The number of people with science doctorates is rapidly increasing, but there are not enough academic jobs for them all. Graduate programmes should be reformed to meet students’ needs.
doi: 10.1038/528007a
Research has a part to play in identifying the factors that breed terrorism.
doi: 10.1038/528007b
Scientific innovation is being smothered by a culture of conformity.
doi: 10.1038/528008a
Senate assigns a clinical trial €3 million — but researchers want an open competition.
doi: 10.1038/528015a
Indian Ocean expedition resumes a six-decade campaign to bore right through the planet’s crust.
doi: 10.1038/528016a
Algorithms could aid discovery at Large Hadron Collider, but raise transparency concerns.
doi: 10.1038/528018a
A clinical trial will look at the neurological structure and function of people who have attempted suicide.
doi: 10.1038/nature.2015.18870
Terrorism is tough to study, but researchers have gleaned insights from the current generation of Islamist extremists.
doi: 10.1038/528020a
Science budget will rise with inflation amid cuts elsewhere, following government spending review.
doi: 10.1038/nature.2015.18878
博士課程の学生数に対して大学の研究ポストが少なすぎるという問題を解決するための、数々の案を紹介する。
doi: 10.1038/528022a
大量のデータを集められる各種センサーを人体に取り付け、医療の改革を目指す研究が進められている。
doi: 10.1038/528026a
2つのヘリウム原子核の衝突に関する計算が大きく進展したことで、炭素や酸素のような元素が星で形成された仕組みを定量的に解明する道が開かれ、星の進化モデルも改良された。
doi: 10.1038/528042a
多様な海洋生物種についての温度分布域の解析から、地球温暖化に対して生態学的群集が示す脆弱性は、温度変化の大きさよりも、群集に含まれる生物の生理学的性質の方に依存するところが大きい可能性が明らかになった。
doi: 10.1038/nature16314
制御性T細胞と呼ばれる免疫細胞は、老化に伴って脂肪中に蓄積していく。このような細胞の抗炎症活性は、代謝における老化関連障害を悪化させるが、肥満については対照的な影響を及ぼすことが分かった。
doi: 10.1038/nature15648
細菌細胞に感染するウイルスについて最初の報告が行われてから100年が経過した。バクテリオファージはこの100年間を通じて、基礎生物学、生物工学やヒトの健康の研究に貢献してきており、それは100周年を祝うのに十分に値する。
doi: 10.1038/528046a
エンタングルメントエントロピーと呼ばれる属性は、相互に作用し合う粒子の量子状態を記述するのに役立つ。これがついに測定されたことは、量子系の解明をさらに進める道を開く。
doi: 10.1038/528048a
一部の侵襲性の脳腫瘍で腫瘍細胞同士を連結する細管構造が見つかったことは、このようながんが広がる仕組みや治療に対する耐性を獲得する仕組みを明らかにするのにつながるだろう。
doi: 10.1038/nature15649
Careful management of nitrogen fertilizer usage is required to ensure world food security while limiting environmental degradation; an analysis of historical nitrogen use efficiency reveals socio-economic factors and technological innovations that have influenced a range of past national trends and that suggest ways to improve global food production and environmental stewardship by 2050.
doi: 10.1038/nature15743
Instead of containing stable and chemically unique ‘humic substances’, as has been widely accepted, soil organic matter is a mixture of progressively decomposing organic compounds; this has broad implications for soil science and its applications.
doi: 10.1038/nature16069
Soil biodiversity sustains human health and its loss can be mitigated by sustainable management.
doi: 10.1038/nature15744
n panels of cancer cell lines analysed for their response to drug libraries, some studies have proposed distinct pharmacological sensitivities for some cell lines while other studies have not seen the same trends; here the data in the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia and the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer are reassessed, and the authors report a stronger degree of concordance between the two data sets than that in a previous study.
doi: 10.1038/nature15736
Entanglement, which describes non-local correlations between quantum objects, is very difficult to measure, especially in systems of itinerant particles; here spatial entanglement is measured for ultracold bosonic atoms in optical lattices.
doi: 10.1038/nature15750
How marine communities will respond to climate change depends on the thermal sensitivities of existing communities; existing reef communities do not show a perfect fit between current temperatures and the thermal niches of the species within them and this thermal bias is a major contributor to projected local species loss.
