WWW.NATURE.COM/NATURE
This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.462 NO.7272 DATED 26 NOVEMBER 2009
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Speech: Listen with your skin
Oceanography: A saltier south Atlantic
Spintronics: The future looks bright
Biology: ‘Bone’ protein linked to fever
Geology: Dynamic upwelling beneath the Gulf of California
Astronomy: Globular clusters shed light on Galaxy formation
And finally… Mirror-image snails made by embryonic manipulation
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
Editorial contacts: While the best contacts for stories will always be the authors themselves, in some cases the Nature editor who handled the paper will be available for comment if an author is unobtainable. Editors are contactable via Ruth Francis on +44 20 7843 4562. Feel free to get in touch with Nature's press contacts in London, Washington and Tokyo (as listed at the end of this release) with any general editorial inquiry.
Warning: This document, and the Nature papers to which it refers, may contain information that is price sensitive (as legally defined, for example, in the UK Criminal Justice Act 1993 Part V) with respect to publicly quoted companies. Anyone dealing in securities using information contained in this document or in advanced copies of Nature’s content may be guilty of insider trading under the US Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
The Nature journals press site is at http://press.nature.com
· PDFs for the Articles, Letters, Progress articles, Review articles, Insights and Brief Communications in this issue will be available on the Nature journals press site from 1400 London time / 0900 US Eastern time on the Friday before publication.
· PDFs of News & Views, News Features, Correspondence and Commentaries will be available from 1400 London time / 0900 US Eastern time on the Monday before publication
PICTURES: While we are happy for images from Nature to be reproduced for the purposes of contemporaneous news reporting, you must also seek permission from the copyright holder (if named) or author of the research paper in question (if not).
HYPE: We take great care not to hype the papers mentioned on our press releases, but are sometimes accused of doing so. If you ever consider that a story has been hyped, please do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected], citing the specific example.
PLEASE CITE NATURE AND OUR WEBSITE www.nature.com/nature AS THE SOURCE OF THE FOLLOWING ITEMS. IF PUBLISHING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO http://www.nature.com/nature
[1] Speech: Listen with your skin (pp 502-504)
People “hear” inaudible airflow through their skin suggests a study in this week’s Nature. The finding suggests that when we listen to speech we use we use not only the audio and visual information we receive but also but also tactile clues, such as airflow, in order to build a full picture of the sounds we are hearing.
Some sounds that we make produce small inaudible bursts of air – aspirated sounds - and some don’t – unaspirated sounds. Bryan Gick and colleagues found that when short bursts of air were presented to skin on the hand and neck, syllables heard at the same time were perceived as being aspirated even when they were not. For example, unaspirated syllables such as ‘ba’ and da’ were perceived as being their aspirated equivalents ‘pa’ and ‘ta’ when presented along with a burst of air. This implies that the tactile sensory information we are receiving works alongside our hearing to decipher what we are listening to.
This advance in the understanding of how we perceive speech could prove useful in the future development of audio and telecommunication aids for the hearing impaired.
CONTACT
Bryan Gick (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)
Tel: +1 604 822 4256; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Oceanography: A saltier south Atlantic (pp 495-498)
Southern Hemisphere westerly winds have gradually progressed southwards over the past few decades. These changing wind patterns have contributed to warmer, salty water entering the southern Atlantic from the Indian Ocean, a trend that could affect the circulation of water further north.
A reduction in the Atlantic Ocean’s deep water (which requires cold, dense, salty water to form) circulation has concerned climate change scientists. High-latitude precipitation and melting ice has increased the amount of fresh water entering the North Atlantic, which could disrupt the flow of the North Atlantic deep water.
A study in Nature this week shifts attention southward, by showing that the North Atlantic is already experiencing anthropogenic changes from the Southern Hemisphere. Arne Biastoch and colleagues use a high-resolution ocean model to study the Agulhas current — the main input of warm, salty water around the southern tip of Africa into the Atlantic. They find that in response to the shift in the westerly winds, the Agulhas leakage has increased, a trend that is expected to accelerate this century. This increased warm, salty water may provide an offset to possible reductions in the Atlantic deep water circulation from freshwater inputs in the North Atlantic.
CONTACT
Arne Biastoch (Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany)
Tel: +49 431 600 4013; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Spintronics: The future looks bright (pp 491-494; N&V)
The generation and control of spin polarization in a silicon-based device that works at room temperature is reported in this week’s Nature. The findings make the use of spintronics — where digital information is carried using the spin orientation of an electron rather than its charge — in electronic devices a more practical possibility.
