Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
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.
Decreased rates of recovery from perturbations, or critical slowing down, are demonstrated in a living system, indicating that recovery rates can be used to probe the resilience of complex systems.
Mammalian zinc finger protein Ars2 is revealed as a sequence-specific transcription factor that promotes the self-renewal of postnatal and adult neural stem cells by directly activating transcription of the pluripotency factor Sox2.
X-ray diffraction is used to show that the structural distortion of magnetite below 125 kelvin is to a first approximation caused by charge ordering of its constituent iron ions, but that the localized electrons are distributed over three iron sites to form ‘trimeron’ quasiparticles.
A type of interaction blockade that occurs for ultracold atoms confined to an optical lattice may offer a means of reducing the temperature and, thus, entropy of quantum gases to the level necessary for quantum simulation.
A continuous record of hydrologic variability for the past 17,000 years at the mouth of the Zambezi River shows that hydrologic conditions in southeast Africa were controlled by variations in local insolation and migrations of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, rather than by Indian Ocean temperature.
Affinity tagging, mass spectroscopy and a tailor-made scoring system are used to identify 497 high-confidence interactions between human proteins and human immunodeficiency virus proteins.
The transcription cofactor CBF-β is shown to regulate the ability of HIV-1 to evade host restriction mediated by the deaminase APOBEC3; it acts by interacting with the HIV protein Vif, so disrupting the Vif–CBF-β interaction could provide a new therapeutic target against HIV-1 infection.
A solution-processing method known as solution shearing is used to introduce lattice strain to organic semiconductors, thus improving charge carrier mobility.
Loss of a snorkelling residue in integrin β TMDs changes membrane embedding and affects transmembrane signalling, showing that snorkelling can have an important role in signal transduction
Insights into the rotary mechanism of the Thermus thermophilus ATP synthase are obtained using electron cryomicroscopy to determine its three-dimensional structure calculated to subnanometre resolution.
Thousands of quorum-sensing Escherichia coli colonies are synchronized over centimetres using redox signalling to create ‘biopixels’ that can sense trace amounts of arsenic in water.
NMR and single molecule FRET experiments show that antiparallel EmrE dimers interconvert between two identical but oppositely oriented conformations that are each open only to one side of the membrane.
Use of nanomechanical resonators has the potential to offer microwave amplification with the minimum possible added noise, namely that due to quantum fluctuations.
Within the previous framework of jamming, granular systems were expected to jam only above a critical density, but here it is shown that application of shear to frictional grains can lead to a rich set of anisotropic jammed states at densities below this critical value.
Use of a three-level system allows the Toffoli gate, an important primitive for quantum error correction schemes, to be implemented with many fewer elementary gates than was previously thought possible.