Society: Don't blame the mothers
Careless discussion of epigenetic research on how early life affects health across generations could harm women, warn Sarah S. Richardson and colleagues.
Books and Arts
Top
History of engineering: Wonder maker
Andrew Robinson delves into a study inspired by James Watt's fascinating workshop.
Review of James Watt: Making the World Anew
Ben Russell
Books in brief
Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks.
Neuroscience: What females really want
Leslie C. Griffith
Solar system: Sandcastles in space
Daniel J. Scheeres
See also
Letter by Rozitis et al.
Ageing: Old blood stem cells feel the stress
Jiri Bartek &
Zdenek Hodny
See also
Letter by Flach et al.
Condensed-matter physics: Glasses made from pure metals
Jan Schroers
See also
Letter by Zhong et al.
Cancer: One cell at a time
Edward J. Fox &
Lawrence A. Loeb
See also
Article by Wang et al.
Astronomical instrumentation: Atmospheric blurring has a new enemy
Brent Ellerbroek
Structural biology: Corralling a protein-degradation regulator
Raymond J. Deshaies
See also
Article by Lingaraju et al.
Limits on fundamental limits to computation
Igor L. Markov
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.
Articles
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Clonal evolution in breast cancer revealed by single nucleus genome sequencing
Yong Wang,
Jill Waters,
Marco L. Leung,
Anna Unruh,
Whijae Roh
+ et al.
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.
See also
News & Views by Fox & Loeb
Crystal structure of the human COP9 signalosome
Gondichatnahalli M. Lingaraju,
Richard D. Bunker,
Simone Cavadini,
Daniel Hess,
Ulrich Hassiepen
+ et al.
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.
See also
News & Views by Deshaies
Three-dimensional structure of human γ-secretase
Peilong Lu,
Xiao-chen Bai,
Dan Ma,
Tian Xie,
Chuangye Yan
+ et al.
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.
Letters
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The origin of the local 1/4-keV X-ray flux in both charge exchange and a hot bubble
M. Galeazzi,
M. Chiao,
M. R. Collier,
T. Cravens,
D. Koutroumpa
+ et al.
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.
Cohesive forces prevent the rotational breakup of rubble-pile asteroid (29075) 1950 DA
Ben Rozitis,
Eric MacLennan &
Joshua P. Emery
Modelling and observations of the kilometre-sized asteroid (29075) 1950 DA reveal it to be a ‘rubble pile’ that is rotating faster than is allowed by gravity and friction; cohesive forces such as those in lunar regolith are required to prevent it breaking up.
See also
News & Views by Scheeres
Formation of monatomic metallic glasses through ultrafast liquid quenching
Li Zhong,
Jiangwei Wang,
Hongwei Sheng,
Ze Zhang &
Scott X. Mao
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.
See also
News & Views by Schroers
The tidal–rotational shape of the Moon and evidence for polar wander
Ian Garrick-Bethell,
Viranga Perera,
Francis Nimmo &
Maria T. Zuber
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.
Neuropsychosocial profiles of current and future adolescent alcohol misusers
Robert Whelan,
Richard Watts,
Catherine A. Orr,
Robert R. Althoff,
Eric Artiges
+ et al.
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.
A common Greenlandic TBC1D4 variant confers muscle insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes
Ida Moltke,
Niels Grarup,
Marit E. Jørgensen,
Peter Bjerregaard,
Jonas T. Treebak
+ et al.
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.
Altitude adaptation in Tibetans caused by introgression of Denisovan-like DNA
Emilia Huerta-Sánchez,
Xin Jin,
Asan,
Zhuoma Bianba,
Benjamin M. Peter
+ et al.
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.
Replication stress is a potent driver of functional decline in ageing haematopoietic stem cells
Johanna Flach,
Sietske T. Bakker,
Mary Mohrin,
Pauline C. Conroy,
Eric M. Pietras
+ et al.
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.
See also
News & Views by Bartek & Hodny
Historical contingency and its biophysical basis in glucocorticoid receptor evolution
Michael J. Harms &
Joseph W. Thornton
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.
DENR–MCT-1 promotes translation re-initiation downstream of uORFs to control tissue growth
Sibylle Schleich,
Katrin Strassburger,
Philipp Christoph Janiesch,
Tatyana Koledachkina,
Katharine K. Miller
+ et al.
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).
Histone H4 tail mediates allosteric regulation of nucleosome remodelling by linker DNA
William L. Hwang,
Sebastian Deindl,
Bryan T. Harada &
Xiaowei Zhuang
A nucleosome-spacing mechanism for human ATP-dependent chromatin assembly and remodelling factor (ACF).
Visualization of arrestin recruitment by a G-protein-coupled receptor
Arun K. Shukla,
Gerwin H. Westfield,
Kunhong Xiao,
Rosana I. Reis,
Li-Yin Huang
+ et al.
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.
