Volume 453 Issue 7198, 19 June 2008

A renewed push for scientific research into weather-modification technologies is long overdue.

... but the European Research Council's success is undermined by practices beyond its control.

United States in race to commercialize pluripotent stem cells.

Universities under pressure to investigate researchers' industry funding.

Cage-cleaning chemicals cause birth defects and fertility problems in mice.

Planet discovery is embedded in an anagram.

Scribbles on the margins of science.

Physicists reveal why paper curls the way it does.

Ethics campaigners highlight extent of research funded by defence agencies.

War is declared on the introduced pests.

Is it really possible to stop rain, invoke lightning from the heavens or otherwise manipulate the weather? Jane Qiu and Daniel Cressey report on the once-scorned notion of weather modification.

As the first grants from the European Research Council begin to come through, Geoff Brumfiel investigates whether the new system is meeting its goals.

A survey suggests that many research misconduct incidents in the United States go unreported to the Office of Research Integrity. Sandra L. Titus, James A. Wells and Lawrence J. Rhoades say it's time to change that.

A joint exploration of early modern physics and the surreal art movement shows these twentieth-century revolutions had more in common than we thought, explains Philip Ball.

Actor Alan Alda, who starred in the television series M^*A^*S^*H and now hosts Scientific American Frontiers on US network PBS, is fascinated with physics. At last month's World Science Festival in New York he led a panel discussing the quantum world, portrayed Richard Feynman in the play QED, and presented Dear Albert, his new play drawn from Albert Einstein's letters.

Statistical analysis can inform the history of music, classification technologies, and our understanding of the act of composition itself, argues Damián Zanette.

Believed to be the world's first printed document, the Phaistos Disc was unearthed 100 years ago. Andrew Robinson explains why this remarkable object remains undeciphered.

Following multiple physiological variables or cell types in vivo requires specific probes. Microfabricated magnetic particles could produce such tuneable contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging.

Paralysed patients would benefit if their thoughts could become everyday actions. The demonstration that monkeys can use brain activity for precise control of an arm-like robot is a step towards that end.

Transformation of normal cells into cancer cells entails concerted changes in the expression of many genes. Identifying which of those genes are crucial will provide insight into the mechanisms underlying malignancy.

At the interface between two compounds, physical properties can emerge that neither material displays on its own. A striking example of such an effect occurs at the border between two organic molecular crystals.

Mutations in collagen lead to hereditary disorders such as brittle-bone disease. Peptide models for aberrant collagens are beginning to clarify how these amino-acid replacements lead to clinical problems.

The genome sequence of a species of amphioxus, an iconic organism in the history of evolutionary biology, opens up a fresh vista on the comparative investigation of chordates and vertebrates.

Different material options for high-temperature superconductivity— conduction of electricity with little or no resistance at 'practical' temperatures — have arrived. Iron compounds are the latest thing.

Medical entomologist and a humanitarian campaigner.

A family of magnetic microstructures that should enable similar multiplexing capabilities in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of biological samples have been developed. It is shown that careful control of the geometry of these magnetic particles yields well-defined spectral signatures in the radio-frequency spectrum used for MRI, effectively giving them characteristic 'colours' that can be readily distinguished from one another.

The PML tumour suppressor gene is involved in the development of some forms of leukaemia. New research has identified a role for PML in the quiescence and maintenance of haematopoietic stem cells and of leukaemia-initiating cells. PML can be targeted by arsenic trioxide and was shown to eliminate leukaemia-initiating cells, supporting its use as an anti-leukemia therapy.

Two stars born at the same time, from the same natal material, and with the same mass are 'identical twins', and as such might be expected to possess identical physical attributes. But this paper reports that a pair of twin stars have surface temperatures that differ by ∼300 K and luminosities that differ by ∼50 per cent. These surprising dissimilarities suggest that one of the twins may have been delayed by several hundred thousand years in its formation relative to its sibling.

Planetary aurorae are formed by energetic charged particles streaming along the planet's magnetic field lines into the upper atmosphere from the surrounding space environment. At Saturn only the main auroral oval has been observed, but this paper reports the discovery of a secondary oval, ∼25 per cent as bright as the main oval.

