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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.462 NO.7269 DATED 05 NOVEMBER 2009
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Earthquakes: Long aftershock sequences
Astronomy: A neutron star cloaked in carbon
Evolution: Hedge your bets
Physics: Strong glasses from soft colloids
Immunology: Keeping watch on sentinel proteins
Physics: Peering inside a quantum gas
And finally… Nature celebrates a birthday
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Earthquakes: Long aftershock sequences (pp 87-89; N&V)
Continental earthquakes that occur far from the boundaries of tectonic plates may be aftershocks of large quakes hundreds of years ago rather than background seismicity, suggests a report in Nature this week.
The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China was a surprise to many because it occurred on a fault that had little recent activity. In contrast to plate boundaries where large earthquakes are expected, continental interiors like the Wenchuan region contain older faults with only a sparse record of seismicity. Assessment of earthquake hazard in these areas relies on the relatively short historical record, making it difficult to distinguish potentially long aftershock sequences from background seismicity indicative of a build-up of stress.
Seth Stein and Mian Liu present a simple model comparing the length of aftershock sequences to the rate at which the fault is loaded in a variety of tectonic settings. They find that at plate boundaries, where most large earthquakes occur, plate motion rapidly reloads faults and the aftershock activity is reduced to the background level of seismicity relatively quickly. Within continents, however, the faults are reloaded much more slowly, allowing aftershocks to continue much longer. Treating such long aftershock sequences as steady-state seismicity may therefore overestimate the hazard in such areas and underestimate it elsewhere.
CONTACT
Seth Stein (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA)
Tel: +1 847 491 5265; E-mail: [email protected]
Mian Liu (University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA)
Tel: +1 573 882 3784; E-mail: [email protected]
Tom Parsons (US Geological Survey, Menlo Park, CA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 650 329 5074; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Astronomy: A neutron star cloaked in carbon (pp 71-73)
The compact remnant of a supernova that may have been observed by a British astronomer in 1680 has been identified as a neutron star with a carbon atmosphere. The star’s very young age (about 330 years) will be important for constraining theories of the thermal evolution of neutron stars.
The supernova remnant Cassiopeia A is one of the youngest in our Galaxy, and is thought to have been observed by Britain’s first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed. Cassiopeia A has at its centre a compact X-ray source, whose nature has been a puzzle since its discovery in 1999. Previous models for the object’s X-ray emission spectrum implied either a stellar radius too small for a neutron star, or a non-uniform surface temperature, which was hard to explain.
In this week’s Nature, Wynn Ho and Craig Heinke show that the spectrum can be explained by a neutron star of normal size, with a low magnetic field and a carbon atmosphere. The presence of the carbon atmosphere seems to be a consequence of the neutron star’s youth, as a somewhat older star would be cool enough to accumulate hydrogen and helium in its atmosphere.
CONTACT
Wynn Ho (University of Southampton, UK)
Tel: +44 238 059 3679; E-mail: [email protected]
Craig Heinke (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)
Tel: +1 780 248 1432; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Evolution: Hedge your bets (pp 90-93)
Faced with an uncertain, changing environment, some bacteria ‘hedge their bets’ by switching randomly between forms suited to different environments. A Nature paper reveals how this strategy evolves, shedding light on the origins and genetics of adaptive traits.
Hubertus Beaumont and colleagues grew their bacteria under fluctuating conditions that favoured the evolution of new types. Initially, the bacteria responded as expected with fixed types adapted to each new environment, but eventually some cells evolved the capacity to pre-empt the environmental change through a bet-hedging strategy. The team identified nine mutations distinguishing bet-hedgers from their ancestors.
Similar behaviour is found in many organisms that face continually changing demands for survival in nature. The rapid and repeatable evolution of bet-hedging in this study suggests that it could have been among life’s earliest adaptations to uncertainty.
CONTACT
Hubertus Beaumont (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Tel: +31 6 19 00 18 71; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Physics: Strong glasses from soft colloids (pp 83-86; N&V)
Soft, deformable particles in colloidal suspensions may hold the key to an improved understanding of glass formation, according to a paper published in this week’s Nature. Unlike hard-sphere colloids, which are ‘fragile’ near the glass transition, soft colloids range from fragile to strong, mimicking the behaviour of ordinary, molecular glass-forming liquids.
Colloidal suspensions of hard particles in a fluid undergo a phase transition similar to the solidification of window glass: increasing the volume fraction of particles, which is analogous to lowering the temperature of a glass-forming liquid, leads to a significant increase in viscosity, and eventually to solidification. This behaviour has made colloids useful model systems for the study of glass formation.
Unfortunately, the utility of the colloid model has been limited by the fact that hard-sphere colloids do not exhibit the great range of behaviours shown by molecular glass-forming liquids as they approach the glassy state. Some molecular liquids characterized as ‘strong’ show a low sensitivity of viscosity to temperature near the glass transition, an attribute essential to the glass-blower’s art. Whereas all hard-sphere colloids exhibit highly sensitive, ‘fragile’ behaviour.
