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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.453 NO.7196 DATED 05 JUNE 2008
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Human mobility: Mobile phone study shows that we really are creatures of habit
Development: Cell discovery helps understanding of heart growth
Optics: Extreme UV
And finally… When moons collide and collide and collide
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Human mobility: Mobile phone study shows that we really are creatures of habit (pp 779-782)
Mobile phones — great for fixing up meeting places and letting people know you’re running late — have a new use: tracking patterns of human movement. A new study has monitored the movements of 100,000 people by their cell-phone signals, and perhaps unsurprisingly shows that most people are creatures of habit, tending to make regular migrations to the same few locations, but with occasional long hops. The research allows epidemiologists to understand the behaviour of individuals rather than seeing a general picture of movement.
This sums up the behaviour of the typical commuter, say researchers led by Albert-László Barabási, who report the experiment in this week’s Nature. They mapped people’s movements by logging the locations of the transmitter towers that handled each of their calls or text messages over several weeks.
Mapping large-scale human movements is important for urban planning, traffic forecasting and disease monitoring, but previous attempts to model these patterns, such as by tracking banknotes, have not provided an accurate picture of individuals’ movement. The patterns revealed in the new study differ slightly from the classic ‘Lévy flight’ patterns displayed by many foraging animals, probably because most humans are not completely free to roam but instead have to turn up to work every day.
CONTACT
Albert-László Barabási (Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 617 373 7774; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Development: Cell discovery helps understanding of heart growth (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature07027
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 04 June 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 05 June, but at a later date. ***
Cell biologists have identified a protein that helps to direct the development of heart cells early in embryonic development. Understanding this process could improve our understanding of very early embryonic processes, and could potentially yield new strategies to repair tissue damaged by heart attacks.
Writing in this week’s Nature, researchers led by Issei Komuro report that a molecule called insulin-like growth-factor-binding protein 4 (IGFBP-4) enhances the differentiation of primitive cells into specialized heart cells, called cardiomyocytes. By working with human cells in culture, as well as frogs, the researchers also show that defects in this protein hamper heart-cell development.
IGFBP-4 is thus added to a host of other proteins, including a range of cell-signalling enzymes and their receptors, known to contribute to the development of the heart, which is the first organ to form during embryonic development. The research could thus pave the way towards understanding how anomalies in this process give rise to congenital heart defects — the most common birth defects in humans.
CONTACT
Issei Komuro (Chiba University Graduate School of Medicine, Japan)
Tel: +81 43 226 2097; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Optics: Extreme UV (pp 757-760; N&V)
A nanostructure consisting of bow-tie-shaped gold elements on a sapphire substrate forms the basis of a new system for generating coherent extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) light. Reported in Nature this week, it is both smaller and cheaper than current methods and could enable the construction of a laptop-sized EUV light source at a reasonable cost.
The properties of coherent EUV light make it a prime candidate for exciting technological applications. But at present, the equipment needed to generate the short-wavelength light is costly and bulky. The system described by Seung-Woo Kim and colleagues could reduce both cost and bulk. It uses the conventional principle of high-harmonic generation via the interaction of a femtosecond laser pulse with a gas, but adopts a novel concept of amplifying light by way of local plasmon field enhancement.
CONTACT
Seung-Woo Kim (KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea)
Tel: +82 42 869 3217; E-mail: [email protected]
Mark Stockman (Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA)
Tel: +1 678 457 4739; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] And finally… When moons collide and collide and collide (pp 739-744)
Large-scale collisions occur almost daily in Saturn’s F ring, making it possibly unique in the Solar System, according to research in Nature this week. Using data from the Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found evidence that there are moonlets embedded in the ring’s bright core and that the ring’s morphology is the result of continual gravitational and collisional effects.
Saturn’s narrow F ring, discovered by Pioneer 11 in 1979, is constantly changing, with features that vary in appearance on timescales of hours to years. Moonlets and clumps have been detected around the ring, and embedded objects have been inferred, but here Carl Murray and colleagues examine Cassini’s data in detail.
The team show that most of the F-ring morphology is caused by regular large-scale collisions that occur perhaps more often than anywhere else in the Solar System.
CONTACT
Carl Murray (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Tel: +44 20 7882 5456; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[5] Charge self-regulation upon changing the oxidation state of transition metals in insulators (pp 763-766; N&V)
[6] Simultaneous teleseismic and geodetic observations of the stick–slip motion of an Antarctic ice stream (pp 770-774)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 04 June 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 05 June, but at a later date. ***
[7] Mei-P26 regulates microRNAs and cell growth in the Drosophila ovarian stem cell lineage
DOI: 10.1038/nature07014
[8] Template-directed synthesis of a genetic polymer in a model protocell
DOI: 10.1038/nature07018
[9] A BCS-like gap in the superconductor SmFeAsO0.85F0.15
DOI: 10.1038/nature07081
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
CHINA
Hefei: 9
FRANCE
Gif-sur-Yvette: 4
GERMANY
Heidelberg: 7
JAPAN
Chiba: 2
Hiroshima: 2
Ibaraki: 2
Tokyo: 2
SINGAPORE
Singapore: 7
SOUTH KOREA
Daejeon: 3
UNITED KINGDOM
Cambridge: 7
London: 4
Newcastle: 6
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
Stanford: 2
Colorado
Golden: 5
Indiana
Notre Dame: 1
Maryland
Baltimore: 9
Massachusetts
Boston: 1, 8
Cambridge:
Missouri
St Louis: 6
Pennsylvania
University Park: 6
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From North America and Canada
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Tel: +1 212 726 9231; E-mail: [email protected]
Katie McGoldrick, Nature Washington
Tel: +1 202 737 2355; E-mail: [email protected]
From Japan, Korea, China, Singapore and Taiwan
Mika Nakano, Nature Tokyo
Tel: +81 3 3267 8751; E-mail: [email protected]
From the UK/Europe/other countries not listed above
Jen Middleton, Nature London
Tel: +44 20 7843 4502; E-mail [email protected]
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