Placing silicon under strain can enhance the ease with which the charge carriers move through the semiconductor, so strain is now engineered into the latest silicon devices. A new approach that incorporates two well known techniques, moiré interferometry and electron holography, to yield a method that combines high spatial resolution and precision with a large field of view has been developed, thus overcoming almost all of the limitations of existing techniques for strain measurement.

This paper reports improved estimates of near-global ocean heat content and thermal expansion for the upper ocean from 1950–2003, applying corrections to reduce systematic biases in the most common ocean temperature observations. The ocean warming and thermal expansion trends for 1961–2003 are about 50 per cent larger than earlier estimates but about 40 per cent smaller for 1993–2003, consistent with the recognition that previously estimated rates for the 1990s were biased by instrumental errors.

Plant stem cell pools are established during embryogenesis. Auxin is required for root-stem specification, whereas the role of cytokinin remains unclear. This study demonstrates that cytokinin is expressed during early embryogenesis and that an interplay between auxin and cytokinin signalling pathways is critical for specifying the first root stem cell niche.

A system where monkeys use their motor cortical activity to control a robotic arm in a real-time self-feeding task, showing a significantly greater sophisitication of control than in previous studies, is demonstrated. This work could be important for the development of more practical neuro-prosthetic devices in the future.

Vocal communication requires both hearing external stimuli, and keeping track of one's own vocalizations during speech. In several species, including humans, auditory neurons are suppressed during vocalization, but the function of this was unclear. In marmosets, neurons in primary auditory cortex are more sensitive to perturbations in vocal feedback despite the general suppression, a possible mechanism for active monitoring of self-generated sounds.

Polyglutamine (polyQ) diseases are a class of dominantly inherited neurodegenerative disorders caused by the expansion of a CAG repeat encoding glutamine within the coding region of the respective genes. PolyQ has been thought to cause neurodegeneration due to protein toxicity. In contrast, pathogenesis in other repeat diseases, such as myotonic dystrophy, is thought to result from the expression of toxic RNA repeats. Here evidence is provided that pathogenesis caused by ataxin-3, which contains CAG repeats, also involves an RNA-mediated component.

A new study identifies a list of genes synergistically regulated by the Ras oncogene and loss of the p53 tumour suppressor gene. A high proportion of these genes are essential for tumour formation in vivo, whereas only very few of the genes regulated by only either Ras or p53 are important. This establishes a new approach to finding genes important in tumourigenesis that may also represent novel targets for tumour therapy.

It is shown that mice lacking the enzyme catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) develop a pre-eclampsia-like syndrome which can be ameliorated by 2-methoxyestradiol (2-ME), which is produced by COMT. Although this mouse model doesn't completely recapitulate pre-eclampsia seen in women, it is found that the levels of COMT and 2-ME are diminished in women with pre-eclampsia, and 2-ME might therefore be of therapeutic value.

The mechanism by which the widely used vaccine adjuvant alum acts on the immune system has been unclear to-date. This paper shows that alum-mediated stimulation of the adaptive immune response requires activation of the Nalp3 inflammasome in antigen presenting cells.

Caenorhabditis elegans (which haeme auxotrophs), are used to identify the proteins involved in haeme homeostasis. It is shown that the proteins of HRG-1 and its paralogue HRG-4 are essential for haeme homeostasis, as they are novel transmembrane proteins residing in an intracellular department. Transient knockdown of hrg-1 in zebrafish led to hydrocephalus, yolk tube abnormalities, and defects in erythropoesis. The human and worm HRG proteins co-localize, and bind and transport haeme, showing there is evolutionary conservation of its function.

Aurora B is a kinase important for mitosis, and is shown to generate a spatial gradient of phosphorylated substrates in anaphase with the highest concentration at the spindle midzone. Generation of this gradient involves a microtubule-dependent mechanism of aurora B activation. The gradient is proposed to provide important spatial information during mitosis.

Navigating the grey areas of industry-academia interactions.

Robin Mejia reports on the perils and opportunities of doing scientific work that is funded by private companies.

Noted physicist Neil Turok heads to Canada.

FDA initiates major hiring wave.

Finding refuge in my science.

A step-by-step guide.

Astronomers find that identical twin stars are not always the same.

Improvements in techniques to manipulate light and matter are facilitating exciting applications of quantum mechanics. Scientists from diverse areas of research are now seeking to harness and exploit quantum coherence and entanglement for quantum simulations and quantum information processing.