Now David Weitz and colleagues show that colloids incorporating deformable particles exhibit the rich behaviour characteristic of molecular liquids. The fragility of these colloids depends on the elasticity of the particles, with softer particles leading to stronger behaviour. It remains to be seen whether elasticity can also explain the range of fragilities seen in molecular glass-formers, but it seems clear that soft colloids will help provide the answer.
CONTACT
David Weitz (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 617 496 2842; E-mail: [email protected]
C. Austin Angell (Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 480 965 7217; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Immunology: Keeping watch on sentinel proteins (pp 99-103)
Nuclear proteins called high-mobility group box (HMGB) proteins act as universal sentinels for foreign DNA and RNA, a Nature paper suggests. The findings may have implications for understanding the evolution of the innate immune system and for the treatment of immunological disorders.
When tissue becomes damaged or infected, foreign nucleic acids are detected by various sensor proteins, but these different receptors were assumed to operate more or less independently. This viewpoint is challenged with the discovery, by Tadatsugu Taniguchi and colleagues, that HMGB proteins are essential for the activation of all innate immune responses induced by nucleic acid receptors. So HMGB proteins appear to represent a universal mechanism underpinning the detection of foreign nucleic acids by various innate immunity receptors.
CONTACT
Tadatsugu Taniguchi (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Tel: +81 3 5841 3375; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Physics: Peering inside a quantum gas (pp 74-77)
A high-resolution microscope has been developed that can image the atoms occupying individual, closely spaced lattice sites in an ultracold quantum gas. The technique, which bridges the gap between previous microscopic and macroscopic approaches to the study of quantum systems, will be useful for the quantum simulation of condensed-matter systems, and for quantum information processing.
Johan Mattsson and colleagues describe the new microscope in this week’s Nature, and present images of single rubidium atoms confined to an optical lattice with spacings of only 640 nanometres between neighbouring atoms. The lattice is created by projecting a laser-generated holographic pattern through the same optical system that comprises the microscope.
Confining a quantum gas – for example, a Bose–Einstein condensate – to an optically generated lattice creates a system that can be used to model complex phenomena in condensed-matter physics, such as superfluidity. Until now, only the bulk properties of such systems could be studied, with previous microscopic methods being limited to small ensembles of atoms or widely spaced lattices. The new microscope’s ability to detect single atoms in an array of thousands will make it possible to study these simulated systems in much more detail, and may also form the basis of a single-site readout system for quantum computation.
CONTACT
Johan Mattsson (Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden)
Tel: +46 31 772 3333; E-mail: [email protected]
[7] And finally… Nature celebrates a birthday (pp 48-49)
This week’s issue marks 140 years since Nature first appeared on 4 November 1869. A special two-page miscellany celebrates the journal’s history, offering a selection of content from that first issue and from equivalent issues every twenty years between then and now.
The first issue’s contributions included topics ranging from the fertilization of winter-flowering plants to the “Female Physicians” question. 1909 saw a 20-year-old Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman write from India about vibrations – he went on to discover a “new kind of radiation or light emission from atoms and molecules”, for which he won the Nobel prize in 1930. By 1969 the journal had weighed in on the scramble to ban cyclamate sweeteners in Britain. An editorial from that year’s 1 November issue spares no sarcasm on this particular ‘health scare’, commenting that the nation’s “political and scientific guardians would leave no stone unturned to protect the nation’s health, save any such as might be inconveniently heavy to uproot.”
The full 140th Birthday Miscellany will be available under embargo on the Nature press site. The first issue is freely available online here: http://www.nature.com/nature/about/first/ Other gems from the archives can be found on the History of Nature website: http://www.nature.com/nature/history
CONTACT
For further information please contact the Nature Press Office:
E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[8] Cooperation between non-kin in animal societies (pp 51-57)
[9] An oestrogen-receptor-alpha-bound human chromatin interactome (pp 58-64)
[10] Combinatorial binding predicts spatio-temporal cis-regulatory activity (pp 65-70)
[11] Rationally Tuning the Reduction Potential of a Single Cupredoxin Beyond the Natural Range (pp 113-116)
[12] Structural basis of interprotein electron transfer for nitrite reduction in denitrification (pp 117-120)
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:
Edmonton: 2
GERMANY
Heidelberg: 10
Jena: 3
ITALY
Milan: 5
JAPAN
Suita: 5, 12
Tokyo: 5
Toyonaka: 12
Tsukuba: 4
NETHERLANDS
Eindhoven: 4
Leiden: 3
Nijmegen: 9
NEW ZEALAND
North Shore City: 3
SINGAPORE
Singapore: 9
SWEDEN
Gothenburg: 4
UNITED KINGDOM
Cambridge: 8
Southampton: 2
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Georgia
Atlanta: 4
Illinois
Evanston: 1
Urbana: 11
Massachusetts
Cambridge: 4, 6
Missouri
Columbia: 1
New York
New York: 4
Upton: 11
Texas
Denton: 4
PRESS CONTACTS…
From North America and Canada
Neda Afsarmanesh, Nature New York
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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