nature

THIS WEEK

Editorials

Diplomatic service ▶

Government science advisers are unlikely to be specialists on the subject of a crisis, but they are key to bringing together relevant experts and disseminating the information clearly and accurately.

People power ▶

Climate models must consider how humans are responding to a warming world.

World View

Allow use of electronic cigarettes to assess risk ▶

Monitoring the outcomes of incentivized e-cigarette use, not endless research, will be the key to sensible regulation, says Daniel Sarewitz.

Seven Days

Seven days: 22–28 August 2014 ▶

The week in science: Botched launch for Europe’s GPS satellites; Iran’s science minister dismissed; and marmosets judged best model for MERS virus.

NEWS IN FOCUS

World struggles to stop Ebola ▶

Greater international assistance is needed to quell the epidemic, say health officials.

Ecotourism rise hits whales ▶

Desire to observe whales and dolphins up close is affecting animals’ behaviour.

Himalayan plants seek cooler climes ▶

Race is on to record mountain biodiversity before it is lost.

Feature

Scientific advice: Crisis counsellors ▶

Volcanic eruptions, oil spills and bacterial outbreaks all land in the laps of government science advisers, and put them to the test.

COMMENT

Earth systems: Model human adaptation to climate change ▶

We can no longer ignore feedbacks between global warming and how people respond, say Paul I. Palmer and Matthew J. Smith.

Books and Arts

Astrobiology: Cosmic prestige ▶

Mario Livio welcomes a lucid description of attempts to evaluate how special humans are.

Books in brief ▶

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks.

Fiction: Transgressive treats ▶

Paul L. McEuen relishes Margaret Atwood's acerbic tales of sex, hallucinations and death by stromatolite.

Correspondence

Water recycling: Uphold China's plan for cleaning water Yanhong Tang, Xin Miao | Intensive farming: When less means more on dairy farms Mark C. Eisler, Michael R. F. Lee, Graeme B. Martin | Fossil descriptions: Private collections of fossils are a plus Oliver W. M. Rauhut, Adriana López-Arbarello, Gert Wörheide | Misconduct: Japan to learn from biomedical cases Tetsuya Tanimoto, Masahiro Kami, Kenji Shibuya

Obituary

Peter Marler (1928–2014) ▶

Pioneering interpreter of animal language.

RESEARCH

Latest Online

Sensory systems: Sound processing takes motor control ▶

Uri Livneh, Anthony Zador

Evolutionary developmental biology: Dynasty of the plastic fish ▶

John Hutchinson

Sustainable Development: The promise and perils of roads ▶

Stephen G. Perz

Neuroscience: Shedding light on a change of mind ▶

Tomonori Takeuchi, Richard G. M. Morris

Developmental plasticity and the origin of tetrapods ▶

Emily M. Standen, Trina Y. Du, Hans C. E. Larsson

The most primitive extant bony fish, Polypterus, exhibits adaptive plasticity for life on land when raised on land rather than in water, suggesting that environmentally induced phenotypic plasticity might have facilitated the macroevolutionary transition to life on land.

A synaptic and circuit basis for corollary discharge in the auditory cortex ▶

David M. Schneider, Anders Nelson, Richard Mooney

Here auditory cortex excitatory neurons are shown to decrease their activity during locomotion, grooming and vocalization, and this decrease was paralleled by increased activity in inhibitory interneurons; these findings provide a circuit basis for how self-motion and external sensory signals can be integrated to potentially facilitate hearing.

OSCA1 mediates osmotic-stress-evoked Ca²⁺ increases vital for osmosensing in Arabidopsis ▶

Fang Yuan, Huimin Yang, Yan Xue et al.

Osmotic stress is known to induce a transient increase in cytoplasmic Ca2+ concentration [Ca2+]_i in plants, and now OSCA1 is identified as a long-sought Ca2+ channel that mediates [Ca2+]_i increases—mutants lacking OSCA1 function have impaired osmotic Ca2+ signalling in guard cells and root cells, and reduced transpiration regulation and root growth under osmotic stress.

HSP70 sequestration by free α-globin promotes ineffective erythropoiesis in β-thalassaemia ▶

Jean-Benoît Arlet, Jean-Antoine Ribeil, Flavia Guillem et al.

In human β-thalassaemiaerythroblasts, HSP70 is sequestered in the cytoplasm by the excess of free α-globin chains and can no longer protect the master transcriptional factor of erythropoiesis GATA-1 from caspase-3 cleavage; transduction of a nuclear-targeted HSP70 or a caspase-3 uncleavable GATA-1 mutant restored maturation of erythropoiesis.

Tumour-infiltrating Gr-1⁺ myeloid cells antagonize senescence in cancer ▶

Diletta Di Mitri, Alberto Toso, Jing Jing Chen et al.