doi: 10.1038/nature16144
Brain tumours are difficult to treat because of their propensity to infiltrate brain tissue; here long processes, or tumour microtubes, extended by astrocytomas are shown to promote brain infiltration and to create an interconnected network that enables multicellular communication and that protects the tumours from radiotherapy-induced cell death, suggesting that disruption of the network could be a new therapeutic approach.
doi: 10.1038/nature16071
Using experimental proteomics and modelling in E. coli, the amount of protein needed to run respiration (per ATP produced) is shown to be twice as much as that needed to run fermentation; results demonstrate that overflow metabolism (known as the Warburg effect in cancer cells) is a necessary outcome of optimal bacterial growth, governed by a global resource allocation program, and that the methodology is directly applicable to synthetic biology and cancer research.
doi: 10.1038/nature15765
In the local Universe, the census of all observed baryons falls short of the estimated number by a factor of two, and simulations have indicated that the missing baryons reside throughout the filaments of the cosmic web; X-ray observations of filamentary structures associated with the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 now find that 5 to 10 per cent of the filament mass is in the form of baryonic gas.
doi: 10.1038/nature16058
Persistent low-velocity baryonic jets have been detected from a supersoft X-ray source; the low velocity suggests that these jets have not been launched from a white dwarf, and the persistence speaks against the origin being a canonical black hole or neutron star, indicating that a different type of source must be implicated.
doi: 10.1038/nature15751
An ab initio calculation of alpha–alpha scattering is described for which the number of computational operations scales approximately quadratically with particle number and which uses lattice Monte Carlo simulations and lattice effective field theory, combined with the adiabatic projection method to reduce the eight-body system to a two-cluster system.
doi: 10.1038/nature16067
Recent work has suggested that sections of the West Antarctic ice sheet are already rapidly retreating, raising concerns about increased sea-level rise; now, an ice-sheet model is used to simulate the mass loss from the entire Antarctic ice sheet to 2200, suggesting that it could contribute up to 30 cm of sea-level rise by 2100 and 72 cm by 2200, but is unlikely to contribute more.
doi: 10.1038/nature16147
It has been suggested that carbon starvation, owing to reduced availability of non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs), is an important contributor to tree mortality during drought in tropical rainforests; however, data from the world’s longest-running experimental drought study presented here show no evidence of carbon starvation, and instead the researchers conclude that impaired water hydraulic processes (involving the transport of water from soil to leaf) have a more important role in triggering tree death from long-term drought.
doi: 10.1038/nature15539
Genetic correction of MeCP2 levels largely reversed the behavioural, molecular and physiological deficits associated with MECP2 duplication syndrome in a transgenic mouse model; similarly, reduction of MeCP2 levels using an antisense oligonucleotide strategy resulted in phenotypic rescue in adult transgenic mice, and dose-dependently corrected MeCP2 levels in cells from patients with MECP2 duplication.
doi: 10.1038/nature16159
Inhibitory antibodies to two specific human and mouse Notch ligands, Jagged1 and Jagged2, are generated and shown to have beneficial effects in a goblet cell metaplasia asthma model; systemic Jagged1 inhibition transdifferentiates secretory cells into ciliated cells in the mouse, demonstrating that Jagged1 from ciliated cells normally holds back secretory cells to adopt the ciliated fate.
doi: 10.1038/nature15715
Regulatory T cells need to express a diverse T-cell-receptor repertoire to control pathogenic self-reactive T cells; here it is shown that repertoire diversification depends on the intronic Foxp3 enhancer CNS3 acting at the regulatory T-cell-precursor stage to induce T-cell-receptor responsiveness to low-strength signals.
doi: 10.1038/nature16141
Fat-resident regulatory T cells (fTreg cells) accumulate in adipose tissue of mice as a function of age, but not obesity; mice without fTreg cells are protected against age-associated insulin resistance, but remain susceptible to obesity-associated insulin resistance and metabolic disease, indicating different aetiologies of age-associated versus obesity-associated insulin resistance.
doi: 10.1038/nature16151
A DNase sequencing method termed scDNase-seq detects DNase I hypersensitive sites genome-wide in single cells and pools of cells dissected from cancer biopsies.
doi: 10.1038/nature15740
A large-scale enhancer complementation assay assessing the activating or repressing contributions of over 800 Drosophila transcription factors and cofactors to combinatorial enhancer control reveals a more complex picture than expected, with many factors having diverse regulatory functions that depend on the enhancer context.
doi: 10.1038/nature15545