‘Spintronics’ has the potential to revolutionize electronics and computing technologies, by enabling greater storage of data in smaller devices. The popularity of silicon in current technologies makes it the obvious choice of platform, but until now researchers have only been able to demonstrate control of electron spin in silicon at low temperatures that are not practical for everyday use.
Ron Jansen and colleagues describe a three-terminal device in which they demonstrate the successful room-temperature electrical injection, manipulation and detection of spin polarization of both electrons and their positively charged counterparts, holes. The findings could help the realization of silicon spintronic devices and their integration with currently available technologies.
CONTACT
Ron Jansen (University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands)
Tel: +31 53 489 3355; E-mail: [email protected]
Michael Flatté (University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 319 335 0201; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Biology: ‘Bone’ protein linked to fever (pp 505-509)
A protein pair best known for their role in bone remodelling may have an unexpected role in the brain, helping to control fever and female body temperature, a Nature paper suggests.
The proteins, RANKL and RANK, are expressed in a particular type of brain cell called an astrocyte, Josef Penninger and colleagues show. Mice and rats injected with RANKL develop severe fever, whereas genetically engineered mice with astrocytes lacking RANK appear fever-resistant. The finding tallies with clinical data from two children carrying RANK mutations who failed to develop fever during pneumonia. Female mice lacking RANK also have an increased body temperature, the team show, suggesting that RANKL/RANK help control temperature in a gender-specific manner.
Antibodies against RANKL are in development at present for the treatment of various metabolic bone diseases such as osteoporosis. The authors speculate that the hot flushes that often accompany osteoporosis and hormonal changes in older women could be explained by the actions of RANKL/RANK.
CONTACT
Josef Penninger (Institute for Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria)
Tel: +43 1 79044 ext 4700; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Geology: Dynamic upwelling beneath the Gulf of California (pp 499-501)
A high-resolution seismic study in the Gulf of California has provided evidence for localized centres of buoyancy-driven upwelling in the underlying mantle. The findings, reported in this week’s Nature, bear on a longstanding debate regarding the relative importance of passive and dynamic upwelling in the shallow mantle beneath seafloor-spreading centres.
Mantle upwelling and melting beneath spreading centres is thought to be mostly a passive response to the separating oceanic plates above. But there may also be a dynamic component of upwelling, driven by the buoyancy of melt retained in the rock, or by the lighter chemical composition of rock from which melt has been removed.
Yun Wang and colleagues present a detailed seismic image of the uppermost 200 kilometres of mantle underneath the Gulf of California, where there are several seafloor-spreading segments and lots of seismometers in place. They find three concentrated regions of anomalously low seismic velocity, spaced about 250 km apart, at a depth of 40–90 km below the surface. The authors attribute the low seismic velocities to a higher melt fraction than in the surrounding areas, and suggest that melting initially caused by passive upwelling created buoyant instabilities, which led to a regularly spaced pattern of dynamic, buoyancy-driven upwelling and melting.
CONTACT
Yun Wang (Brown University, Providence, RI, USA)
Tel: +1 401 523 9556; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] & [7] Astronomy: Globular clusters shed light on Galaxy formation (pp 480-482; 483-486; N&V)
Globular star clusters in our Galaxy have a complex story to tell about the processes that formed the Galaxy, according to two papers published in this week’s Nature.
Our Galaxy plays host to about 150 globular clusters — compact collections of stars, tightly bound by gravity, which orbit the Galactic Centre. The traditional view of these clusters is that they are uniformly old, having formed at the same time from a single dense cloud of gas and dust. A prominent exception to this rule has been the most massive globular cluster, omega Centauri. This system, which has several distinct stellar populations differing in composition and age, has been interpreted as the remnant of a disrupted dwarf galaxy that merged with our own Galaxy.
Now it seems that other globular clusters are also remnants of pre-existing galaxies. Jae-Woo Lee and colleagues have measured calcium abundances in 37 globular clusters, and find that about half of them seem to have more than one stellar population. Measurements of other heavy-element abundances in seven of these clusters support this conclusion. Significantly, calcium and the other heavy elements must have been supplied by supernova explosions, and the ejecta from these explosions can only be retained in systems much more massive than the globular clusters are today — hence the conclusion that the clusters are the relics of more massive dwarf galaxies.
In independent work, Francesco Ferraro and colleagues reach the same conclusion for the globular cluster Terzan 5, located in the central bulge of our Galaxy — a region that has been hard to study because of its high concentration of interstellar dust. The two stellar populations identified by the team in Terzan 5 have different ages, as well as different compositions, implying a complex star-formation history characteristic of a pre-existing galaxy.
