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This press release is copyright Nature. VOL.440 NO.7088 DATED 27 April 2006
This press release contains:
* Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Language: Starlings question our grammar
Climate change: Twentieth century wettest period in northern Pakistan
Gene therapy: Not without risk
Astronomy: How the big planets got their tilt
Insight: The early Universe
Ecology: How coral reefs can survive ‘bleaching’
Materials science: The harder you bend them
Evolution: Fishy fossil demonstrates early gill structure
Cancer: LOX stops the spread
And finally… ‘Top dog’ determined in the womb
* Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
* Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Language: Starlings question our grammar (pp1204-1207; N&V)
Songbirds can recognize a grammar in their songs in a way that was once thought to be the exclusive ability of humans, say Timothy Gentner and his colleagues in this week's Nature.
The researchers studied a phenomenon known as recursion, a hallmark of language in which words or phrases can be embedded in one another again and again. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky have proposed that the use and recognition of recursion is a uniquely human ability.
In a series of experiments with European starlings, using warbles and rattles in place of words, the team showed that these birds could learn to recognize a recursive-type grammar from a simpler grammar. This contrasts with previous experiments showing that tamarin monkeys could not make this distinction.
"An intriguing possibility is that the capacity to recognize recursion might be found only in species that can acquire new patterns of vocalization, for example songbirds, humans and perhaps some cetaceans," writes Gary Marcus in an accompanying News & Views piece.
CONTACT
Timothy Gentner (University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 858 822 6763; E-mail: [email protected]
Gary Marcus (New York University, New York, NY, USA)
Tel: +1 212 998 3551; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Climate change: Twentieth century wettest period in northern Pakistan (pp1179-1182; N&V)
The last century has seen a dramatic increase in snowfall in central Asia compared to the previous thousand years, according to research published in this week's Nature.
Global warming is thought to increase the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere, leading to more precipitation. But there are few studies that look at how precipitation varies over such long timescales.
Kerstin Treydte and colleagues base their conclusion on evidence in the rings of trees in northern Pakistan. Oxygen atoms found in water molecules absorbed by the trees are trapped in the cellulose of the wood. These oxygen atoms can have different masses, and more precipitation is associated with lower concentrations of the heaviest oxygen isotope.
Measurements of the relative proportions of oxygen isotopes in the wood can therefore be turned into a long-term precipitation record.
The recent hike in precipitation suggests that climate change is having a significant impact on the water cycle. "The highest precipitation anomalies observed by Treydte et al. have occurred in the last 150 years, approximately coincident with the Industrial Revolution and greenhouse gas increases," comments Michael N. Evans in a related News and Views article.
CONTACT
Kerstin Treydte (Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Zuerich, Switzerland)
Tel: +41 1739 2662; E-mail [email protected]
Michael Evans (University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA)
Tel: +1 520 626 2897; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Gene therapy: Not without risk (p1123)
A gene-therapy treatment for a severe immune deficiency could contribute to the later development of T-cell lymphomas, according to a Brief Communication in Nature this week. Inder M. Verma and colleagues argue, on the basis of their findings in mice, that preclinical treatments involving transgenes should include long-term follow-up before entering clinical trial.
The team demonstrate that one-third of mice treated for X-linked severe combined immune deficiency (X-SCID) with the corrective therapeutic gene IL2RG go on to develop T-cell lymphomas. They show that the origin of these tumours is not, as previously believed, due to the upregulated expression of an oncogene but is related to IL2RG itself.
The syndrome X-SCID is caused by faulty expression of IL2RG, a component of the receptor for interleukin-2, which results in diminished lymphoid cell survival and proliferation. Gene therapy can restore the expression of IL2RG and improve adaptive immunity in patients.
Until now IL2RG has not been considered to be oncogenic but the researchers argue that this is because studies have not been lengthy enough to pick up on these effects. They warn that the preclinical phases of gene therapy treatments should include follow-up over a much longer term.
