Federal restrictions on the use of drones by US researchers threaten an increasingly productive tool. The scientific community must speak out while there is a chance to change matters.
doi: 10.1038/512231a
The NIH is right to investigate whether bias makes grant awards unfair.
doi: 10.1038/512231b
Federal rules ground scientists using remotely piloted aircraft at private universities.
doi: 10.1038/512239a
Climate change and human development are jeopardizing the plateau’s fragile environment.
doi: 10.1038/512240a
Carbon-dating improvements show that Neanderthals disappeared from Europe much earlier than thought.
doi: 10.1038/512242a
US agency will assess whether grant reviewers are biased against minority applicants.
doi: 10.1038/512243a
南極の分厚い氷の下、800 mの所にある隠れた湖から採取された試料には、多数の微生物と、未知の広大な生態系の手がかりが含まれている。
doi: 10.1038/512244a
南極氷床下の深い所にある氷底湖に生息している微生物についての初めての報告から、複雑な双方向性の代謝過程の一部が明らかになった。こうした代謝過程がこの微生物群集を維持しているのである。
doi: 10.1038/512256a
造血幹細胞の少なくとも一部は、背側大動脈と呼ばれる胚の血管に由来する。血管に隣接する体節と呼ばれる組織がこの過程に細胞やシグナルを提供していることが分かってきた。
doi: 10.1038/nature13740
2014年にチリ沖で起こった地震は、大地震が予測されていた地域で発生した。今回、2つの研究によって、大地震に先立って、関連するプレート境界断層で数か月にわたる前震とスロースリップが起こっていたことが分かった。
doi: 10.1038/nature13655
改良された放射性炭素年代測定技術を使って、ロシアからスペインに至る考古遺跡から出土した標本が再検討され、ネアンデルタール人がヨーロッパから最終的に消滅した時期が再決定された。
doi: 10.1038/512260a
磁気光学トラップと呼ばれる装置は、原子の冷却や閉じ込めにずっと使われてきたが、分子についてはこれまで適用されたことがなかった。分子の閉じ込めが今回新たに達成されたことで、極低温分子の物理的性質に関する多数の研究やその応用が可能となりそうだ。
doi: 10.1038/512261a
複数の人種が混じり合ったヒト個体群の解析が新しい遺伝学的方法を用いて行われ、オーストロネシア語を話す人々の歴史的移動と混合に関して示されている学術的な証拠に対して、さらなる裏付けが得られた。
doi: 10.1038/512262a
Programmed −1 ribosomal frameshifting (−1 PRF) is a process by which a signal in a messenger RNA causes a translating ribosome to shift by one nucleotide, thus changing the reading frame; here −1 PRF in the mRNA for the co-receptor for HIV-1, CCR5, is stimulated by two microRNAs and leads to degradation of the transcript by nonsense-mediated decay and at least one other decay pathway.
doi: 10.1038/nature13429
GABAA receptors are the principal mediators of rapid inhibitor synaptic transmission in the brain, and a decline in GABAA signalling leads to diseases including epilepsy, insomnia, anxiety and autism; here, the first X-ray crystal structure of a human GABAA receptor, the human β3 homopentamer, reveals structural features unique for this receptor class and uncovers the locations of key disease-causing mutations.
doi: 10.1038/nature13293
The first X-ray crystal structure of the mouse serotonin 5-HT3 receptor, a pentameric ligand-gated ion channel, is similar to those of other Cys-loop receptors — though here electron density for part of the cytoplasmic domain, which is important for trafficking, synaptic localization, and modulation by cytoplasmic proteins, but not visible in previous structures, is also described.
doi: 10.1038/nature13552
A model in which the stellar wind of the fast-moving red supergiant Betelgeuse is photoionized by radiation from external sources can explain the dense, almost static shell recently discovered around the star, and predicts both that debris from Betelgeuse’s eventual supernova explosion will violently collide with the shell and that other red supergiants should have similar, but much more massive, shells.
doi: 10.1038/nature13522
Magneto-optical trapping is the standard method for laser cooling and confinement of atomic gases but now this technique has been demonstrated for the diatomic molecule strontium monofluoride, leading to the lowest temperature yet achieved by cooling a molecular gas.
doi: 10.1038/nature13634
The volume of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheet controlled abrupt millennial-scale climate changes during the last glacial.
doi: 10.1038/nature13592
The 2014 Iquique event was not the earthquake that had been expected to fill the regional seismic gap; given that significant sections of the northern Chile subduction zone have not ruptured in almost 150 years, it is likely that future megathrust earthquakes will occur south and potentially north of the 2014 Iquique sequence.
doi: 10.1038/nature13677
A long foreshock series unlocked the South American plate boundary until eventually initiating the M 8.1 Iquique, Chile, earthquake.
doi: 10.1038/nature13681
Differences in function and dietary ecology between Morganucodon and Kuehneotherium show that lineage splitting during the earliest stages of mammalian evolution was associated with ecomorphological specialization and niche partitioning.
doi: 10.1038/nature13622
Accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating is used to construct a chronology of Neanderthal disappearance, showing that Neanderthals overlapped with anatomically modern humans for between about 2,000 and 5,000 years.
doi: 10.1038/nature13621
There has been active debate over microbial life in Antarctic subglacial lakes owing to a paucity of direct observations from beneath the ice sheet and concerns about contamination in the samples that do exist; here the authors present the first geomicrobiological description of pristine water and surficial sediments from Subglacial Lake Whillans, and show that the lake water contains a diverse microbial community, many members of which are closely related to chemolithoautotrophic bacteria and archaea.
doi: 10.1038/nature13667
A new somite compartment, called the endotome, that contributes to the formation of the embryonic dorsal aorta by providing endothelial progenitors is identified here; endotome-derived endothelial progenitors, whose formation is regulated by the activity of the meox1 gene, induce haematopoietic stem cell formation upon colonization of the nascent dorsal aorta.
doi: 10.1038/nature13678
Notch signalling has a key role in the generation of haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) during vertebrate development; here two adhesion molecules, Jam1a and Jam2a, are shown to be essential for the contact between precursors of HSCs and the somite during embryonic migration, and the Jam1a–Jam2a interaction is shown to be needed to transmit the Notch signal and produce HSCs.
doi: 10.1038/nature13623
The mutant IDH1 protein, which is expressed in a large fraction of human gliomas, is shown to be immunogenic; mutant-specific immune responses can be detected in patients with IDH1 mutated gliomas and generated in mice and are shown to treat established IDH1 mutant tumours in a syngeneic MHC humanized mouse model in a CD4 T-cell-dependent manner.
doi: 10.1038/nature13387
To investigate the mechanism of frameshifting during messenger RNA translation, a technique was developed to monitor translation of single molecules in real time using Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET); ribosomes were revealed to pause tenfold longer than usual during elongation at the frameshifting sites.
doi: 10.1038/nature13428
This study solved structures of the glutamate-gated chloride channel (GluCl), a Cys-loop receptor from C. elegant, in an apo, closed state and in a lipid-bound state — comparison of these structures with a previously published structure of GluCl in an ivermectin-bound state reveals what conformational changes probably occur as this membrane protein transitions from the closed/resting state towards an open/activated state.
doi: 10.1038/nature13669
