Volume 462 Issue 7269, 5 November 2009

An emissions trading scheme gives forests a market value on the basis of how much carbon they sequester. It could help to control global warming — if developing nations meet their responsibilities.

The sacking of a government adviser on drugs shows Britain's politicians can't cope with intelligent debate.

Nature's birthday offers an occasion to reflect on the past and look to the future.

The week in science

If adopted, the move would put the country ahead of other developing nations on emissions curbs.

Focus shifts to blocking parasite transmission.

US politicians, once supportive of a massive research project on childhood health, are now criticizing it.

Vertebrates in line for massive sequencing project.

First major round of research targeted at therapies takes off.

Access to crystals may hamper bid to repeat experiment.

Budgets set to double as new government backs previous spending commitments.

Our departing columnist David Goldston reflects on some misconceptions about science and politics.

Projects in Madagascar could provide a model for stemming deforestation. But first these efforts must deal with the poverty and political upheaval that threaten forests, reports Anjali Nayar.

Unsatisfied with merely halting environmental destruction, some conservationists are trying to reconstruct ecosystems of the past. Emma Marris travels back in time with the rewilders.

Darwin's idea of the 'struggle for existence' struck a chord with his fellow countrymen. But Russians rejected the alien metaphor, says Daniel Todes, in the second of four weekly pieces on reactions to evolutionary theory.

A book blaming a fungus for the disappearance of amphibians from wild places wrongly downplays the role of environmental change, warn Alan Pounds and Karen Masters.

Immune cells cross the inflamed blood–brain barrier. But it's unclear how brain inflammation begins before immune-cell entry. Studies of a model of multiple sclerosis start to solve this 'chicken and egg' conundrum.

Earthquakes occur within continental tectonic plates as well as at plate boundaries. Do clusters of such mid-plate events constitute zones of continuing hazard, or are they aftershocks of long-past earthquakes?

Mutations in RAS genes are common in human tumours, but RAS has proved impossible to target with drugs. Its associated NF-κB signalling pathway, however, may turn out to be this tumour gene's Achilles heel.

The mechanisms that govern the rate at which glasses soften on heating have long been a mystery. The finding that colloids can mimic the full range of glass-softening behaviours offers a fresh take on the problem.

During meiotic cell division, chromosome pairs exchange genetic material in a tightly controlled crossover process. Higher-order chromosome structure may regulate this genetic reshuffling at two distinct stages of meiosis.

With this issue, it is 140 years since Nature first appeared on 4 November 1869. To mark the anniversary, these two pages offer a miscellany from that issue and from 1889, 1909, 1929, 1949, 1969 and 1989.

Many transcription factors bind to regulatory DNA elements that are distant from gene promoters. These distal binding sites are thought to regulate transcription through long-range chromatin interactions, but, until now, the impact of chromatin interactions on transcription regulation has not been investigated in a genome-wide manner. A new strategy — chromatin interaction analysis by paired-end tag sequencing — is now described for the de novo detection of global chromatin interactions.

The precise patterns of gene expression required for development are primarily controlled by transcription factors binding to cis-regulatory modules; however, decoding this regulatory landscape remains challenging. Here, a novel approach is used to predict spatio-temporal cis-regulatory activity based only on in vivo transcription factor binding and enhancer activity data, and is then applied to Drosophila mesoderm development.

The surface of hot neutron stars is known to be covered by a thin atmosphere but observations have been unable to confirm the atmospheric composition of isolated neutron stars. An analysis of archival observations of the compact X-ray source in the centre of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant now reveals that an extremely young carbon-atmosphere neutron star (with low magnetic field) produces a good fit to the spectrum.

There are two different approaches for creating complex atomic many-body quantum systems — the macroscopic and the microscopic — which have, until now, been fairly disconnected. A quantum gas 'microscope' is now demonstrated that bridges the two approaches and can be used to detect single atoms held in a Hubbard-regime optical lattice. This quantum gas microscope may enable addressing and read-out of large-scale quantum information systems based on ultracold atoms.

