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Volume 468 Issue 7321, 11 November 2010

This special issue of Nature includes a series of News Features, Comment pieces and Perspectives on our current knowledge of schizophrenia and the research agenda. Advances in this area might help to control the condition in the next decades. The cover artwork is by Rodger Casier and NARSAD Artworks, a non-profit organization that showcases artists with mental illness. Proceeds from the art go to the research-funding body NARSAD.

Postdoc Journal

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Editorial

  • Research has revealed daunting complexities in the psychiatric condition, but also new routes towards diagnosis and treatment.

    Editorial
  • California climate initiative moves decisively forward, providing a glimmer of hope.

    Editorial
  • A wise report on genetic screening from the Leopoldina has been 350 years in the making.

    Editorial
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World View

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Research Highlights

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Seven Days

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News

  • With global warming hitting the Tibetan plateau hard, scientists gather to plan an international research campaign to understand and mitigate changes at the 'third pole'.

    • Jane Qiu
    News
  • First affordable and effective weapon against killer meningococcal meningitis A rolled out in Africa.

    • Declan Butler
    News
  • Power shift in Congress paves way for Republicans to constrict government spending.

    • Richard Monastersky
    • Jeff Tollefson
    • Eugenie Samuel Reich
    News
  • Direct conversion of cell types could offer safer, simpler treatments than stem cells.

    • Ewen Callaway
    News
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Correction

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News Feature

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Comment

  • The stigma of mental illness will be reduced only if region-specific awareness initiatives become a permanent fixture of health and social services, argues Norman Sartorius.

    • Norman Sartorius
    Comment
  • More rigorous studies should be done on the effects of a therapy that seems to improve the everyday functioning of people with schizophrenia, says Til Wykes.

    • Til Wykes
    Comment
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Books & Arts

  • Novelist Tracy Chevalier describes her experience of judging the entries in this year's Royal Society Prize for Science Books, and explains why she placed a nineteenth-century female fossil hunter at the centre of her last novel.

    • Jennifer Rohn
    Books & Arts
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Correspondence

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Obituary

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News & Views

  • Once a blood vessel supplying the brain has been blocked, the opportunity to prevent brain damage is fleeting. An alternative strategy might be to guide the damaged area onto the path to recovery. See Letter p.305

    • Kevin Staley
    News & Views
  • An approach that entails printing compound-semiconductor ribbons on a silicon substrate offers the means to build nanoscale transistors that can be switched on and off much more effectively than their bulk analogues. See Letter page 286

    • John A. Rogers
    News & Views
  • In both fruitflies and vertebrates, signals from photoreceptor cells are immediately split into two opposing channels in the downstream neurons. This might facilitate the computation of visual motion. See Letter p.300

    • Chi -Hon Lee
    News & Views
  • Measuring Newton's constant of gravitation is a difficult task, because gravity is the weakest of all the fundamental forces. An experiment involving two simple pendulums provides a seemingly accurate but surprising value.

    • Richard Davis
    News & Views
  • One might think that aneuploidy — having an abnormal number of chromosomes — would be harmful, and would reduce an organism's fitness. Not necessarily: it all depends on the type of aneuploidy and the associated conditions. See Letter p.321

    • Judith Berman
    News & Views
  • The discovery of predicted collective electronic behaviour in copper-oxide superconductors in the non-superconducting state provides clues to unlocking the 24-year-old mystery of high-temperature superconductivity. See Letter p.283

    • Chandra Varma
    News & Views
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Perspective

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Introduction

    • Tanguy Chouard
    • Noah Gray
    Introduction
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Review Article

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Article

  • Mutations in the methyl-CpG-binding protein 2 (MeCP2) gene cause Rett syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder with features of autism. Multiple mouse models of MeCP2 have been generated, but show only a subset of the symptoms of Rett syndrome. These authors find that mice with selective deletion of MeCP2 in GABA-mediated neurons show not only impaired GABA-mediated function, but capitulate multiple key features of Rett, further suggesting a role of inhibitory function in neuropsychiatric disease.

    • Hsiao-Tuan Chao
    • Hongmei Chen
    • Huda Y. Zoghbi
    Article
  • The central amygdala relies on inhibitory circuitry to encode fear memories, but how this information is acquired and expressed in these connections is unknown. Two new papers use a combination of cutting-edge technologies to reveal two distinct microcircuits within the central amygdala, one required for fear acquisition and the other critical for conditioned fear responses. Understanding this architecture provides a strong link between activity in a specific circuit and particular behavioural consequences.

    • Wulf Haubensak
    • Prabhat S. Kunwar
    • David J. Anderson
    Article
  • The central amygdala relies on inhibitory circuitry to encode fear memories, but how this information is acquired and expressed in these connections is unknown. Two new papers use a combination of cutting-edge technologies to reveal two distinct microcircuits within the central amygdala, one required for fear acquisition and the other critical for conditioned fear responses. Understanding this architecture provides a strong link between activity in a specific circuit and particular behavioural consequences.

