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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.449 NO.7163 DATED 11 OCTOBER 2007
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Languages: Evolution and frequency of word use
Climate change: Getting steamy
Genomics: Evolution in the lab
Planetary science: Tiger stripes, jets and Enceladus
Materials: Ferrotoroidic ordering found
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] & [2] Languages: Evolution and frequency of word use (pp 713-716; 717-720; N&V)
Why do some words evolve rapidly through time whilst others stay the same, often with an identical meaning in many different languages? Why do some English verbs remain stubbornly irregular, to the frustration of language learners worldwide? Two papers published in this week’s Nature explore the frequency of word use throughout Indo-European history and analyse the rate at which language becomes regular over time.
Some words, such as ‘bird’ or ‘tail’, are expressed by dozens of unrelated word forms in different languages, whereas others, such as the number ‘three’ or the word for ‘water’, use the same word forms or ‘cognates’ across the whole Indo-European language family. This indicates that some words evolve more quickly than others, but until now no general mechanism has been proposed to explain why.
Mark Pagel and colleagues used a statistical modelling technique to analyse four Indo-European languages: English, Spanish, Russian and Greek, and compared this to a database of 200 fundamental vocabulary meanings in 87 languages. They found that across all 200 meanings, commonly used words, such as numbers, evolve much more slowly, suggesting that the frequency with which specific words are used affects their rate of replacement over thousands of years.
In a separate paper, Martin Nowak and colleagues present a quantitative study to measure the rate at which verbs in English have become more regular with time, and find that frequency of use also affects this relationship. The authors compiled a list of 177 irregular verbs from Old English, and found that only 98 are still irregular today. They then calculated the frequency of occurrence for each verb, and discovered that the less a verb is used, the faster it takes a regular form.
CONTACT
Mark Pagel (University of Reading, UK) Author paper [1]
Tel: +44 118 931 8900; E-mail: [email protected]
Martin Nowak (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA) Author paper [2]
Tel: +1 617 496 4737; E-mail: [email protected]
Tecumseh Fitch (University of St Andrews, UK) N&V author
Tel: +44 1334 462 054; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Climate change: Getting steamy (pp 710-712)
A global-scale increase in surface humidity over the late twentieth century can be attributed mainly to human-induced global warming, reports a paper in Nature this week.
Specific humidity is a measure of how much water vapour there is in a given volume of air. The water vapour content of the atmosphere is an important component of the Earth’s climate system — affecting the distribution and maximum intensity of rainfall, the potential intensity of cyclones, and surface hydrology. Scientists have observed significant increases in specific humidity at the Earth’s surface over the last few decades, but it has been unclear whether these changes represent a natural or human influence on climate.
Nathan P. Gillett and colleagues combined a new data set of observations with a coupled climate model and found that a significant increase in global mean surface specific humidity over the late twentieth century was mainly due to anthropogenic warming. They conclude that this response to human-induced climate change may have important implications for extreme precipitation, tropical cyclones and human heat stress.
CONTACT
Nathan P. Gillett (University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK)
Tel: +44 1603 593 647; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Genomics: Evolution in the lab (pp 677-681; N&V)
An experiment demonstrating the effects of evolution is reported in Nature this week, showing how gene duplication can allow a bifunctional gene to fine-tune with respect to both functions and not compromise one function at the expense of another.
The team led by Sean Carroll used yeast to test mutations in genes that control metabolism in response to sugar in the environment. From the results, the authors propose that yeast thrived with less sugar by making a copy of the gene, so that it maintained its original function whilst evolving previously forbidden mutations to improve fitness, resulting in two slightly different genes. This shows how two genes that control sugar metabolism in one species of yeast arose from the same, single bifunctional gene still present in another species since the two species split over 100 million years ago.
CONTACT
Sean Carroll (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA)
Tel: +1 608 262 6191; E-mail: [email protected]
Edward J. Louis (University of Nottingham, UK) N&V author
Tel: +44 115 823 0375; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Planetary science: Tiger stripes, jets and Enceladus (pp 695-697)
The south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus is unusually warm, and jets of material have been seen emanating from its surface. In this week’s Nature, analysis of the most powerful jets identifies their specific source locations within the region.
The hottest measured temperatures from the south-polar terrain of Enceladus coincide with four ’tiger stripe‘ fractures — named Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus. In the present study, Joseph Spitale and Carolyn Porco used images taken by Cassini over two years to triangulate the source for the most prominent jets originating from the south pole. They find that the jets emanate from the four tiger stripes, with the strongest sources on Baghdad and Damascus. The jets’ variability allowed the authors to test various ideas about their origin — the most probable being sheer heating within the fractures under changing gravitational forces. Spitale and Porco predict that several new hotspots on Enceladus remain to be discovered by future thermal observations.
CONTACT
Joseph Spitale (Space Science Institute – CICLOPS, Boulder, CO, USA)
Tel: +1 520 207 8782; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Materials: Ferrotoroidic ordering found (pp 702-705; N&V)
A fourth form of ferroic order has been discovered, completing the family that includes ferromagnetism — the physics behind the humble fridge magnet — ferroelectricity and ferroelasticity. The discovery of ferrotoroidic ordering reported in this week’s Nature could lead to new types of data-storage devices.
In any ferroic material it is expected that domains are formed; these are regions that display different orientations of the magnetic order. To observe ferrotoroidicity, Manfred Fiebig and colleagues therefore set about to observe ferrotoroidic domains, and identified them in an antiferromagnetic material called LiCoPO4 using laser-optic techniques. Their find should result in a better understanding of the physics of multiferroics, currently of interest because their combined electronic and magnetic properties mean that the same material can perform more than one task.
CONTACT
Manfred Fiebig (Universitaet Bonn, Germany)
Tel: +49 228 73 2539; E-mail: [email protected]
Karin Rabe (Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 732 445 4186; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[7] Phase-resolved measurements of stimulated emission in a laser (pp 698-701; N&V)
[8] Isotopic evidence for Mesoarchaean anoxia and changing atmospheric sulphur chemistry (pp 706-709)
[9] Structural basis for selective recognition of ESCRT-III by the AAA ATPase Vps4 (pp 735-739)
[10] ESCRT-III recognition by VPS4 ATPases (pp 740-744)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 10 October at 1800 London time / 1300 US Eastern time (which is also when the embargo lifts) as part of our AOP (ahead of print) programme. Although we have included it on this release to avoid multiple mailings it will not appear in print on 11 October, but at a later date.***
[11] The amniote primitive streak is defined by epithelial cell intercalation before gastrulation
DOI: 10.1038/nature06211
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.
AUSTRIA
Vienna: 7
FRANCE
Palaiseau: 7
Paris: 7
GERMANY
Berlin: 6, 8
Bonn: 6
Munster: 8
SWITZERLAND
Geneva: 6
UNITED KINGDOM
Cambridge: 9
Exeter: 3
London: 11
Norwich: 3
Reading: 1
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Colorado
Boulder: 5
Maryland
College Park: 8
Massachusetts
Boston: 2
Cambridge: 2
Missouri
St Louis: 4
New Mexico
Santa Fe: 1
New York
Ithaca: 9
Utah
Salt Lake City: 10
Virginia
Charlottesville: 11
Wisconsin
Madison: 4
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