CONTACT
Inder Verma (The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 858 453 4100; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Astronomy: How the big planets got their tilt (pp1163-1165)
The puzzling tilts of the rotation axes of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have been explained by a new theory proposed by astronomer Adrián Brunini in this week's Nature.
All the planets in the Solar System are more or less tilted: they spin on a slanting axis, so that their equators don't lie in the plane of their orbits around the Sun. For the Earth, this tilt or 'obliquity' is around 23 degrees, and is responsible for the changing seasons.
The obliquities of the Earth-size planets change over time, and so there's no mystery about how they got their current values. But the obliquities of the largest planets are stable, and so they must have been fixed during the planets' formation. How that happened, however, has been something of a puzzle.
Brunini suggests that the obliquities, which vary from about 3 degrees for Jupiter to around 97 degrees for Uranus, could have been fixed in a non-arbitrary way by gravitational interactions of the giant planets as they moved through the Solar System to take up their present orbits. This migration is thought to have placed the planets far from where they first began to form. Brunini has conducted computer simulations of the motions of the young giant planets under a variety of different starting conditions - most of which end up with planetary obliquities very close to the ones now observed.
CONTACT
Adrian Brunini (Facultad de Ciencias Astronomicas y Geofisicas (UNLP), Buenos Aires, Argentina) Tel: + 54 221 423 6593; E-mail: [email protected]
Insight: The early Universe
As astronomers make ever-more-detailed observations of the Universe, its mysteries only seem to get more mysterious. In a series of Insight articles in this week's Nature, astronomers mull over where we now stand in cosmology.
Charles L. Bennett asks why the Universe expanded so rapidly soon after its birth, and considers the nature of the 'dark energy' that drives its current acceleration. He also describes efforts to identify the 'dark matter' particles that dominate the material content of the cosmos.
John J. Cowan and Christopher Sneden explore the chemical make-up of the earliest stars to form, while Sean M. Carroll asks why our Universe turned out the way it did.
Volker Springel, Carlos S. Frenk and Simon D. M. White discuss how computer simulations of growing galaxy clusters can tell us how the Universe first got itself organized. Finally, Esther M. Hu and Lennox L. Cowie look at research indicating that star formation reached its peak about 7 billion years ago, when the Universe was half its present age.
CONTACT
Sean Carroll (University of Oregon, Eugene, USA)
E-mail: [email protected]
Carlos Frenk (University of Durham, UK)
Tel:+44 191 374 2141; E-mail: [email protected]
Charles L. Bennett (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)
Tel: +1 410 516 6177; E-mail: [email protected]
John J. Cowan (University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA)
Tel: +1 405 325 3961; E-mail: [email protected]
Volker Springel (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany)
Tel: +49 89 3000 2238; E-mail: [email protected]
Simon White (Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, Garching, Germany)
Tel: +89 30000 2211; E-mail: [email protected]
Esther Hu (University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA)
Tel:+1 808 956 7190; E-mail: [email protected]
Professor Lennox L L C Cowie (University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA)
Tel: +1 808 956 8134; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Ecology: How coral reefs can survive ‘bleaching’ (pp1186-1189)
Coral reefs have a hitherto unsuspected trick up their sleeve that could help some species to endure deadly ‘mass bleaching’ events caused by ocean warming. Some coral species can survive by preying on tiny marine animals called zooplankton, allowing them to make a living even in their bleached state, when they are deserted by the tiny algae that usually live alongside them.
Andréa Grottoli and colleagues discovered that when the coral Montipora capitata is grown in a tank and subjected to increased temperatures that cause bleaching, it can get all the energy it needs to sustain its metabolism by catching zooplankton. Other coral species tested, however, could not gain all the sustenance needed in the absence of the algae that usually provide nutrients in return for a place to live on the coral skeleton.
The results, reported in this week's Nature, offer hope that the world’s tropical corals will not succumb entirely to global warming - some experts fear that rising sea temperatures could cause 60% of corals to undergo bleaching over the next few decades. But, given that some species will inevitably be more resilient than others, coral ecosystems, often termed the ‘rainforests of the ocean’, could be set to undergo wholesale changes.