CONTACT
Jae-Woo Lee (Sejong University, Seoul, Korea) Author paper [6]
Tel: +82 2 3408 3966; E-mail: [email protected]
Francesco Ferraro (University of Bologna, Italy) Author paper [7]
Tel: +39 051 209 5774; E-mail: [email protected]
Judith Cohen (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 626 395 4005; E-mail: [email protected]
[8] And finally… Mirror-image snails made by embryonic manipulation (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature08597
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 25 November 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 26 November, but at a later date. ***
Gently manipulating early snail embryos can reverse the otherwise genetically dictated coiling direction of their shell, a Nature paper reveals. The study sheds light on how 'handedness' develops in invertebrates.
Snail shells coil either to the right or the left, and this 'handedness' is inherited from the mother. Here, Reiko Kuroda and colleagues show that they can reverse this chirality by manipulating eight-cell snail embryos with a pair of tiny glass rods. So genetically 'right-handed' snails develop 'left-handed' shells, and vice versa.
Remarkably, the expression of nodal, a gene that imparts left–right asymmetry in many species, becomes reversed in subsequent development, suggesting that these events operate upstream of the Nodal signalling pathway.
CONTACT
Reiko Kuroda (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
Tel: +81 3 5454 6600; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[9] Structure of the formate transporter FocA reveals a pentameric aquaporin-like channel (pp 467-472)
[10] Structure and hydration of membranes embedded with voltage-sensing domains (pp 473-479; N&V)
[11] Two-dimensional normal state quantum oscillations in a superconducting heterostructure (pp 487-490)
[12] Host plant genome overcomes the lack of a bacterial gene for symbiotic nitrogen fixation (pp 514-517)
[13] An ancient light-harvesting protein is critical for the regulation of algal photosynthesis (pp 518-521)
[14] Innate Immune and Chemically Triggered Oxidative Stress Modifies Translational Fidelity (pp 522-526)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 25 November 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 26 November, but at a later date. ***
[15] Rational Design of a Structural and Functional Nitric Oxide Reductase
DOI: 10.1038/nature08620
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: 4
CANADA:
Vancouver: 1
CHINA
Beijing: 9
CHILE
Santiago: 7
GERMANY
Berlin: 4
Kiel: 2
Munster: 13
ITALY
Bologna: 7
JAPAN
Kariya: 12
Kawaguchi: 11
Kitakyushu: 4
Kisarazu: 12
Kyoto: 4
Nagoya: 4, 12
Oita: 4
Okazaki: 12
Tokyo: 8, 11
Tsukuba: 12
NETHERLANDS
Enschede: 3
Noordwijk: 7
SOUTH AFRICA
Rondebosch: 2
SOUTH KOREA
Pusan: 11
Seoul: 6
TURKEY
Bursa: 4
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
Berkeley: 13
Irvine: 10
Los Angeles: 7
Stanford: 13
Connecticut
New Haven: 1
Illinois
Chicago: 14
Urbana: 15
Maryland
Bethesda: 10, 14
Gaithersburg: 10
Missouri
Columbia: 10
New York
Upton: 15
Rhode Island
Kingston: 5
Providence: 5
Virginia
Charlottesville: 7
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]
About Nature Publishing Group (NPG):
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a publisher of high impact scientific and medical information in print and online. NPG publishes journals, online databases and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine.
Focusing on the needs of scientists, Nature (founded in 1869) is the leading weekly, international scientific journal. In addition, for this audience, NPG publishes a range of Nature research journals and Nature Reviews journals, plus a range of prestigious academic journals including society-owned publications. Online, nature.com provides over 5 million visitors per month with access to NPG publications and online databases and services, including Nature News and NatureJobs plus access to Nature Network and Nature Education’s Scitable.com.
Scientific American is at the heart of NPG’s newly-formed consumer media division, meeting the needs of the general public. Founded in 1845, Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the US and the leading authoritative publication for science in the general media. Together with scientificamerican.com and 15 local language editions around the world it reaches over 3 million consumers and scientists. Other titles include Scientific American Mind and Spektrum der Wissenschaft in Germany.
Throughout all its businesses NPG is dedicated to serving the scientific and medical communities and the wider scientifically interested general public. Part of Macmillan Publishers Limited, NPG is a global company with principal offices in London, New York and Tokyo, and offices in cities worldwide including Boston, Buenos Aires, Delhi, Hong Kong, Madrid, Barcelona, Munich, Heidelberg, Basingstoke, Melbourne, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul and Washington DC. For more information, please go to www.nature.com.
