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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.459 NO.7247 DATED 04 JUNE 2009
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Geoscience: How Antarctica got its ice
Biology: Hydrogen peroxide link to wound healing
Quantum physics: Entangled vibes
Space: Titan’s cloud cover
Immunology: Fatty acid metabolism linked to immunological memory
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Geoscience: How Antarctica got its ice (pp 690-693)
Antarctica’s first ice sheets formed against an Alpine-style backdrop, as river valleys were eroded by glaciers, a Nature paper suggests. The onset of glaciation in Antarctica marks a period of significant climate change in the Earth’s history, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels fell rapidly and the continent developed ice sheets. Knowing how the polar regions respond to globally forced changes should help us understand the Earth’s current changes in climate.
It’s thought that Antarctica’s first ice sheets formed on central Antarctic mountain ranges, such as the Gamburtsev mountains, around 34 million years ago. But exactly how this occurred is unclear. Martin Siegert and colleagues present Chinese radar information suggesting that the Gamburtsev mountains were initially incised by rivers and later eroded further by ice movement. Their classic Alpine topography is buried beneath up to 3,000 metres of ice. The landscape probably developed more than 34 million years ago when mean summer temperatures were about 3 degrees Celsius, and the authors conclude that it has probably been preserved beneath the present ice sheet for around 14 million years.
CONTACT
Martin Siegert (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Tel: +44 131 650 7543; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Biology: Hydrogen peroxide link to wound healing (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature08119
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 03 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 04 June, but at a later date. ***
Hydrogen peroxide helps to guide infection-fighting white blood cells to new wounds, a zebrafish study in this week’s Nature suggests.
Within minutes of a tail-fin wound occurring, a decreasing concentration gradient of hydrogen peroxide becomes established between the outer cell layer and the inner vasculature, Philipp Niethammer and colleagues show. The gradient is created by an enzyme called dual oxidase, and it helps to guide the rapid migration of white blood cells to the wound.
The team believe that this is the first observation of a tissue-scale hydrogen peroxide pattern, and the first evidence that hydrogen peroxide signals to white blood cells in tissues.
CONTACT
Philipp Niethammer (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 617 910 7167; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Quantum physics: Entangled vibes (pp 683-685; N&V)
Vibrating ions are the latest entities to find themselves entangled. The study, reported in this week’s Nature, is the first demonstration of quantum entanglement in distinct mechanical oscillators. The findings represent an intriguing bridge between quantum and classical physics, and may also prove important for scaling-up quantum information processors.
Entanglement, which links states in quantum systems, has been demonstrated before - but usually with more esoteric quantities such as electron spin or photon polarization. Here, John Jost and colleagues demonstrate entanglement of the vibrational states of two pairs of atomic ions held in different locations.
The ability to entangle vibrations is more obviously relevant to the large-scale, classical world, and so may open the way to the generation of entangled states of larger-scale mechanical oscillators. This could prove useful in quantum information processing, and is conceptually of interest as it may help researchers understand the boundaries between quantum and classical behaviour.
CONTACT
John Jost (National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO, USA)
Tel: +1 303 497 3328; E-mail: [email protected]
Rainer Blatt (Universität Innsbruck, Austria) N&V author
Tel: +43 512 507 6350; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Space: Titan’s cloud cover (pp 678-682)
Thirty-nine monthly fly-bys of Titan by the Cassini spacecraft reveal patterns of global cloud coverage on Titan that are in general agreement with previous models, according to research in Nature this week. This is the first observational evidence for the interaction of Saturn’s tides with Titan’s atmosphere.
Clouds on Titan result from the condensation of methane and ethane. At present, cloud activity mainly occurs in the southern, or summer, hemisphere. General circulation models predict that this distribution should change with the seasons on a 15-year timescale. Until now the models have been poorly constrained and their long-term predictions have not yet been observationally verified.
Sébastien Rodriguez and colleagues show that, generally, clouds are observed where they were predicted by general circulation models. However, activity in the southern hemisphere, as Titan’s equinox approaches this August 2009, does not seem to follow the decline predicted by those models. There are waves in the southern mid-latitude clouds that the authors attribute to the tidal forcing of Titan’s winds as it orbits Saturn.
CONTACT
Sébastien Rodriguez (Université Paris Diderot, Gif sur Yvette, France)
Tel: +33 1 69 08 80 56; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Immunology: Fatty acid metabolism linked to immunological memory (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature08097
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 03 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 04 June, but at a later date. ***
‘Immunological memory’ appears to be influenced by energy metabolism, a Nature paper suggests. The finding is of interest because it hints that metabolic transitions help to direct cell fate, and because a drug that influences the process has been shown to boost the efficacy of an experimental anti-cancer vaccine.
CD8 T cells, known to have a key role in infection and cancer, switch from glucose metabolism to fatty acid metabolism as they differentiate into a ‘memory’ cell that can ‘remember’ past infections. The process is regulated by a protein called TRAF6, Yongwon Choi and colleagues show.
Pharmacologically inducing fatty acid oxidation with the widely prescribed anti-diabetic drug metformin enhanced CD8 T-cell memory in a mouse model, significantly improving the efficacy of an experimental vaccine against an aggressive tumour.
CONTACT
Yongwon Choi (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA)
Tel: +1 215 746 6404; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[6] GroEL/ES chaperonin overexpression promotes genetic variation and enzyme evolution (pp 668-673)
[7] A low energy core-collapse supernova without a hydrogen envelope. (pp 674-677)
[8] Kinematic variables and H2O transport control the formation and location of arc volcanoes (pp 694-697)
[9] Metamorphic enzyme assembly in polyketide diversification (pp 731-735)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 03 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 04 June, but at a later date. ***
[10] T cells dampen innate immune responses through inhibition of NLRP1 and NLRP3 inflammasomes
DOI: 10.0138/nature08100
[11] Uniparental expression of PolIV-dependent siRNAs in developing endosperm of Arabidopsis
DOI: 10.0138/nature08084
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.
CANADA:
Montreal: 5
CHINA
Shanghai: 1
FINLAND
Kangaslampi: 7
Piikkio: 7
FRANCE
Champagne-Ardenne : 4
Nantes: 4
Paris: 4
GERMANY
Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen: 2:
Garching: 7
ISRAEL
Rehovot: 3, 6
ITALY
Catania: 7
Padova: 7
Trieste: 7
JAPAN
Tokyo: 1
SPAIN
Barcelona: 7
Tenerife: 7
Valencia: 7
SWITZERLAND
Epalinges: 10
UNITED KINGDOM
Belfast: 7
Cambridge: 11
Norwich: 11
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Arizona
Tucson: 4
California
La Jolla: 9
Moffett Field: 4
Pasadena: 4, 7
Colorado
Boulder: 3
Denver: 3
Massachusetts
Boston: 2
Cambridge: 8
Michigan
Ann Arbor: 4, 9
New York
Ithaca: 4
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia: 5, 9
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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
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Tel: +44 20 7843 4502; E-mail [email protected]
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