miRNA from lymphoblastoid cell lines of 462 individuals from the 1000 Genomes Project reveal widespread genetic variation affecting the regulation of most genes, with transcript structure and expression level variation being equally common but genetically largely independent, and the analyses point to putative causal variants for dozens of disease-associated loci.
doi: 10.1038/nature12531
Mutations in the ubiquitin ligase parkin are associated with increased susceptibility to Parkinson’s disease; parkin is already known to have a role in mitophagy and this work identifies a new innate immunity role for parkin in ubiquitin-mediated autophagy of intracellular bacterial pathogens.
doi: 10.1038/nature12566
A neutron star with a low mass companion star was observed at different times as a millisecond pulsar powered either by the rotation of its magnetic field or by the accretion of mass, demonstrating the evolutionary link between these two classes of pulsars, and probing the short timescales on which the transitions between the two states may occur.
doi: 10.1038/nature12470
In a step towards developing a system in which to study quantum magnetism, the long-range dipolar interactions of polar molecules pinned in a three-dimensional optical lattice are used to realize a lattice spin model.
doi: 10.1038/nature12483
A computer built entirely using transistors based on carbon nanotubes, which is capable of multitasking and emulating instructions from the MIPS instruction set, is enabled by methods that overcome inherent challenges with this new technology.
doi: 10.1038/nature12502
Benzynes are capable of concerted removal of two vicinal hydrogen atoms from a hydrocarbon, a discovery enabled by the thermal generation of reactive benzyne intermediates through the hexadehydro-Diels–Alder cycloisomerization reaction of triyne substrates.
doi: 10.1038/nature12492
The distribution of chromium isotopes and redox-sensitive metals in the Nsuze palaeosol and in the Ijzermyn iron formation from the Pongola Supergroup, in South Africa, suggests that there were appreciable levels of atmospheric oxygen about three billion years ago, some 300–400 million years earlier than previous indications for Earth surface oxygenation.
doi: 10.1038/nature12426
Global reef fish diversity is studied with metrics incorporating species abundances and functional traits; these identify diversity hotspots corresponding to the diversity of functional traits amongst individuals in the community, and greater evenness in the abundance of reef fishes at higher latitudes, findings that contrast with patterns reported previously using traditional richness-based methods.
doi: 10.1038/nature12529
The role of parvalbumin (PV)-positive interneurons in ocular dominance plasticity (ODP) has been a point of contention; here PV-positive cells are shown to initiate competitive periods of plasticity during the critical periods of eye development when ODP occurs, and transient reductions in inhibitory firing from PV-positive cells provides a return to normal firing rates in excitatory neurons, a key step in ODP progression.
doi: 10.1038/nature12485
The crystal structure of the complex formed by the B and C toxin complex proteins is reported, revealing how toxin complexes are processed and protected; the proteins assemble to form a large hollow structure that sequesters the cytotoxic portion of the C protein, and a β-propeller domain mediates attachment to the A protein in the native ABC complex.
doi: 10.1038/nature12465
Here, biological attributes of two early human isolates of the newly emerged H7N9 influenza viruses are characterized: the potential of these viruses to infect and/or transmit within various animal models is discussed, as is their relative sensitivity to neuraminidase inhibitors and experimental polymerase inhibitors compared to an H1N1 pandemic strain.
doi: 10.1038/nature12392
The new H7N9 influenza virus, recently emerged in China, can replicate in human airway cells and in the respiratory tract of ferrets to a higher level than can seasonal H3N2 virus and shows higher lethality in mice than genetically related H7N9 and H9N2 viruses, but shows limited transmission in ferrets by respiratory droplets.
doi: 10.1038/nature12391
An investigation into the transmissibility of the H7N9 influenza A virus in ferrets finds that although the virus has some determinants associated with human adaptation and transmissibility between mammals, the airborne transmission between ferrets is limited.
doi: 10.1038/nature12476
Depletion of the cohesin-associated protein Wapl in mice is shown to increase the residence time of cohesin on DNA, which leads to clustering of cohesin in axial structures, and causes chromatin condensation in interphase chromosomes; the findings suggest that cohesin could have an architectural role in interphase chromosome organization.
doi: 10.1038/nature12471
Stalling of replication forks in sequences that have non-allelic repeats can lead to genomic rearrangements; here two pathways consistent with homologous recombination and error-free post-replication repair fuse identical and mismatched repeats, respectively, thus inducing chromosomal rearrangements in mouse embryonic stem cells.
doi: 10.1038/nature12500
The X-ray crystal structure of NapA, a Na+/H+ antiporter from Thermus thermophilus, in an active, outward-facing state is reported; comparisons to the structure of a related transporter in a low pH/inactivated, inward-facing state show the conformational changes that occur when the membrane protein moves from an inward-facing to an outward-facing state, suggesting that Na+/H+ antiporters operate by a two-domain rocking bundle model.
doi: 10.1038/nature12484
