Volume 470 Issue 7332, 3 February 2011

Historic scientific collections deserve better than to gather dust.

The Global Fund should be praised for coming clean about fraud by grant recipients.

The week in science.

Adult cells do not fully convert to embryonic-like state.

Procedural transparency is at issue as a US agency transfers a high-precision radio dish to an international partner.

Goals include commercialization of research and emphasis on energy, biomedicine and information technology.

The European Commission should free its Framework programme from political interference and red tape.

Britain's space ambitions lack financial fuel.

'Top ten' crucial questions set research priorities for the field.

Launched in 2009 to seek out worlds beyond the Solar System, the Kepler mission is exceeding expectations. Is it closing in on another Earth?

The search for planets outside our Solar System will always be pricey. But creative solutions are proving that it no longer has to break the bank.

Extracting minerals from sea-floor vents should not go ahead without a coherent conservation framework, argues Cindy Lee Van Dover.

Neil deGrasse Tyson enjoys a passionate and personal account of the demotion of Pluto.

The tale of the first female to sail around the world deserves a more accurate telling, says Sandra Knapp.

Two books reach opposite verdicts on how the Internet affects us, find Daphne Bavelier and C. Shawn Green

A Paris exhibition contrasts 1920s depictions of the fourth dimension, find Stefan Michalowski and Georgia Smith.

Discoverer of the hormone that regulates the production of red blood cells.

Two approaches have emerged for creating libraries of compounds for use in biological screening assays for drug discovery — fragment-based ligand design and diversity-oriented synthesis. Advocates of each approach discuss their favoured strategy.

A remarkable example has been discovered of a plant tuning its immune defence against a pathogen. The tuning consists of maximal expression of the relevant genes at the time of day when attack is most likely. See Letter p.110

Conventional wisdom tells us that supermassive black holes are found exclusively in massive galaxies undergoing little star formation. But one such object has now been discovered in a star-forming dwarf galaxy. See Letter p.66

Fragile sites are genomic regions prone to deletions or other alterations during DNA replication. The reason for the susceptibility of these sites to damage may be simple: they contain few replication initiation sites. See Letter p.120

The aquatic plant Salvinia molesta is a widespread pest of waterways in the tropics and subtropics. A study of its control by a weevil in Australian billabongs sets a new standard in ecological time-series analysis. See Letter p.86

The rising trend in atmospheric concentrations of methane over the past 5,000 years has been attributed to human agency. A modelling study, of a power that has only now become possible, points to another cause. See Letter p.82

What role did the Arabian peninsula play in the expansion of our species out of Africa? An archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates provides tantalizing new evidence that supports an early human migration from Africa.

When an extrasolar planet passes in front of its star (transits), its radius can be measured from the decrease in starlight and its orbital period from the time between transits. This study reports Kepler spacecraft observations of a single Sun-like star that reveal six transiting planets, five with orbital periods between 10 and 47 days plus a sixth one with a longer period. The five inner planets are among the smallest for which mass and size have both been measured, and these measurements imply substantial envelopes of light gases.

Harnessing information from whole genome sequencing in 185 individuals, this study generates a high-resolution map of copy number variants. Nucleotide resolution of the map facilitates analysis of structural variant distribution and identification of the mechanisms of their origin. The study provides a resource for sequence-based association studies.

Henize 2-10 is a nearby dwarf starburst galaxy that may be similar to galaxies in the infant Universe. It is reported that Henize 2-10 contains a compact radio source at the dynamical centre of the galaxy that is spatially coincident with a hard X-ray source, from which it is concluded that Henize 2-10 harbours an actively accreting central black hole with a mass of approximately one million solar masses. The results confirm that nearby star-forming dwarf galaxies can indeed form massive black holes, and by implication so can their primordial counterparts.

Spin ensembles, such as those used in liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance, have been important for the development of quantum control methods. However, these demonstrations contained no entanglement, which is essential for a quantum information processor. This study reports the on-demand generation of entanglement between an ensemble of electron and nuclear spins in phosphorus-doped silicon, simultaneously creating 10¹⁰ spin pairs.

The start-up of the new femtosecond hard X-ray laser facility in Stanford, the Linac Coherent Light Source, has brought high expectations for a new era for biological imaging. The intense, ultrashort X-ray pulses allow diffraction imaging of small structures before radiation damage occurs. This new capability is tested for the problem of structure determination from nanocrystals of macromolecules that cannot be grown in large crystals. Over three million diffraction patterns were collected from a stream of nanocrystals of the membrane protein complex photosystem I, which allowed the assembly of a three-dimensional data set for this protein, and proves the concept of this imaging technique.

