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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.456 NO.7224 DATED 18 DECEMBER 2008
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Astrophysics: Maser in a quasar is one in a million
Essay: An engine for social change
Geoscience: Taking the rough with the smooth
Oncology: Cancer stem cells leave their mark
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Astrophysics: Maser in a quasar is one in a million (pp 927-929)
Scientists have detected a water maser — the microwave equivalent of a laser — farther from our galaxy than ever previously reported. The surprising finding is described in this week’s Nature.
Violette Impellizzeri and colleagues used gravitational lensing — where the gravity of a massive object bends light from a more distant one to create an enhanced image — to increase their chances of finding water masers in active galaxies. They spotted a water maser at redshift 2.64 in a quasar that is twice as luminous as the most powerful local water maser and half as luminous as the most distant maser previously known. From knowledge of relatively local masers, the probability of finding a maser this luminous associated with any single active galaxy was expected to be one in a million, but that Impellizzeri and colleagues found it in the first galaxy they looked at means that such masers must be far more abundant in the early Universe than they are now.
CONTACT
Violette Impellizzeri (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie, Bonn, Germany)
Tel: +49 228 525 365; E-mail: [email protected]
Essay: An engine for social change (pp 877)
Much attention has focused on what happens to a population’s ideas, beliefs and values when militarily or economically more powerful societies expand at the expense of weaker ones. Far less attention has been given to another group-level process: the movement of people from poorer or more unequal societies into richer, more just ones.
Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd argue in an Essay in this week’s Nature that because immigrants and their descendants adopt some of the ideas and institutions that make their new homes better places to live, flows of migrants are a more powerful driver of cultural change than armies. They conclude that empires established through conflict and conquest will be ephemeral unless they induce immigration and integration.
Their Essay, is the fifth piece in Nature’s ‘Being human’ Essay series (see http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/beinghuman/).
CONTACT
Peter Richerson (University of California, Davis, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 530 752 2781; E-mail: [email protected]
Robert Boyd (University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 310 206 8008; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Geoscience: Taking the rough with the smooth (pp 938-941)
Seafloor roughness may be influenced by large-scale mantle convection and the break-up of supercontinents, a Nature paper reveals. The results provide a framework for understanding the source of seafloor roughness.
Seafloor roughness varies considerably across the world’s ocean basins and is known to influence ocean mixing. After accounting for the effects of nearby mantle plumes and mid-ocean-ridge spreading rate, Joanne Whittaker and colleagues find that anomalously smooth crust formed over mantle previously overlain by the Pangaea supercontinent. This indicates that a large region of the mantle was relatively hot before break-up of the supercontinent. Conversely, Pacific ‘superswells’ are not associated with basement roughness anomalies, indicating that mantle temperatures associated with these two convection processes differ significantly.
CONTACT
Joanne Whittaker (GETECH, Leeds, UK)
Tel: +44 113 322 2255; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] & [4] Oncology: Cancer stem cells leave their mark (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature07602
DOI: 10.1038/nature07589
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 17 December 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 18 December, but at a later date. ***
Inappropriate activation of a signalling pathway in intestinal stem cells causes them to become cancerous. The findings, reported in two Nature papers this week, help identify the cell type at the root of this cancer, which should in turn aid therapeutic design.
Genetic mutations that activate the Wnt signalling pathway are known to trigger intestinal cancer; however, it’s not clear which cells are responsible. Hans Clevers and colleagues switched on the Wnt pathway in cells expressing the receptor Lgr5 — a marker for intestinal stem cells — and found that this was sufficient to initiate tumour formation.
In a related paper, Richard Gilbertson and colleagues report that Lgr5-expressing intestinal stem cells also express the cell surface glycoprotein prominin 1. These prominin-1-expressing stem cells also form intestinal tumours when the Wnt pathway is abnormally activated. The research highlights Lgr5 and prominin 1 as potential markers for identifying cancer-prone stem cells.
CONTACT
Hans Clevers (Hubrecht Institute, Utrecht, Netherlands) Author paper [3]
Tel: +31 302 121 826; E-mail: [email protected]
Richard Gilbertson (St Jude Children's Research hospital, Memphis, TN, USA) Author paper [4]
Tel: +1 901 495 3913; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[5] Sensing voltage across lipid membranes (pp 891-897)
[6] Geometric frustration in buckled colloidal monolayers (pp 898-903; N&V)
[7] Neural palmitoyl-proteomics reveals dynamic synaptic palmitoylation (pp 904-909; N&V)
[8] SUMOylation regulates Rad18-mediated template switch (pp 915-920)
[9] Structure of an argonaute silencing complex with a seed-containing guideDNA and target RNA duplex
[10] Unconventional superconductivity in Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2 from inelastic neutron scattering (pp 930-932)
[11] Conformational changes in an ultrafast light-driven enzyme determine catalytic activity (pp 1001-1004)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***These papers will be published electronically on Nature's website on 17 December 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 them on this release to avoid multiple mailings they will not appear in print on 18 December, but at a later date. ***
[12] Quality control by the ribosome following peptide bond formation
DOI: 10.1038/nature07582
[13] Peptide neurotransmitters activate a cation channel complex of NALCN and UNC-80
DOI: 10.1038/nature07579
[14] The DNA-encoded nucleosome organization of a eukaryotic genome
DOI: 10.1038/nature07667
[15] WSTF regulates the H2A.X DNA damage response via a novel tyrosine kinase activity
DOI: 10.1038/nature07668
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.
AUSTRALIA
Sydney: 2
CANADA:
Toronto: 14
Vancouver: 7
CHINA
Hong Kong: 6
Nanjing: 13
FRANCE
Plouzané: 2
GERMANY
Bonn: 1
Cologne: 15
ISRAEL
Rehovot: 6, 14
ITALY
Capoterra: 1
Milan: 8
NETHERLANDS
Utrecht: 3
UNITED KINGDOM
Didcot: 10
Glasgow: 3
Leeds: 2
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
La Jolla: 7
Santa Clara: 14
Hawaii
Honolulu: 2
Illinois
Argonne: 10
Chicago: 7
Evanston: 10, 14
Maryland
Baltimore: 12
Bethesda: 5
Silver Spring: 2
Massachusetts
Boston: 15
Michigan
Detroit: 7
New York
New York: 9, 15
North Carolina
Chapel Hill: 14
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia: 6, 13
Tennessee
Memphis: 4
Oak Ridge: 10
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Tel: +1 212 726 9231; E-mail: [email protected]
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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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