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Energy: Consider the global impacts of oil pipelines
Debates over oil-sands infrastructure obscure a broken policy process that overlooks broad climate, energy and environment issues, warn Wendy J. Palen and colleagues.
Physics: Bell’s theorem still reverberates
Fifty years ago, John Bell made metaphysics testable, but quantum scientists still dispute the implications. Howard Wiseman proposes a way forward.
Bibliometrics: The citation game
Jonathan Adams takes the measure of the uses and misuses of scholarly impact.
Review of Beyond Bibliometrics: Harnessing Multidimensional Indicators of Scholarly Impact
Eds Blaise Cronin & Cassidy R. Sugimoto
Space science: Lunar star
Roger D. Launius is perplexed by a biography of Neil Armstrong that profiles the missions, not the man.
Review of Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight
Jay Barbree
Forum
Nuclear-weapons dismantlement: Identifying a hidden warhead
John Finney &
James M. Acton
See also
Article by Glaser et al.
Antibiotic resistance: To the rescue of old drugs
Djalal Meziane-Cherif &
Patrice Courvalin
See also
Article by King et al.
Fundamental constants: A cool way to measure big G
Stephan Schlamminger
See also
Letter by Rosi et al.
Structural biology: Wobble puts RNA on target
Oscar Vargas-Rodriguez &
Karin Musier-Forsyth
See also
Article by Naganuma et al.
Applied physics: Trawling for complements
J. Marty Gregg &
Amit Kumar
Structural biology: Enzyme assembly line pictured
Peter F. Leadlay
See also
Article by Dutta et al.
See alsoReview
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An overview of N-heterocyclic carbenes
Matthew N. Hopkinson,
Christian Richter,
Michael Schedler &
Frank Glorius
N-heterocyclic carbenes are powerful tools in organic chemistry, with many commercially important applications; this overview describes their properties and potential uses.
Articles
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A zero-knowledge protocol for nuclear warhead verification
Alexander Glaser,
Boaz Barak &
Robert J. Goldston
Future rounds of nuclear arms control would ideally involve direct inspection of nuclear warheads using procedures that give inspectors high confidence about the authenticity of submitted nuclear items yet give no information about their design; this is now shown to be achievable using zero-knowledge protocols in neutron imaging of nuclear warheads.
See also
News & Views by Finney & Acton
Aspergillomarasmine A overcomes metallo-β-lactamase antibiotic resistance
Andrew M. King,
Sarah A. Reid-Yu,
Wenliang Wang,
Dustin T. King,
Gianfranco De Pascale
+ et al.
The emergence of Gram-negative pathogens resistant to carbapenem antibiotics is a global health concern and carbapenem resistance often arises through acquisition of β-lactamase enzymes; this study identifies the natural fungal product aspergillomarasmine A as a metallo-β-lactamase inhibitor and a potential treatment to tackle carbapenem resistance.
See also
News & Views by Meziane-Cherif & Courvalin
The selective tRNA aminoacylation mechanism based on a single G•U pair
Masahiro Naganuma,
Shun-ichi Sekine,
Yeeting Esther Chong,
Min Guo,
Xiang-Lei Yang
+ et al.
X-ray crystal structures of a tRNA synthetase bound to wild-type and mutant alanine tRNAs reveal the structural basis for selectivity.
See also
News & Views by Vargas-Rodriguez & Musier-Forsyth
Structure of a modular polyketide synthase
Somnath Dutta,
Jonathan R. Whicher,
Douglas A. Hansen,
Wendi A. Hale,
Joseph A. Chemler
+ et al.
Polyketide synthases are multidomain enzymes that produce polyketides, which form the basis of many therapeutic agents; here, electron cryo-microscopy is used to establish the structure of a bacterial full-length module, and to elucidate the structural basis of both intramodule and intermodule substrate transfer.
See also
News & Views by Leadlay
Letters
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Precision measurement of the Newtonian gravitational constant using cold atoms
G. Rosi,
F. Sorrentino,
L. Cacciapuoti,
M. Prevedelli &
G. M. Tino
Determination of the gravitational constant G using laser-cooled atoms and quantum interferometry, a technique that gives new insight into the systematic errors that have proved elusive in previous experiments, yields a value that has a relative uncertainty of 150 parts per million and which differs from the current recommended value by 1.5 combined standard deviations.
See also
News & Views by Schlamminger
Chirality-specific growth of single-walled carbon nanotubes on solid alloy catalysts
Feng Yang,
Xiao Wang,
Daqi Zhang,
Juan Yang,
Da Luo
+ et al.
