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Hadza women Chausiki and Sislem (with baby) pick ngwilabee berries. The Hadza of northern Tanzania are almost totally cut off from the modern developed world, providing anthropologists with a useful model of an early hunter-gatherer society. A study of Hadza social networks, quantifying their ties to each other and their propensity to cooperate, shows that the main characteristics of modernized networks, such as transitivity and homophily, are observed in the Hadza. In addition, social ties are more likely between individuals with similar levels of public goods game donations, and Hadza camps exhibit high between-group and low within-group variation in cooperation. Taken together, these results provide the strongest evidence so far that these key features of human networks reflect shared ancestry and may have developed at an early point in human history. Photo: Martin Schoeller/August
To create a sustainable, open research literature, governments need to find the finances to make it viable — and recognize that adding value to diversifying research outputs has its own costs.
The week in science: Tar-sands pipeline pulled; radioactive material stolen from nuclear plant under construction in Egypt; and decision on whether to ditch the leap second is postponed.
Purkinje cells in the brain region known as the cerebellum act by inhibiting their target neurons. A paper in this issue provides an explanation for how this inhibition might be used to control the timing of action potentials. But experts are not equally convinced about the functional relevance of this finding. See Letter p.502
Three examples of a new family of planets, which orbit a pair of stars rather than a single one, have been discovered. The Milky Way may contain millions of these circumbinary planets. See Letter p.475
A study of social networks in the hunter-gatherer Hadza people in Tanzania illuminates the evolutionary origins of humans' unique style of cooperation in groups. See Letter p.497
The ligand-mediated binding of colloid particles to each other is more effective if the particles are flat rather than curved. This finding opens up opportunities for the design of self-assembling materials.
With the laser just over half a century old, another dream of the pioneers of this light source has been fulfilled. An atomic X-ray laser with unprecedentedly high photon energy has been demonstrated. See Letter p.488
Different cell types produce signals that regulate the activity of blood-forming stem cells. A study shows that certain rare mesenchymal cells surrounding blood vessels are the main source of one such signal in mice. See Article p.457
Most drug candidates fail clinical trials, in many cases because the compounds have less than optimal physico-chemical properties. A new method for assessing the 'drug-likeness' of compounds might help to remedy the situation.
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A femtosecond, high-intensity atomic X-ray laser with a photon energy of 849 electronvolts is produced in singly ionized neon by pumping using an X-ray free-electron laser.
Kinetic control of the self-assembly of the π-conjugated oligomer S-chiral oligo(p-phenylenevinylene) (SOPV) reveals two competing pathways, leading to a kinetically favoured metastable product and a thermodynamically favoured stable product with opposite helicity, but the addition of a chiral tartaric acid changes the assembly process to produce only the desired metastable product.
The social networks of Hadza hunter-gatherers are structurally similar to modern social networks and show signs of clustering in cooperative behaviour, which suggests that these networks may have contributed to the emergence of cooperation in early humans.
Through a combination of intrinsic and synaptic properties, synchronous activation of a small number of Purkinje cells can set the spike timing of target neurons in the cerebellar nuclei.
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The function of the KCNH family of potassium channels is critical for the repolarization of the cardiac action potential and the regulation of neuronal excitability; here, the X-ray crystal structure of the cyclic-nuclotide-binding homology domain of the zebrafish ELK channel is reported.