| | Career guide: Asia-Pacific
Nic Fleming | Relocating science
Countries are spending more than ever on research and development, but the fields they fund vary depending on national priorities. And it is not just the research reputation that matters when choosing whether to move abroad — cost of living and quality-of-life are factors too. | China
As China continues to increase its investment in research, it is offering opportunities that can be difficult to find elsewhere.
Rebecca Kanthor | Japan
The government is stepping up efforts to attract international scientists, as the country invests record sums in research.
Smriti Mallapaty | Australia
Scientists from across the world are attracted to the country, which competes internationally by focusing on its strengths.
Karen McGhee | South Korea
A big investor in research and development, South Korea is attracting top scientists in the hope of boosting basic science.
Mark Zastrow | India
Although not a major scientific player, India hopes that attracting foreign researchers will help it achieve its ambitions.
T.V. Padma | Singapore
The government is spending more than ever before on research and development, especially on work that is likely to produce returns.
Tom Benner | New Zealand
A small science community offers opportunities in a dramatic landscape, but can also limit career progression.
Annabel McGilvray | | | | |
| | | Brief Communications Arising | | | | Early onset of industrial-era warming across the oceans and continents
Reconstructions of ocean and land temperatures since ad 1500 indicate that sustained, industrial-era warming of land areas in the Northern Hemisphere and tropical oceans began earlier than previously thought, around the mid-nineteenth century.
Nerilie J. Abram, Helen V. McGregor, Jessica E. Tierney et al. | Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East
Analysis of DNA from ancient individuals of the Near East documents the extreme substructure among the populations which transitioned to farming, a structure that was maintained throughout the transition from hunter–gatherer to farmer but that broke down over the next five thousand years.
Iosif Lazaridis, Dani Nadel, Gary Rollefson et al. | Uncovering Earth’s virome
An integrated computational approach that explores the viral content of more than 3,000 metagenomic samples collected globally highlights the existing global viral diversity, increases the known number of viral genes by an order of magnitude, and provides detailed insights into viral distribution across diverse ecosystems and into virus–host interactions.
David Paez-Espino, Emiley A. Eloe-Fadrosh, Georgios A. Pavlopoulos et al. | Molecular basis of APC/C regulation by the spindle assembly checkpoint
A high-resolution structure of a complex between the anaphase-promoting complex (APC/C) and the mitotic checkpoint complex (MCC) reveals how MCC interacts with and represses APC/C by obstructing substrate recognition and suppressing E3 ligase activity.
Claudio Alfieri, Leifu Chang, Ziguo Zhang et al. | | Extending the lifetime of a quantum bit with error correction in superconducting circuits
A quantum-error-correction system is demonstrated in which natural errors due to energy loss are suppressed by encoding a logical state as a superposition of Schrödinger-cat states, which results in the system reaching the ‘break-even’ point, at which the lifetime of a qubit exceeds the lifetime of the constituents of the system.
Nissim Ofek, Andrei Petrenko, Reinier Heeres et al. | Molecular modifiers reveal a mechanism of pathological crystal growth inhibition
Like citrate, the molecule hydroxycitrate is shown to inhibit growth of the crystal that is the principal component of kidney stones, suggesting that hydroxycitrate could be another treatment for kidney stone disease.
Jihae Chung, Ignacio Granja, Michael G. Taylor et al. | An integrated design and fabrication strategy for entirely soft, autonomous robots
An untethered, entirely soft robot is designed to operate autonomously by combining microfluidic logic and hydrogen peroxide as an on-board fuel supply.
Michael Wehner, Ryan L. Truby, Daniel J. Fitzgerald et al. | Biodiversity at multiple trophic levels is needed for ecosystem multifunctionality
Both a high number of species and abundance in multiple trophic levels are required for ecosystems to continue to provide the services humans require of them.
Santiago Soliveres, Fons van der Plas, Peter Manning et al. | The prion protein is an agonistic ligand of the G protein-coupled receptor Adgrg6
The cellular prion protein PrPC promotes peripheral myelin homeostasis by acting on a G protein-coupled receptor to increase levels of cyclic AMP in Schwann cells.
Alexander Küffer, Asvin K. K. Lakkaraju, Amit Mogha et al. | DWARF14 is a non-canonical hormone receptor for strigolactone
Structural, biochemical, mass spectrometry and genetic analyses define Arabidopsis thaliana AtD14 as a non-canonical hormone receptor for strigolactone, which hydrolyses strigolactone into a covalently linked intermediate molecule and undergoes an open-to-closed state transition for interaction with D3 to trigger strigolactone signalling.
Ruifeng Yao, Zhenhua Ming, Liming Yan et al. | Vaccine protection against Zika virus from Brazil
The authors test several candidate vaccines for Zika virus in mouse models and show that single-shot DNA vaccines and inactivated virus vaccines provide complete protection against Zika virus isolates from Brazil and Puerto Rico.
Rafael A. Larocca, Peter Abbink, Jean Pierre S. Peron et al. | A terrestrial planet candidate in a temperate orbit around Proxima Centauri
A small planet of at least 1.3 Earth masses is orbiting Proxima Centauri with a period of about 11.2 days, with the potential for liquid water on its surface.
Guillem Anglada-Escudé, Pedro J. Amado, John Barnes et al. | The TRPM2 ion channel is required for sensitivity to warmth
The neuronal mechanism for the detection of non-painful warm stimuli has remained unclear; mammalian TRPM2 ion channel is shown to be required for warmth detection in the non-noxious range of 33–38 °C, and surprisingly to mediate responses to warmth in the autonomic nervous system.
Chun-Hsiang Tan, Peter A. McNaughton | Pancreatic stellate cells support tumour metabolism through autophagic alanine secretion
Pancreatic adenocarcinoma cells drive autophagy in tumour microenvironment-associated stellate cells, which release alanine that is used by the cancer cells as a carbon source for a variety of metabolic processes in an otherwise nutrient-poor environment.
Cristovão M. Sousa, Douglas E. Biancur, Xiaoxu Wang et al. | Diverse activation pathways in class A GPCRs converge near the G-protein-coupling region
A highly conserved rearrangement of residue contacts functions as a common step in the activation pathways of diverse G-protein-coupled receptors.
A. J. Venkatakrishnan, Xavier Deupi, Guillaume Lebon et al. | | | | |
