Volume 458 Issue 7239, 9 April 2009

Screening programmes for cancer detection are not always as effective at saving lives as might be hoped. Improving the situation will require a concerted effort on a broad front.

The US National Academy of Sciences faces a difficult balancing act over global warming.

President extends US commitment to arms reduction.

Targeting the blood vessels that feed tumours is not the silver bullet once hoped for, but refinements to the strategy may suggest further ways to treat the disease. Erika Check Hayden reports.

From Antarctic icefish to Galapagos finches, there are some interesting characters at the fringes of developmental biology. Brendan Maher explores a world of alternative model organisms.

While researchers in Greece starve for government support, biomedicine is thriving at a lavish new centre in Athens, finds Alison Abbott.

Nick Hopwood applauds an account of how US scientists used images to counter creationism and promote public understanding of evolution in the 1920s.

Twenty-five years ago this week, food writer Harold McGee published a Nature paper on the science of whipping egg whites in copper bowls. Here he explains how he first developed an interest in science and cooking.

The Byzantine system for degrading proteins inside cells is already the target of a successful anticancer drug. A compound that inhibits another part of this system also shows promise in models of cancer in mice.

An experiment flying on a balloon at the edge of the atmosphere offers the deepest far-infrared view of the sky yet achieved, revealing previously unidentified, dust-obscured, star-forming galaxies in the early Universe.

Dietary restriction can prolong life and delay the onset of cancer. Suppressing the signalling pathway that is mediated by the hormone insulin might be crucial for the anticancer effects of reduced caloric intake.

The availability (or lack) of oceanic trace elements is providing fresh lines of explanation for turning points in Earth's history — the Great Oxidation Event being one such momentous occasion.

New techniques circumvent a roadblock to the production of embryonicstem-cell-like lines from adult tissue. Such reprogrammed cell lines should be much safer to use for therapy.

The technique of second harmonic generation microscopy is used to obtain pictures of living systems, but the dyes required provide only modest imaging contrast per molecule. The latest dyes give a much better picture.

Inspiration and innovation in molecular cancer research.

The authors show that mouse or human tumours in which the PI3K/Akt pathway is constitutively activated are resistant to dietary restriction whereas other tumours are sensitive. The authors also implicate the Akt target gene FOXO1 in the response to dietary restriction.

This study has developed the first small molecule NEDD8-activating enzyme (NAE) inhibitor, which induces cancer cell death and exerts anti-tumour activity in preclinical mouse models. This work establishes NAE as an anti-cancer target and may lead to new anti-cancer therapeutics.

Submillimetre surveys have discovered a population of luminous, high-redshift, dusty starburst galaxies, which go through a phase of very rapid star formation, resulting in approximately equal extragalactic optical and far infrared backgrounds (FIRB). Devlin et al. report an extragalactic survey at 250, 350 and 500 µm; they determine that all of the FIRB comes from individual galaxies, with galaxies at redshift z ≥ 1.2 accounting for 70 per cent of it.

Despite the complexity and diversity of nature, universality exists in the form of critical scaling laws for dissimilar systems such as stock markets, lung inflation and earthquakes. This universality seems to depend only on the symmetry and dimension of the system. Kab-Jin Kim and co-authors demonstrate that in ferromagnetic nanowires, the magnetic domain wall dynamics are universal even when the system changes from two dimensional to one.

The Nernst effect in metals is sensitive to superconductivity and density-wave order. The large positive Nernst signal observed in hole-doped high-transition-temperature superconductors has been attributed to fluctuating superconductivity but Olivier Cyr-Choiniere and colleagues report that the Nernst signal can be caused by stripe order. In LSCO doped with Nd or Eu, the onset of stripe order causes the Nernst signal to go from small and negative to large and positive.

Tricobalt tetraoxide (Co₃O₄) is a potential catalyst for low-temperature oxidation of carbon monoxide (required in automotive emission control) but although it is active even at subzero temperatures, it is highly sensitive to moisture. By forming Co₃O₄ into nanorods, Xiaowei Xie and colleagues make it more active and also stable in the presence of water; they attribute these improvements to the high density of catalytically active Co³⁺ sites exposed on the nanorod surface.

A decrease in atmospheric methane levels might have triggered the progressive rise of atmospheric oxygen about 2.4 billion years ago, but the cause of this methane decrease remains uncertain. Kurt Konhauser and colleagues report a decline in the oceanic nickel-to-iron ratio about 2.7 billion years ago, which they attribute to a reduced flux of nickel to the oceans; this decline would have stifled the activity of methane-producing organisms that require nickel to function.

How constrained is the ecology of a species by its phylogenetic history? The authors assess the extent of biome conservatism — the tendency of a species to occupy the same niche as its ancestors — in over 11,000 Southern Hemisphere plants, 15% of the total flora of the Southern Hemisphere continents. They show that only 3.6% of the evolutionary divergences in their study involved a shift of biome, demonstrating the strong influence of biome conservatism.

The histone demethylase Jhdm2a (also known as Kdm3a) has an important role in nuclear hormone receptor-mediated gene activation and male germ cell development. Here the authors disrupt the Jhdm2a gene in mice to demonstrate that Jhdm2a also regulates expression of metabolic genes such as Ppara and Ucp1; the obese phenotype of the knockout mice indicates the demethylase is involved in regulation of weight control.

This paper shows that c-Myc regulates the microRNAs miR-23a and miR-23b to increase the expression of the mitochondrial enzyme glutaminase. This leads to enhanced glutamine metabolism and contributes to the metabolic changes in c-Myc-driven cancers.

This paper uses the piggyBac transposon to generate stable iPS cells from human and mouse fibroblasts; the individual piggyBac insertions can then be removed from established iPS cell lines. The study also demonstrates removal of reprogramming factors joined with 2A sequences (described in an accompanying paper; doi:10.1038/nature07864) delivered by a single transposon from murine iPS lines.

This paper presents a technique to reprogram mouse and human fibroblasts to induce pluripotency. The authors show that the transgene can be removed once reprogramming has been achieved with a piggyBac transposon (described in an accompanying paper; doi:10.1038/nature07863). This system minimizes genome modification in induced pluripotent stem cells and enables complete elimination of exogenous reprogramming factors.

Here it is shown that Hedgehog signalling is important in chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), where it acts to maintain leukaemia stem cells by regulating the expression of Numb. CML stem cells can be depleted when Hedgehog signalling is inhibited, including cells that are resistant to the drug imatinib that is used to treat CML.

This study shows that cancer stem cell in breast tumours have lower levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) than the rest of the tumour cells. This property renders cancer stem cells less sensitive to radiation therapy, which may cause radioresistance in breast cancer.

This study reports the structures of two complexes: Rat1–Rai1 and Dom3Z (the mouse Rat1 homologue)–Rai1. These structures reveal the mechanism of exonuclease activity and define the catalytic differences with another class of nucleases containing a PIN domain. The work also reveals that Rai1 has pyrophosphohydrolase activity, the first such activity found in eukaryotes.

Awards allow young scientists to pursue risky research.

Vietnamese science struggles.

Research park planned in Minnesota.

Solar power firm downsizing.

Researchers who study environmental influences on cancer tend to receive a fraction of the funds available to those researching cancer cures. But career opportunities exist — and may even be expanding. Heidi Ledford reports.

The sin of self.