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Volume 523 Issue 7560, 16 July 2015

In a collaboration with Scientific American, Nature takes a look at modern movements in teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). By applying the principles of twenty-first century learning, educators should be able to produce scientists better prepared for the modern, multidisciplinary workforce and a more science-literate populace in general. Cover: Vasava

Editorial

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World View

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Research Highlights

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Social Selection

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Seven Days

  • Report criticizes the APA for colluding on torture; South Korean government is sued over MERS; and Pluto gets sized up by New Horizons.

    Seven Days
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News

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Correction

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News Feature

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Comment

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Books & Arts

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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • In fruit flies, protrusions can extend from stem cells in the testes to cells in a regulatory hub, mediating intercellular signalling and stem-cell maintenance. The implications of this finding are presented here from two angles. See Letter p.329

    • Thomas B. Kornberg
    • Lilach Gilboa
    News & Views
  • A compilation of more than 300,000 rock compositions provides crucial input into a 100-year-old debate on how the continental crust formed, and provides new constraints for theories of continental-crust development. See Article p.301

    • Christy Till
    News & Views
  • Activation of a cellular stress response and the transcription factor XBP1 in dendritic cells has now been shown to limit the cells' ability to stimulate antitumour immune responses in a mouse model of ovarian cancer.

    • Miriam Merad
    • Hélène Salmon
    News & Views
  • Laboratory measurements confirm that a 'buckyball' ion is responsible for two near-infrared absorption features found in spectra of the interstellar medium, casting light on a century-old astrochemical mystery. See Letter p.322

    • Pascale Ehrenfreund
    • Bernard Foing
    News & Views
  • The effects of mutations in proteins can depend on the occurrence of previous mutations. It emerges that such historical contingency is also important during the evolution of gene regulatory networks. See Letter p.361

    • Aaron M. New
    • Ben Lehner
    News & Views
  • EPR3, a plant protein, is found to act as a probable receptor for exopolysaccharide molecules that surround the plant's symbiotic bacteria. The advance sheds light on how recognition is governed in symbiotic relationships. See Article p.308

    • Sharon R. Long
    News & Views
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Article

  • A global geochemical data set of volcanic and plutonic rocks indicates that differentiation trends from primitive basaltic to felsic compositions for volcanic versus plutonic samples are generally indistinguishable in subduction-zone settings, but are divergent in continental rifts.

    • C. Brenhin Keller
    • Blair Schoene
    • Jon M. Husson
    Article
  • This paper describes the discovery of the exopolysaccharide receptor (Epr3) in plants, and shows that its expression is induced upon perception of the bacterial Nod factors; the EPR3 receptor recognizes exopolysaccharides on the surface of rhizobia, thus controlling the symbiotic infection of the roots of legumes.

    • Y. Kawaharada
    • S. Kelly
    • J. Stougaard
    Article
  • Progesterones, oestrogens and their receptors (PR, ERα and ERβ) are essential in normal breast development and homeostasis, as well as in breast cancer; here it is shown that PR controls ERα function by redirecting where ERα binds to the chromatin, acting as a proliferative brake in ERα+ breast tumours.

    • Hisham Mohammed
    • I. Alasdair Russell
    • Jason S. Carroll
    Article
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Letter

  • The observed range of luminosities of the extremely hot ‘blue hook’ stars of the globular cluster ω Centauri is successfully explained by a model in which the progenitors of these stars are second-generation helium-rich stars characterized by a range of rotation rates arising during the cluster’s very early evolution.

    • Marco Tailo
    • Francesca D’Antona
    • Roberto Capuzzo-Dolcetta
    Letter
  • Organohalide perovskites and preformed colloidal quantum dots are combined in the solution phase to produce epitaxially aligned ‘dots-in-a-matrix’ crystals that have both the excellent electrical transport properties of the perovskite matrix and the high radiative efficiency of the quantum dots.

    • Zhijun Ning
    • Xiwen Gong
    • Edward H. Sargent
    Letter
  • Fluorescent labelling is used to show that in E. coli, outer membrane protein (OMP) turnover is passive and binary in nature, and OMPs cluster to form islands in which diffusion of individual proteins is restricted owing to lateral interactions with other OMPs; new OMPs are inserted mostly at mid-cell, meaning that old OMP islands are displaced to the poles of growing cells.

    • Patrice Rassam
    • Nikki A. Copeland
    • Colin Kleanthous
    Letter
  • The central nervous system undergoes constant immune surveillance, but the route that immune cells take to exit the brain has been unclear as it had been thought to lack a classical lymphatic drainage system; here functional lymphatic vessels able to carry both fluid and immune cells from the cerebrospinal fluid are shown to be located in the brain meninges.

    • Antoine Louveau
    • Igor Smirnov
    • Jonathan Kipnis
    Letter
  • Quantification of single-cell growth over long periods of time in E. coli shows transient oscillations in cell size, with periods stretching across more than ten generations; a noisy negative feedback on cell-size control is proposed in which cells with a small initial size tend to divide later than cells with a large initial size with implications for the genetic and physiological processes required.

    • Yu Tanouchi
    • Anand Pai
    • Lingchong You
    Letter
  • Epistatic interactions, whereby a mutation's effect is contingent on another mutation, have been shown to constrain evolution within single proteins, and how such interactions arise in gene regulatory networks has remained unclear; here the appearance of pheromone-response regulator binding sites in the regulatory DNA of the a-specific genes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae are shown to have required specific changes in a second pathway during the evolution from its common ancestor with Candida albicans.

    • Trevor R. Sorrells
    • Lauren N. Booth
    • Alexander D. Johnson
    Letter
  • Retroviruses such as HIV rely on the intasome, a tetramer of integrase protein bound to the viral DNA ends interacting with host chromatin, for integration into the host genome; the structure of the intasome as it interacts with a nucleosome is now solved, giving insight into the integration process.

    • Daniel P. Maskell
    • Ludovic Renault
    • Peter Cherepanov
    Letter
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Corrigendum

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Retraction

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Erratum

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Feature

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Futures

  • A rude awakening.

    • Dan Stout
    Futures
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