Editorials
Pushing the boundaries of current computing technologies will show the way to new ones.
doi: 10.1038/512113b
Infants and young people are being traumatized by armed conflict in their countries. Their resulting mental illnesses must be addressed, for the good of both the individuals and their society.
doi: 10.1038/512113a
News
California’s current water crisis offers a preview of what climate change will bring.
doi: 10.1038/512121a
European project evaluates risks to delicate ecosystems.
doi: 10.1038/512122a
US government programme will examine 10,000 adolescents to document effects on developing brains.
doi: 10.1038/512123a
Researchers warn that a change of mosquito host could accelerate spread of chikungunya across the Americas.
doi: 10.1038/512124a
News Features
Giant academic social networks have taken off to a degree that no one expected even a few years ago. A Nature survey explores why.
doi: 10.1038/512126a
News & Views
The identification of neural subcircuits used by female fruit flies to make a choice about whether to copulate with a potential mate provides a template for understanding how the brain integrates complex information to reach decisions.
doi: 10.1038/512138a
Analysis of a kilometre-sized, near-Earth asteroid shows that forces weaker than the weight of a penny can keep it from falling apart. This has implications for understanding the evolution of the Solar System. See Letter p.174
doi: 10.1038/512139a
Ageing is accompanied by deterioration in the haematopoietic stem cells that are responsible for regenerating the blood system. Cellular stress in the aged stem cells could be a cause of this decline. See Letter p.198
doi: 10.1038/nature13652
The experimental realization of amorphous pure metals sets the stage for studies of the fundamental processes of glass formation, and suggests that amorphous structures are the most ubiquitous forms of condensed matter. See Letter P.177
doi: 10.1038/nature13653
Single-cell DNA sequencing of two breast-cancer types has shown extensive mutational variation in individual tumours, confirming that generation of genetic diversity may be inherent in how tumours evolve. See Article p.155
doi: 10.1038/nature13650
A fully automated optics system that corrects atmospheric blurring of celestial objects has imaged 715 star systems thought to harbour planets, completing each observation in less time than it takes to read this article.
doi: 10.1038/512144a
The crystal structure of the COP9 signalosome, a large protein complex that regulates intracellular protein degradation, reveals how the complex achieves exquisite specificity for its substrates. See Article p.161
doi: 10.1038/nature13644
Review
To evaluate the promise of potential computing technologies, this review examines a wide range of fundamental limits, such as to performance, power consumption, size and cost, from the device level to the system level.
doi: 10.1038/nature13570
Articles
To investigate genomic diversity within tumours, a new type of whole-genome and exome single cell sequencing has been developed using G2/M nuclei; the technique was used to sequence single nuclei from an oestrogen-positive breast cancer and a triple-negative ductal carcinoma—aneuploidy rearrangements emerged as early events in tumour formation and then point mutations evolved gradually over time.
doi: 10.1038/nature13600
The COP9 signalosome (CSN) complex regulates cullin–RING E3 ubiquitin ligases—the largest class of ubiquitin ligase enzymes, which are involved in a multitude of regulatory processes; here, the crystal structure of the entire human CSN holoenzyme is presented.
doi: 10.1038/nature13566
The three-dimensional structure of intact human γ-secretase complex at 4.5 Å resolution is revealed by cryo-electron-microscopy single-particle analysis; the complex comprises a horseshoe-shaped transmembrane domain containing 19 transmembrane segments, and a large extracellular domain from nicastrin, which sits immediately above the hollow space formed by the horseshoe.
doi: 10.1038/nature13567
Letters
The contribution of solar-wind ions exchanging electrons with helium and hydrogen near the Sun is shown to be only about 40 per cent of the 1/4-keV X-ray flux observed in the Galactic plane; this supports the existence of a local ‘hot bubble’ filled with X-ray-emitting gas, accounting for the rest of the flux.
doi: 10.1038/nature13525
Space missions and ground-based observations have shown that some asteroids are loose collections of rubble rather than solid bodies. The physical behaviour of such ‘rubble-pile’ asteroids has been traditionally described using only gravitational and frictional forces within a granular material. Cohesive forces in the form of small van der Waals forces between constituent grains have recently been predicted to be important for small rubble piles (ten kilometres across or less), and could potentially explain fast rotation rates in the small-asteroid population. The strongest evidence so far has come from an analysis of the rotational breakup of the main-belt comet P/2013 R3 (ref. 7), although that was indirect and poorly constrained by observations. Here we report that the kilometre-sized asteroid (29075) 1950 DA (ref. 8) is a rubble pile that is rotating faster than is allowed by gravity and friction. We find that cohesive forces are required to prevent surface mass shedding and structural failure, and that the strengths of the forces are comparable to, though somewhat less than, the forces found between the grains of lunar regolith.
doi: 10.1038/nature13632
Metallic liquids of single elements have been successfully vitrified to their glassy states by achieving an ultrafast quenching rate in a new experimental design, of which the process has been monitored and studied by a combination of in situ transmission electron microscopy and atoms-to-continuum computer modelling.
doi: 10.1038/nature13617
Analysis of the Moon's topography reveals that when its largest basins are removed, the lunar shape is consistent with processes controlled by early Earth tides, and implies a reorientation of the Moon's principal shape axes.
doi: 10.1038/nature13639
Many factors have been proposed as contributors to risk of alcohol abuse, but quantifying their influence has been difficult; here a longitudinal study of a large sample of adolescents and machine learning are used to generate models of predictors of current and future alcohol abuse, assessing the relative contribution of many factors, including life history, individual personality differences, brain structure and genotype.
doi: 10.1038/nature13402
An association mapping study of type-2-diabetes-related quantitative traits in the Greenlandic population identified a common variant in TBC1D4 that increases plasma glucose levels and serum insulin levels after an oral glucose load and type 2 diabetes risk, with effect sizes several times larger than any previous findings of large-scale genome-wide association studies for these traits.
doi: 10.1038/nature13425
Admixture with other hominin species helped humans to adapt to high-altitude environments; the EPAS1 gene in Tibetan individuals has an unusual haplotype structure that probably resulted from introgression of DNA from Denisovan or Denisovan-related individuals into humans, and this haplotype is only found in Denisovans and Tibetans, and at low frequency among Han Chinese.
doi: 10.1038/nature13408
Haematopoietic stem cell (HSC) function is known to degrade with age; here, replication stress is shown to be a potent driver of the functional decline of HSCs during physiological ageing in mice due to decreased expression of mini-chromosome maintenance helicase components and reduced activity of the DNA replication machinery.
doi: 10.1038/nature13619
By characterizing a very large number of might-have-been evolutionary trajectories starting from a resurrected ancestral protein, the authors show that the evolution of an essential modern protein was contingent on extremely unlikely historical mutations.
doi: 10.1038/nature13410
This study identifies the DENR–MCT-1 complex as the first factors in animals specific for translation re-initiation downstream of upstream Open Reading Frames (uORFs).
doi: 10.1038/nature13401
A nucleosome-spacing mechanism for human ATP-dependent chromatin assembly and remodelling factor (ACF).
doi: 10.1038/nature13380
Single-particle electron microscopy and hydrogen–deuterium exchange mass spectrometry are used to characterize the structure and dynamics of a G-protein-coupled receptor–arrestin complex.
doi: 10.1038/nature13430