    • Stephane Ciocchi
    • Cyril Herry
    • Andreas Lüthi
    Article
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Letter

  • Recent findings indicate that the pseudogap regime in the high-transition-temperature copper oxides constitutes a new phase of matter rather than a mere crossover phenomenon. These authors report inelastic neutron scattering results for HgBa2CuO4+δ that reveal a fundamental collective magnetic mode associated with the unusual order, further supporting this picture. The mode's intensity rises below the pseudogap characteristic temperature and its dispersion is weak.

    • Yuan Li
    • V. Balédent
    • M. Greven
    Letter
  • A potential route to enhancing the performance of electronic devices is to integrate compound semiconductors, which have superior electronic properties, within silicon, which is cheap to process. These authors present a promising new concept to integrate ultrathin layers of single-crystal indium arsenide on silicon-based substrates with an epitaxial transfer method borrowed from large-area optoelectronics. With this technique, the authors fabricate thin-film transistors with excellent device performance.

    • Hyunhyub Ko
    • Kuniharu Takei
    • Ali Javey
    Letter
  • It is thought that rises in atmospheric oxygen concentrations occurred about 2.3 and 0.8 billion years ago, with the latter implicated in the subsequent evolutionary expansion of complex biota. Sulphur isotope fractionation data from an ancient sedimentary succession in Scotland now suggest that the terrestrial environment was already sufficiently oxygenated to support a biota adapted to an oxygen-rich atmosphere about 1.2 billion years ago.

    • John Parnell
    • Adrian J. Boyce
    • Sam Spinks
    Letter
  • These authors use seismic imaging to accurately measure fault extension at the conjugate west Iberia and Newfoundland margins and compare this with crustal thinning. They use these observations to create a balanced kinematic model of rifting that resolves the extension discrepancy — where crustal thinning seems to be greater than the extension caused by brittle faulting.

    • César R. Ranero
    • Marta Pérez-Gussinyé
    Letter
  • Ramón y Cajal, the founding father of neuroscience, observed similarities between the vertebrate retina and the insect eye, but that was based purely on anatomy. Using state-of-the-art genetics and electrophysiology in the fruitfly, these authors distinguish motion-sensitive neurons responding to abrupt increases in light from those specific to light decrements, thus bringing the similarity with vertebrate circuitry to the functional level.

    • Maximilian Joesch
    • Bettina Schnell
    • Alexander Borst
    Letter
  • Following a stroke, there is generally limited functional recovery, but plasticity in adjacent intact areas may be critical to rehabilitation. These authors report that tonic GABAA inhibition is elevated in cortex immediately surrounding the stroke site. Furthermore, genetically or pharmacologically reducing tonic GABAA receptor signalling leads to improved functional and motor recovery in a mouse model of stroke, suggesting that this could be a new pharmacological target for stroke therapy.

    • Andrew N. Clarkson
    • Ben S. Huang
    • S. Thomas Carmichael
    Letter
  • These authors describe a molecular pathway by which endothelial cells sustain liver regeneration after surgical resection. Activation of vascular endothelial growth factor-A receptor-2 in a defined subpopulation of liver endothelial cells leads to the upregulation of the endothelial-specific transcription factor Id1, which in turn induces Wnt2 and hepatocyte growth factor, which are secreted from the endothelial cells and trigger hepatocyte proliferation.

    • Bi-Sen Ding
    • Daniel J. Nolan
    • Shahin Rafii
    Letter
  • Realizing the full potential of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) in research and clinical applications requires a detailed understanding of the genetic network that governs their unique properties. A genome-wide RNA interference screen identifies a wealth of new regulators of self-renewal and pluripotency properties in hESCs. The transcription factor PRDM14, for example, is required for the maintenance of hESC identity and reprogramming of somatic cells to pluripotency.

    • Na-Yu Chia
    • Yun-Shen Chan
    • Huck-Hui Ng
    Letter
  • Insertion of retrovirus genome into host genome to replicate is mediated by a tetramer of the virus-encoded integrase protein. The structure of a related integrase from prototype foamy virus bound to the cleaved viral DNA ends, a complex called the intasome, was previously revealed. These authors solve the structure of the intasome interacting with the target host DNA both before and after it is cleaved, revealing new details of the integration process that may help in designing improved inhibitors of HIV.

    • Goedele N. Maertens
    • Stephen Hare
    • Peter Cherepanov
    Letter
  • Mononuclear iron-containing oxygenases have many important roles in the cell, including the demethylation of DNA and histones. These authors crystallized the AlkB oxygenase in complex with various modified DNAs. By growing the crystals under anaerobic conditions and then exposing them to dioxygen to initiate oxidation, two different intermediates were trapped. A third type of intermediate was determined using additional computational analysis. These structures provide insight into how these enzymes perform oxidative demethylation.

    • Chengqi Yi
    • Guifang Jia
    • Chuan He
    Letter
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Erratum

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News

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Q&A

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Career Brief

  • Arizona initiative offers support to female doctoral students.

    Career Brief
  • European biology, chemistry and physics programmes get assessed.

    Career Brief
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Futures

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Insight

  • Since their discovery more than 150 years ago, glial cells have been defined by what they couldn't do. Above all, they were considered to lack certain properties of neurons, such as the ability to communicate with other cells through fast electrical and chemical signals. However, recent research suggests that glial cells have a crucial role in brain development and function, and in many diseases of the nervous system.

    Insight
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