Single-walled carbon nanotubes of a single chirality can be produced with an abundance of more than 92 per cent when using tungsten-based bimetallic alloy nanocrystals as catalysts.
South Greenland ice-sheet collapse during Marine Isotope Stage 11
Alberto V. Reyes,
Anders E. Carlson,
Brian L. Beard,
Robert G. Hatfield,
Joseph S. Stoner
+ et al.
The isotopic composition of glacial sediment discharged into the ocean from south Greenland is used to identify a major reduction in the amount of that sediment derived from erosion of Greenland’s Precambrian bedrock, probably indicating the cessation of subglacial erosion and sediment transport during Marine Isotope Stage 11 as a result of the almost complete deglaciation of south Greenland.
Purkinje-cell plasticity and cerebellar motor learning are graded by complex-spike duration
Yan Yang &
Stephen G. Lisberger
Recordings from monkeys during motor learning suggest that durations of complex-spike (CS) responses to climbing-fibre inputs are meaningful signals correlated across the Purkinje-cell population during motor learning; longer climbing-fibre bursts lead to longer-duration CS responses, larger synaptic depression and stronger learning, thus forming a graded instruction.
Human oocytes reprogram adult somatic nuclei of a type 1 diabetic to diploid pluripotent stem cells
Mitsutoshi Yamada,
Bjarki Johannesson,
Ido Sagi,
Lisa Cole Burnett,
Daniel H. Kort
+ et al.
Here human embryonic stem cell lines are derived by somatic cell nuclear transfer from cells of a newborn and from skin cells of an adult, a female with type 1 diabetes; the stem cells produced are pluripotent and can be differentiated into insulin-producing beta cells.
Decoding the regulatory landscape of medulloblastoma using DNA methylation sequencing
Volker Hovestadt,
David T. W. Jones,
Simone Picelli,
Wei Wang,
Marcel Kool
+ et al.
Medulloblastoma is a malignant childhood brain tumour presenting major clinical challenges; here, a comprehensive genome-wide DNA methylation data set from human and mouse tumours, coupled with analysis of histone modifications, RNA transcripts and genome sequencing, uncovers a wealth of alterations that provide insights into the epigenetic regulation of transcription and genome organization in medulloblastoma pathogenesis.
Metformin suppresses gluconeogenesis by inhibiting mitochondrial glycerophosphate dehydrogenase
Anila K. Madiraju,
Derek M. Erion,
Yasmeen Rahimi,
Xian-Man Zhang,
Demetrios T. Braddock
+ et al.
Metformin treatment of rats at physiologically relevant doses inhibits the redox shuttle enzyme mitochondrial glycerophosphate dehydrogenase.
Cyclin D1–Cdk4 controls glucose metabolism independently of cell cycle progression
Yoonjin Lee,
John E. Dominy,
Yoon Jong Choi,
Michael Jurczak,
Nicola Tolliday
+ et al.
Formation of an active cyclin D1–Cdk4 complex suppresses glucose metabolism independently of cell division.
Structure of a lipid-bound extended synaptotagmin indicates a role in lipid transfer
Curtis M. Schauder,
Xudong Wu,
Yasunori Saheki,
Pradeep Narayanaswamy,
Federico Torta
+ et al.
Several proteins localized at membrane contact sites contain an SMP domain, which has been proposed to act as a lipid-binding module; here, the crystal structure of a fragment of the extended synaptotagmin 2 protein, including its SMP, is presented, and indicates that this protein may have a direct role in lipid transport.
BRCA1 controls homologous recombination at Tus/Ter-stalled mammalian replication forks
Nicholas A. Willis,
Gurushankar Chandramouly,
Bin Huang,
Amy Kwok,
Cindy Follonier
+ et al.
Direct evidence for the role of BRCA1 in controlling homologous recombination at stalled replication forks has been obtained in mammalian cells using the bacterial Tus/Ter system.
Structural rearrangements of a polyketide synthase module during its catalytic cycle
Jonathan R. Whicher,
Somnath Dutta,
Douglas A. Hansen,
Wendi A. Hale,
Joseph A. Chemler
+ et al.
Polyketide synthases (PKSs) are multidomain enzymes that produce polyketides, which form the basis of many therapeutic agents; here, electron cryo-microscopy is used to probe the structure of an intact module of a multi-enzyme PKS in different functional states.
See also
News & Views by Leadlay