In a photonic crystal, the periodicity of the host medium is used to manipulate the properties of light, whereas in a phononic crystal it is mechanical vibrations that are subject to such control. Here, a structure that acts as both a photonic and phononic crystal — an 'optomechanical' crystal — is described; the strong coupling between photons and phonons realized in this structure should find application in a host of sensing and communication technologies.

Glasses can be divided into fragile or strong, depending on whether they show a marked dependence of their relaxation time with temperature when approaching the glass transition. Although colloidal particles have previously been found to produce only fragile glasses, here it is shown that deformable colloidal particles exhibit the same variation in fragility as that observed in molecular liquids. Colloids are easy to study, so this model should provide new insight into glass formation in molecular systems.

Within plate interiors, assessments of earthquake hazards rely heavily on the assumption that the locations of the few recorded small earthquakes reflect continuing deformation that will cause future large earthquakes. Here, however, a simple model shows that many of these recent earthquakes are probably aftershocks of large earthquakes that occurred hundreds of years ago, causing earthquake prediction to overestimate hazard in presently active areas, and underestimate it elsewhere.

In the face of fluctuating environmental conditions, bet hedging — stochastic switching between phenotypes — can be an advantageous strategy. But how does bet hedging evolve? The de novo evolution of bet hedging in experimental bacterial populations subjected to an environment that continually favoured new phenotypic states is now reported. The findings suggest that risk-spreading strategies may have been among the earliest evolutionary solutions to life in fluctuating environments.

The tissues of the central nervous system are shielded from the blood circulation by specialized vessels, impermeable to cells and most circulating macromolecules. Despite this, central nervous system tissues are subject to immune surveillance and are vulnerable to autoimmune attack. Here, intravital two-photon imaging is used to observe, in real-time, the interactive processes between effector T cells and cerebral structures leading to an experimental rat model of autoimmune encephalitis.

Activation of innate immune responses by nucleic acids is crucial to protective and pathological immunities. This activation is known to be mediated by transmembrane Toll-like receptors and cytosolic receptors; however, it remains unclear whether a mechanism exists that integrates these two nucleic-acid-sensing systems. High-mobility group box (HMGB) proteins 1, 2 and 3 are now shown to function as universal sentinels for nucleic-acid-mediated innate immune responses.

NF-κB transcription factors have been implicated in cellular transformation and tumorigenesis, but despite extensive biochemical characterization of NF-κB signalling, its requirement in tumour development is not completely understood. Here, the NF-κB pathway is shown to be required for the development of tumours in a mouse model of lung adenocarcinoma in a p53-status-dependent manner, providing support for the development of NF-κB inhibitory drugs as targeted therapies.

KRAS is a proto-oncogene that is mutated in a wide variety of human cancers. Although this makes KRAS an obvious candidate for the development of targeted therapies, it has so far remained refractory to this approach. Systematic RNA interference is now used to detect synthetic lethal partners of oncogenic KRAS, revealing that TBK1 and NF-κB signalling are essential in KRAS mutant tumours. This may provide an alternative approach for targeting KRAS therapeutically.

Redox processes, which are at the heart of numerous functions in chemistry and biology, are accomplished in nature by only a limited number of redox-active agents. A long-standing issue is how redox potentials are fine-tuned over a broad range with little change to the redox-active site or electron-transfer properties. Here it is shown that two important secondary coordination sphere interactions, hydrophobicity and hydrogen-bonding, are capable of tuning the reduction potential of a single cupredoxin over a 700 mV range.

Anthropogenic addition of bio-available nitrogen to the global nitrogen cycle has led to a host of environmental problems. Copper-containing nitrite reductase (CuNIR) is a key enzyme in the process of denitrification by catalysing the one-electron reduction of nitrite to nitric oxide, but details of the mechanism of the electron-transfer reaction are still unknown. Here, the high-resolution crystal structure of the electron-transfer complex for CuNIR is presented and analysed.

It's not enough to be an expert on a specific topic. Today's scientists also need to be able to apply their knowledge, argues Peter Fiske.

An interdisciplinary networking site for scientists.

Chance plays an important part in our career decisions.

Retirement benefits and perks figure in survey rankings.

Top students abandon US pipeline for science, technology, engineering and medicine.

European Research Council reorganizes its structure and management.

The final demonstration of the failure of cold fusion.