The start-up of the new femtosecond hard X-ray laser facility in Stanford, the Linac Coherent Light Source, has brought high expectations for a new era for biological imaging. The intense, ultrashort X-ray pulses allow diffraction imaging of small structures before radiation damage occurs. This new capability is tested for the problem of imaging a non-crystalline biological sample. Images of mimivirus are obtained, the largest known virus with a total diameter of about 0.75 micrometres, by injecting a beam of cooled mimivirus particles into the X-ray beam. The measurements indicate no damage during imaging and prove the concept of this imaging technique.

The source of what seems to be an anomalous increase in atmospheric methane concentrations about 5,000 years ago compared to methane levels during previous interglacial periods has puzzled researchers. Possible explanations for the rise in methane levels include very early agricultural activity. Climate and wetland simulations of global methane levels over the last glacial cycle now suggest that the increase in methane concentrations can be explained by natural changes in the Earth's orbital configuration, with enhanced emissions in the Southern Hemisphere tropics linked to precession-induced modification of seasonal precipitation

Alternative stable states are common in ecosystems, and pose problems for management, but most studied examples are of strongly stable states that switch only rarely after major perturbations. This study fits a model of weakly stable states to a billabong system in which biological control is applied to an invasive weed. Frequent changes in water availability cause shifts between states in which control either is or is not effective. Understanding these shifts could allow intervention to keep the system in the controlled state.

Jawless fish were recently shown to possess T- and B-like lymphocytes expressing diverse assembled antigen receptors. This study identifies and characterizes lympho-epithelial thymus-like structures at the tips of gill filaments of lamprey larvae, thus providing evidence that the similarities underlying the adaptive immune systems of both types of vertebrate appear to extend to primary lymphoid organs.

Fish can regenerate nephrons (the functional units of the kidney) de novo after kidney injury, whereas adult mammals lack this ability. This study identifies a pool of self renewing nephron stem/progenitor cells that are responsible for nephrogenesis during kidney growth and regeneration in zebrafish. The findings might provide an insight into how mammalian renal regeneration may be therapeutically activated.

Neuronal plasticity is thought to be the source of several chronic neurological conditions, including tinnitus. Using a rodent model for noise-induced tinnitus, this study finds that reversing neural plasticity induced by the tinnitus can correct perceptual impairments caused by the ailment. Pairing tones with stimulation of the vagus nerve sharpened auditory neuron tuning and eliminated the physiological as well as behavioural correlates of the tinnitus. This proof of principle suggests that simply restoring normal neural activity to circuits that have been pathologically modified could provide a benefit in those ailments involving aberrant neural plasticity.

Using a temporal series of growth factor manipulations to mimic embryonic intestinal development in culture, this study has successfully directed the differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (both embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells) into intestinal tissue. This approach may provide therapeutic benefit for disease studies.

Circadian rhythms regulate a wide variety of developmental and metabolic processes resulting in enhanced fitness. In this study, a link is made between plant immune responses and the circadian clock. Plant defence against a fungal pathogen which causes downy mildew disease in Arabidopsis is studied, and it is shown that a novel set of defence genes are regulated by the circadian regulator CIRCADIAN CLOCK-ASSOCIATED 1 (CCA1). The mechanism allows plants to 'anticipate' infection at dawn when the pathogen normally disperses its spores. Such a cross-talk mechanism reveals an important strategy for plants to time immune responses against pathogens.

This study finds frequent mutations in MYD88 in the activated B-cell-like subtype of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and, with lower frequency, in mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue lymphomas. MYD88 mediates signalling by Toll-like receptors, and the mutations, most of which affect the same amino acid, are shown to activate the pathway and promote cancer cell survival.

Some chromosomal locations, known as common fragile sites, are predisposed to breakage. These sites have pathogenic relevance as they are frequently associated with chromosomal translocations. Here, it is found that rather than breakage being due to replication stalling, the fragility of site FRA3B results from an unusually low density of replication origins in this region. Unexpectedly, fragility is found to be cell-type-specific, which may have implications for current models of translocations.

Recruitment of 53BP1 to double-strand DNA breaks is an important step in the cellular response to DNA damage. Here, the histone methyltransferase MMSET is shown to be responsible for localized increases in a histone modification that is involved in recruiting 53BP1. The mechanism of MMSET recruitment to DNA damage sites is also investigated.

Switching to a new postdoc may be risky and challenging, but it does not have to be career-threatening.

Jonathan Rothberg has sparked his career with invention and entrepreneurship.

Trade mission.