Senescence in cancer can be antagonized by a subset of immune cells acting in a non-cell-autonomous manner.

Synergistic blockade of mitotic exit by two chemical inhibitors of the APC/C ▶

Katharine L. Sackton, Nevena Dimova, Xing Zeng et al.

Simultaneous disruption of two different protein–protein interactions within the (APC/C–Cdc20)–substrate complex can synergistically inhibit APC/C-dependent proteolysis and mitotic exit.

PLETHORA gradient formation mechanism separates auxin responses ▶

Ari Pekka Mähönen, Kirsten ten Tusscher, Riccardo Siligato et al.

Through a combination of experimental and computational approaches, the interplay between the plant hormone auxin and the auxin-induced PLETHORA transcription factors is shown to control zonation and gravity-prompted growth movements in plants.

Nodal signalling determines biradial asymmetry in Hydra ▶

Hiroshi Watanabe, Heiko A. Schmidt, Anne Kuhn et al.

A Nodal-related gene is uncovered in Hydra and is involved in setting up the body axis, and a β-Catenin–Nodal–Pitx signalling cassette is shown to have existed before the divergence of cnidarians, including Hydra, and bilaterians.

Bidirectional switch of the valence associated with a hippocampal contextual memory engram ▶

Roger L. Redondo, Joshua Kim, Autumn L. Arons et al.

An optogenetic approach in mice was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying memory valence association; dentate gyrus, but not amygdala, memory engram cells exhibit plasticity in valence associations, suggesting that emotional memory associations can be changed at the circuit level.

Articles and Letters

AhR sensing of bacterial pigments regulates antibacterial defence ▶

Pedro Moura-Alves, Kellen Faé, Erica Houthuys et al.

The mammalian aryl hydrocarbon receptor (known to sense environmental pollutants) is shown to also have a role as a pattern recognition receptor in sensing bacterial virulence factors, resulting in an antibacterial response and activation of innate and natural defences.

Diversity and dynamics of the Drosophila transcriptome OPEN ▶

James B. Brown, Nathan Boley, Robert Eisman et al.

A large-scale transcriptome analysis in Drosophila melanogaster, across tissues, cell types and conditions, provides insights into global patterns and diversity of transcription initiation, splicing, polyadenylation and non-coding RNA expression.

Regulatory analysis of the C. elegans genome with spatiotemporal resolution OPEN ▶

Carlos L. Araya, Trupti Kawli, Anshul Kundaje et al.

Chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing across multiple stages of Caenorhabditis elegans development reveals the genomic distribution of binding sites for 92 transcription factors and regulatory proteins, and integration of these and cellular-resolution expression data produce a spatiotemporally resolved metazoan transcription factor binding map allowing exploration into the properties of developmental regulatory circuits.

A primitive fish from the Cambrian of North America ▶

Simon Conway Morris, Jean-Bernard Caron

Fossils of Metaspriggina, one of the earliest known and most primitive fishes, are described, with the structure of the gills shown to presage that of jawed vertebrates in many ways.

Neural constraints on learning ▶

Patrick T. Sadtler, Kristin M. Quick, Matthew D. Golub et al.

During learning, the new patterns of neural population activity that develop are constrained by the existing network structure so that certain patterns can be generated more readily than others.

Processing properties of ON and OFF pathways for Drosophila motion detection ▶

Rudy Behnia, Damon A. Clark, Adam G. Carter et al.

Four medulla neurons implement two critical processing steps to incoming signals in Drosophila motion detection.

miR-34a blocks osteoporosis and bone metastasis by inhibiting osteoclastogenesis and Tgif2 ▶

Jing Y. Krzeszinski, Wei Wei, HoangDinh Huynh et al.

A microRNA, miR-34a, is a novel and critical suppressor of osteoclastogenesis, bone resorption and the bone metastatic niche.

The long-term maintenance of a resistance polymorphism through diffuse interactions ▶

Talia L. Karasov, Joel M. Kniskern, Liping Gao et al.

Long-term plant resistance polymorphism does not require obligate association but instead is maintained in the face of diffuse ecological interactions.

The Get1/2 transmembrane complex is an endoplasmic-reticulum membrane protein insertase ▶

Fei Wang, Charlene Chan, Nicholas R. Weir et al.

The receptor for the cytoplasmic factor that targets tail-anchored proteins to the endoplasmic reticulum is an enzyme that enables a facilitated insertion path into the lipid bilayer.

Comparative analysis of the transcriptome across distant species OPEN ▶

Mark B. Gerstein, Joel Rozowsky, Koon-Kiu Yan et al.

