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Water droplets cooling rapidly in vacuum are probed by an intense pulse from a femtosecond X-ray laser before they turn to ice, providing Jonas Sellberg et al. with unique structural information on the deeply supercooled liquid phase in the so-called no-mans land, where waters anomalous properties become strongly enhanced, but where ice forms too quickly for normal measurement techniques to cope. In a second paper Jeremy Palmer et al. explore water in this regime with advanced simulation methods, finding a phase transition between two structurally distinct liquids that could explain many water anomalies. Cover: Gregory Steward, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
The week in science: Chile axes giant hydroelectric dams; calls to dismantle RIKEN’s centre for developmental biology; and Europe’s medicines agency frees data on drug trials.
Members of the US National Academy of Sciences have long enjoyed a privileged path to publication in the body's prominent house journal. Meet the scientists who use it most heavily.
Elena Cattaneo and Gilberto Corbellini are among the academics working to protect patients from questionable stem-cell therapies. Here, they share their experiences and opinions of the long, hard fight for evidence to prevail.
The finding that phosphoinositide-3-OH kinase δ restrains the antitumour immune response by promoting the action of suppressive immune cells may broaden the applicability of drugs targeting this enzyme to multiple cancers. See Letter p.407
“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future,” goes the proverb. A study of the dynamics of chaotic systems in the context of information theory adds a twist to this saying.
Undernourished children fall behind not only on growth, but also on maturation of their intestinal bacterial communities, according to a study comparing acutely malnourished and healthy Bangladeshi children. See Letter p.417
What gives quantum computers that extra oomph over their classical digital counterparts? An intrinsic, measurable aspect of quantum mechanics called contextuality, it now emerges. See Article p.351
The enzyme parkin is known to promote disposal of organelles called mitochondria that have suffered damage. The identification of an enzyme that opposes parkin demonstrates how a delicate balance is maintained in the cell. See Article p.370
An approach based on quantum sensing, in which controlled quantum systems serve as precision sensors, has enabled measurement of the weak magnetic interaction between two electrons bound to two separate ions. See Letter p.376
Quantum computing promises advantages over classical computing for certain problems; now ‘quantum contextuality’ — a generalization of the concept of quantum non-locality — is shown to be a critical resource that gives the most promising class of quantum computers their power.
The Eucalyptus grandis genome has been sequenced, revealing the greatest number of tandem duplications of any plant genome sequenced so far, and the highest diversity of genes for specialized metabolites that act as chemical defence and provide unique pharmaceutical oils; genome sequencing of the sister species E. globulus and a set of inbred E. grandis tree genomes reveals dynamic genome evolution and hotspots of inbreeding depression.
Damaged mitochondria are removed by mitophagy, and defects in mitophagy are linked to Parkinson’s disease; here it is shown that USP30, a deubiquitinase localized to mitochondria, antagonizes mitophagy by removing the ubiquitin tags put in place by Parkin, USP30 inhibition is therefore potentially beneficial for Parkinson’s disease by promoting mitochondrial clearance and quality control.
The magnetic interaction between two electrons is measured at the micrometre scale, exhibiting spin entanglement generation over 15 seconds of coherent evolution; varying the inter-electron separation shows a distance dependence consistent with the inverse-cube law.
Femtosecond X-ray laser pulses are used to probe the structure of liquid water in micrometre-sized droplets that have been cooled below the homogeneous ice nucleation temperature, revealing the existence of metastable bulk liquid water down to temperatures of 227 kelvin.
A stable crystal phase and two metastable liquid phases of the ST2 model of water exist at the same deeply supercooled condition, and the two liquids undergo a first-order liquid–liquid transition that meets stringent thermodynamic criteria.
Seismic data from subduction zones that exhibit slow earthquakes reveal that the ratio of compressional-wave to shear-wave velocity of the overriding forearc crust is linearly related to the average recurrence time of slow earthquakes and that this may be associated with quartz enrichment within the forearc crust.
A mouse study reveals that the stem cell quiescent state is composed of two distinct phases, G0 and GAlert; stem cells reversibly transition between these two phases in response to systemic environmental stimuli acting through the mTORC1 pathway.
Ageing in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans is shown to be delayed by supplementation with α-ketoglutarate, an effect that is probably mediated by ATP synthase—which is identified as a direct target of α-ketoglutarate—and target of rapamycin (TOR).
A mouse model of T-cell leukaemia is used to test whether PTEN loss is required for tumour maintenance as well as initiation; although it had little effect on tumour load in haematopoietic organs, PTEN reactivation reduced the CCR9-dependent tumour dissemination to the intestine that was amplified on PTEN loss, exposing the importance of tumour microenvironment in PTEN-deficient settings.
The kinase PI(3)Kδ is shown to be required for the immunosuppressive function of regulatory T cells; inactivation of PI(3)Kδ in these cells leads to enhanced cytotoxic T-cell function and restricts tumour growth and metastasis in a variety of mouse tumour models.
CFIm25 is identified as a factor that prevents messenger RNAs being shortened due to altered 3′ polyadenylation, which typically occurs when cells undergo high proliferation and correlates with increased tumorigenic activity in glioblastoma tumours.
Bacterial species whose representation defines healthy postnatal assembly of the gut microbiota in Bangladeshi children during their first 2 years are identified, and a model is constructed to compare healthy children to those with severe acute malnutrition (SAM); results show that SAM is associated with microbiota immaturity that is only partially ameliorated by existing nutritional interventions.
Crystal structures of human and prokaryotic ribosomal oxygenases reported here, with and without their ribosomal protein substrates, support their assignments as hydroxylases, and provide insights into the evolution of the JmjC-domain-containing hydroxylases and demethylases.
How sulphur is incorporated into sulphur-containing secondary metabolites is poorly understood; here, the bacterium Amycolatopsis orientalis is shown to co-opt sulphur-carrier proteins from primary metabolic pathways to facilitate the biosynthesis of sulphur-containing natural products.