CONTACT
Andrea Grottoli (Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA)
Tel: +1 614 292 5782; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Materials science: The harder you bend them (pp1174-1178)
Blacksmiths have known for centuries that metals like steel can be hardened and strengthened by hammering them at the anvil. Vasily Bulatov and colleagues show in Nature this week that the conventional explanation for this hardening process has overlooked an important ingredient.
Metals are ductile because of defects in their crystal structures called dislocations, which are misalignments of the regularly packed layers of atoms. Dislocations can glide through the metal crystals like zips, allowing the metal to deform under stress. But if too many dislocations are present - for example, when hammering or repeated bending creates lots of new ones - then they can become tangled together, making them immobile.
Previous studies of the entanglement of dislocations have generally considered what happens when two dislocations meet. But Bulatov and colleagues point out that three or more dislocations might also sometimes collide. The researchers' computer simulations of the atomic structures of metals show that dislocation multi-junctions like this behave differently from junctions of just two dislocations. Whereas the latter can 'unzip' and reform elsewhere, allowing some movement, triple junctions of dislocations become locked fast. Once formed, they seem very difficult to disentangle. Repeated bending of a metal, they say, gradually builds up a locked network of these multi-junctions.
The researchers support their findings with experimental studies of dislocations in molybdenum metal, imaged with an electron microscope. They find several examples of junctions that tie together four different dislocation lines, formed from the collision and entanglement of three distinct dislocations.
CONTACT
Vasily Bulatov (Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Livermore, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 925 423 0124;E-mail: [email protected]
[7] Evolution: Fishy fossil demonstrates early gill structure (pp1183-1185)
Palaeontologists have peered back in time to study the intricate gill structure of one of the oldest fossil vertebrates. The investigation suggests that an ancestor of all ‘jawed’ vertebrates - the group to which most vertebrates, including humans, belong - had gills that were encased in pouches, similar to those of today’s ‘jawless’ vertebrates.
The species - a fish called Endeiolepis that lived some 370 million years ago - had gills that closely resemble those of modern jawless fish, which include hagfish and lampreys, report researchers led by Philippe Janvier in this week’s Nature. But whereas lampreys have seven gill pouches, Endeiolepis had an impressive 30, suggesting that it lived in an environment where oxygen was much scarcer.
The fossils, found at Miguasha, Canada, and displayed at the city’s natural history museum, represent a species that - if current ideas about vertebrate phylogeny are correct - is a direct ancestor of jawed vertebrates. This means not only that jawless vertebrates evolved from an ancient predecessor with the same gill structure as themselves, but also that our own watery ancestor had the same structure too, which was subsequently lost as we evolved.
CONTACT
Philippe Janvier (Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle Paleontologie, Paris, France)
Tel: +33 140 79 34 50; E-mail: [email protected]
[8] Cancer: LOX stops the spread (pp1222-1226)
Most deaths from cancer occur because of metastasis - when tumour cells spread throughout the body. In this week’s Nature, Amato Giaccia and colleagues identify a protein vital for metastasis that could be a new target for cancer therapies.
Tumours contain areas low in oxygen in which the cells are - for unknown reasons - particularly prone to metastatic growth. The team shows that the enzyme lysyl oxidase (LOX) is produced at high levels in oxygen-starved human breast, head and neck tumours, and that patients with tumours producing high levels of LOX are more likely to suffer metastasis and tend to survive for shorter periods.
The group also shows that LOX promotes metastasis by helping cells migrate into and invade new tissue, and that inhibiting the LOX enzyme blocks metastasis of breast cancer in a mouse model.
CONTACT
Amato Giaccia (Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 415 723 7366; E-mail: [email protected]
[9] And finally… ‘Top dog’ determined in the womb (pp1190-1193)
A strong link is made between the social rank of spotted hyaenas (Crocuta crocuta) and their prenatal exposure to male hormones in this week's issue of Nature. The study represents the first example of how status-related traits are passed from mother to offspring in mammals.