Uniform processing and detailed annotation of human, worm and fly RNA-sequencing data reveal ancient, conserved features of the transcriptome, shared co-expression modules (many enriched in developmental genes), matched expression patterns across development and similar extent of non-canonical, non-coding transcription; furthermore, the data are used to create a single, universal model to predict gene-expression levels for all three organisms from chromatin features at the promoter.

Comparative analysis of metazoan chromatin organization OPEN ▶

Joshua W. K. Ho, Youngsook L. Jung, Tao Liu et al.

A large collection of new modENCODE and ENCODE genome-wide chromatin data sets from cell lines and developmental stages in worm, fly and human are analysed; this reveals many conserved features of chromatin organization among the three organisms, as well as notable differences in the composition and locations of repressive chromatin.

Comparative analysis of regulatory information and circuits across distant species OPEN ▶

Alan P. Boyle, Carlos L. Araya, Cathleen Brdlik et al.

A map of genome-wide binding locations of 165 human, 93 worm and 52 fly transcription-regulatory factors (almost 50% presented for the first time) from diverse cell types, developmental stages, or conditions reveals that gene-regulatory properties previously observed for individual factors may be general principles of metazoan regulation that are well preserved.

News & Views

Genomics: Hiding in plain sight ▶

Felix Muerdter, Alexander Stark

Immunology: Mammalian watchdog targets bacteria ▶

Parag Kundu, Sven Pettersson

Behavioural ecology: Love thy neighbour ▶

Ben C. Sheldon, Marc Mangel

50 & 100 Years Ago ▶

Sensory systems: Sound processing takes motor control ▶

Uri Livneh, Anthony Zador

Evolutionary developmental biology: Dynasty of the plastic fish ▶

John Hutchinson

Sustainable Development: The promise and perils of roads ▶

Stephen G. Perz

Neuroscience: Shedding light on a change of mind ▶

Tomonori Takeuchi, Richard G. M. Morris

Research Highlights

Marine ecology: Sick reefs repel young coral | Biotechnology: Yeast turned into opioid-makers | Microbiology: Liquid layer for lung defence | Neuroscience: Light signals boost stroke recovery | Virology: Polio killed the vaccinated | Environmental microbiology: Algal boom and bust tracked | Plant sciences: Plants drink mineral water | The cost of misconduct

NEWS & COMMENT

People power | Scientific advice: Crisis counsellors | Himalayan plants seek cooler climes | Astrobiology: Cosmic prestige | Books in brief | Intensive farming: When less means more on dairy farms | Fossil descriptions: Private collections of fossils are a plus | Misconduct: Japan to learn from biomedical cases | Peter Marler (1928–2014) | Allow use of electronic cigarettes to assess risk | World struggles to stop Ebola | Ecotourism rise hits whales

More Biological Sciences ▶

RESEARCH

Latest Online

Sensory systems: Sound processing takes motor control ▶

Uri Livneh, Anthony Zador

HSP70 sequestration by free α-globin promotes ineffective erythropoiesis in β-thalassaemia ▶

Jean-Benoît Arlet, Jean-Antoine Ribeil, Flavia Guillem et al.

In human β-thalassaemiaerythroblasts, HSP70 is sequestered in the cytoplasm by the excess of free α-globin chains and can no longer protect the master transcriptional factor of erythropoiesis GATA-1 from caspase-3 cleavage; transduction of a nuclear-targeted HSP70 or a caspase-3 uncleavable GATA-1 mutant restored maturation of erythropoiesis.

Tumour-infiltrating Gr-1⁺ myeloid cells antagonize senescence in cancer ▶

Diletta Di Mitri, Alberto Toso, Jing Jing Chen et al.

Senescence in cancer can be antagonized by a subset of immune cells acting in a non-cell-autonomous manner.

Articles and Letters

miR-34a blocks osteoporosis and bone metastasis by inhibiting osteoclastogenesis and Tgif2 ▶

Jing Y. Krzeszinski, Wei Wei, HoangDinh Huynh et al.

A microRNA, miR-34a, is a novel and critical suppressor of osteoclastogenesis, bone resorption and the bone metastatic niche.

News & Views

Sensory systems: Sound processing takes motor control ▶

Uri Livneh, Anthony Zador

Research Highlights

Microbiology: Liquid layer for lung defence | Neuroscience: Light signals boost stroke recovery | Virology: Polio killed the vaccinated

NEWS & COMMENT

Intensive farming: When less means more on dairy farms | Allow use of electronic cigarettes to assess risk

More Health Sciences ▶

RESEARCH

Latest Online

A massive galaxy in its core formation phase three billion years after the Big Bang ▶

Erica Nelson, Pieter van Dokkum, Marijn Franx et al.

Hubble Space Telescope, Keck telescope and Spitzer satellite data reveal the formation of the dense stellar core of a massive galaxy occurring three billion years after the Big Bang.