Spotted hyaenas live in a female-dominated society where the most aggressive individual becomes the 'top dog'. Dominant females have priority over food and males, so aggressive behaviour is key to reproductive success. Dloniak and colleagues now show that during gestation the concentration of male sex hormones, called androgens, directly affects the aggressive behaviour exhibited by offspring. The authors reveal that in late gestation, androgen concentrations are higher in dominant females compared to subordinate females. This is reflected in the behaviour of cubs of dominant females, who exhibit higher rates of aggression and mounting behaviour than cubs born to subordinate females.
This study supports the hypothesis that aggression in female spotted hyaenas is an adaptive trait to improve feeding success, which in turn improves reproductive success.
CONTACT
Stephanie Dloniak (Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA)
Tel: +1 517 353 3771; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[10] Structural basis for broad DNA-specificity in integron recombination (pp1157-1162)
[11] Wave and defect dynamics in nonlinear photonic quasicrystals (pp1166-1169)
[12] Electron-phonon coupling reflecting dynamic charge inhomogeneity in copper oxide superconductors (pp1170-1173; N&V)
[13] The DNA sequence, annotation and analysis of human chromosome 3 (pp1194-1198)
[14] TMP21 is a presenilin complex component that modulates g-secretase but not 1-secretase activity (pp1208-1212)
[15] Targeting C-reactive protein for the treatment of cardiovascular disease (pp1217-1221)
[16] Detecting transient intermediates in macromolecular binding by paramagnetic NMR (pp1227-1230)
GEOGRAPHICAL LISTING OF AUTHORS…
The following list of places refers to the whereabouts of authors on the papers numbered in this release. For example, London: 4 - this means that on paper number four, there will be at least one author affiliated to an institute or company in London. The listing may be for an author's main affiliation, or for a place where they are working temporarily. Please see the PDF of the paper for full details.
ARGENTINA
La Plata: 4
AUSTRALIA
Wollongong: 15
CANADA
Nouvelle: 7
Toronto: 14
CHINA
Beijing: 13
Shanghai: 13
FRANCE
Gif-sur-Yvette: 12
Paris: 7, 10
Valbonne: 14
GERMANY
Bonn: 2
Berlin: 13
Freiburg: 3
Heidelberg: 3
Julich: 2
Karlsruhe: 12
Kiel: 13
Leipzig: 8
Potsdam: 2
ISRAEL
Haifa: 11
Tel Aviv: 11
ITALY
Pavia: 15
JAPAN
Hyogo: 14
Nagoya: 12
Oitsu: 14
Sendai: 12
Tokyo: 14
SWITZERLAND
Birmensdorf: 2
UNITED KINGDOM
Cambridge: 15
Edinburgh: 15
London: 7, 13, 15
Reading: 15
Southampton: 15
Sussex: 15
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
La Jolla: 1, 3
Livermore: 6
Stanford: 6, 8
Colorado
Aurora: 14
Florida
Orlando: 11
Illinois
Chicago: 1
Maryland
Bethesda: 16
Michigan
East Lansing: 9
Nebraska
Omaha: 9
New Jersey
Princeton: 11
New York
New York: 14
Upton: 12
North Carolina
Durham: 8
Ohio
Columbus: 5
Pennsylvania
Villanova: 5
Rhode Island
Providence: 5
Texas
Houston: 13
Washington
Seattle: 13
PRESS CONTACTS…
For North America and Canada
Katie McGoldrick, Nature Washington
Tel: +1 202 737 2355; E-mail: [email protected]
For Japan, Korea, China, Singapore and Taiwan
Rinoko Asami, Nature Tokyo
Tel: +81 3 3267 8751; E-mail: [email protected]
For the UK/Europe/other countries not listed above
Ruth Francis, Nature London
Tel: +44 20 7843 4562; E-mail [email protected]
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