Probing excitonic dark states in single-layer tungsten disulphide ▶

Ziliang Ye, Ting Cao, Kevin O’Brien et al.

A series of long-lived excitons in a monolayer of tungsten disulphide are found to have strong binding energy and an energy dependence on orbital momentum that significantly deviates from conventional, three-dimensional, behaviour.

Articles and Letters

Neutrinos from the primary proton–proton fusion process in the Sun ▶

Spectral observations of the low-energy neutrinos produced by proton–proton fusion in the Sun demonstrate that about 99 per cent of the Sun’s power is generated by this process.

Cobalt-56 γ-ray emission lines from the type Ia supernova 2014J ▶

E. Churazov, R. Sunyaev, J. Isern et al.

The detection of 56Co γ-ray emission from the supernova 2014J proves that type Ia supernovae result from a thermonuclear explosion of a carbon–oxygen white dwarf or of a pair of merging white dwarfs.

Quantum imaging with undetected photons ▶

Gabriela Barreto Lemos, Victoria Borish, Garrett D. Cole et al.

A new quantum imaging experiment demonstrates images made with light that does not encounter the object; one of a pair of photons created at two crystals illuminates the object but is never detected, and the other photon, which is in a joint quantum state with the first and does not interact with the object, forms an image of the object on a camera.

Carbon–carbon bond cleavage and rearrangement of benzene by a trinuclear titanium hydride ▶

Shaowei Hu, Takanori Shima, Zhaomin Hou

A trinuclear titanium polyhydride complex can be used to cleave carbon–carbon bonds in benzene and transform the benzene ring, suggesting that multinuclear titanium hydrides could be used to activate aromatic molecules.

News & Views

Astrophysics: Supernova seen through γ-ray eyes ▶

Robert P. Kirshner

Neutrino physics: What makes the Sun shine ▶

Wick Haxton

Applied physics: Hybrid sensors ring the changes ▶

Jörg Wrachtrup, Amit Finkler

50 & 100 Years Ago ▶

Research Highlights

Astronomy: Collision history written in rock

NEWS & COMMENT

Astrobiology: Cosmic prestige | Books in brief

More Physical Sciences ▶

RESEARCH

Latest Online

A major advance of tropical Andean glaciers during the Antarctic cold reversal ▶

V. Jomelli, V. Favier, M. Vuille et al.

A moraine chronology determined by surface exposure dating shows that glaciers in the northern tropical Andes expanded to a larger extent during the Antarctic cold reversal (14,500 to 12,900 years ago) than during the Younger Dryas stadial (12,800 to 11,500 years ago), contrary to previous studies; as a result, previous chronologies and climate interpretations from tropical glaciers may need to be revisited.

A global strategy for road building ▶

William F. Laurance, Gopalasamy Reuben Clements, Sean Sloan et al.

A global zoning scheme is proposed to limit the environmental costs of road building while maximizing its benefits for human development, by discriminating among areas where road building would have high environmental costs but relatively low agricultural advantage, areas where strategic road improvements could promote agricultural production with relatively modest environmental costs, and ‘conflict areas’ where road building may have large agricultural benefits but also high environmental costs.

Articles and Letters

Contrasting responses of mean and extreme snowfall to climate change ▶

Paul A. O’Gorman

In many regions, a warming climate may lead to large decreases in annual snowfall while having a much weaker effect on the intensities of the heaviest snowfall events — those that can be most disruptive to urban infrastructure.

Research Highlights

Limnology: Earth's lakes added up | Environmental microbiology: Algal boom and bust tracked

NEWS & COMMENT

Scientific advice: Crisis counsellors | Earth systems: Model human adaptation to climate change | Himalayan plants seek cooler climes | Intensive farming: When less means more on dairy farms

More Earth & Environmental Sciences ▶

Bold moves ▶

People seeking non-academic jobs may need to try something unexpected to be noticed, says Peter Fiske.

Donation expectations ▶

Growth in charitable giving to US higher education falls.

Mentoring programme ▶

Virtual network matches mentors with students worldwide.

Lies have consequences ▶

Falsehoods on CVs can jeopardize a job offer.

Careers related news & comment

Diplomatic service | Seven days: 22–28 August 2014 | Intensive farming: When less means more on dairy farms Mark C. Eisler, Michael R. F. Lee, Graeme B. Martin | Misconduct: Japan to learn from biomedical cases Tetsuya Tanimoto, Masahiro Kami, Kenji Shibuya

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Cellular / Molecular Biology of the B-MYB Transcription Factor

King's College London 

Metabolic modeller (5064)

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland 

University Assistant (prae doc) at the Department of Biological Chemistry

University of Vienna (Universitaet Wien) 

Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Organic Chemistry

University of Oxford 

Development of Cancer Medicines

27.11.14 London, UK