Volume 454 Issue 7200, 3 July 2008

A treasure-trove of data in the UK National Health Service is set to energize biomedical research.

Not unless a research institution's managers recognize its value.

Max Planck researchers charged with misusing data.

Geologist claims personal views led to job denial.

Astronomers plan successor for Ulysses spacecraft.

Physicists reverse quantum-classical transition.

Science-publishing firm struggles to make ends meet with open-access model.

Scribbles on the margins of science.

Rich nations and emerging economies join to discuss world's most pressing issues.

Phylogeny of Spiders project offers close-ups of spiders' silk producers.

Scientists need a carefully crafted strategy to catch the attention of policy-makers. David Goldston explains.

Entomologists are briefing the military on how to protect troops from the scourge of the desert: sandflies. Rex Dalton reports.

A difference in one molecule led physician Ajit Varki to question what sets humans apart from other apes. Bruce Lieberman meets a man who sees a big picture in the finer points.

Launched in 1977, NASA's Voyager missions transformed humanity's view of the Solar System. Now in their fourth decade, they are sending back information about the borderlands of interstellar space. Here, three veterans recall details and moments that meant something special along the way.

Research is riddled with strong characters; Walter Gratzer applauds a spirited attempt to get their measure.

Primatology meets socio-cultural analysis in a controversial account of human evolution.

A cache of beautiful nineteenth-century German scientific devices that has survived many misfortunes now needs a new home, reports Alison Abbott.

In the last of nine Essays on science and music, John Sloboda argues that researchers must study music as people actually experience it, if they are to understand how it affects thoughts and feelings.

If we are to learn how to develop a healthy society, we must transform history into an analytical, predictive science, argues Peter Turchin. He has identified intriguing patterns across vastly different times and places.

If the first cells were simple vesicles, how did nutrients cross their membranes without help from transport proteins? A model of a primitive cell suggests that early membranes were surprisingly permeable.

The Voyager 2 spacecraft has now followed Voyager 1 into the region beyond the end of the supersonic solar wind, where the influence of interstellar space is growing — so opening a new age of exploration.

Two ideas vie for prominence in community ecology — 'niche partitioning' and 'neutral theory'. A survey of patterns of tree abundance in tropical forest prompts fresh thinking on their respective effects.

A glitch in the history of sulphur isotopes could imply that methane emitted by the ancient biosphere created a high-altitude photochemical smog, which governed the climate in a distinctly Gaian way.

Picture a simple molecule as two balls attached together by a compressible spring. If an incoming atom strikes one end of the molecule, the spring compresses and the vibrating molecule jumps backwards. Or does it?

Introducing just four specific genes into adult cells causes them to regress to an embryonic stem-cell-like state. At 1%, the efficiency of this process is low, but two tips are at hand on how to make improvements.

Rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide lead to acidification of the oceans. A site in the Mediterranean, naturally carbonated by under-sea volcanoes, provides clues to the possible effects on marine ecosystems.

A genomic analysis of the reprogramming of murine fibroblasts and B lymphocytes was performed. It is shown that fully reprogrammed cells display gene expression and epigenetic states that are highly similar to embryonic stem cells. But in stable partially reprogrammed cell lines, there is reactivation of a distinct subset of stem cell-related genes and incomplete repression of lineage-specifying transcription factors.

Some of the TGF-β family of growth factors are responsible for contractility in vascular smooth muscle cells. This paper demonstrates that in response to ligand, TGF-β and bone morphogenetic proteins (BMP) promote the processing of a microRNA, miR-21, which regulates several genes involved in contractility. This occurs through a direct interaction of TGF-β and BMP with the DROSHA miRNA processing complex.

The Voyager 2 spacecraft observed a decrease in solar wind speed commencing on about 9 June 2007, which culminated in several crossings of the termination shock between 30 August and 1 September 2007. This paper reports that the heliosphere is asymmetric and that the flow is still supersonic with respect to the thermal ions downstream of the termination shock.

Data from the plasma and magnetic field instruments on Voyager 2 indicate that non-thermal ion distributions probably play key roles in mediating dynamical processes at the termination shock and in the heliosheath. Intensities of low-energy ions measured at Voyager 2 produce non-thermal partial ion pressures in the heliosheath that are comparable to (or exceed) both the thermal plasma pressures and the scalar magnetic field pressures. The acceleration of ions extracts a large fraction of bulk flow kinetic energy from the incident solar wind.

The supersonic (with respect to the interstellar medium) solar wind creates a heliospheric bubble around the Sun. A termination shock occurs where the wind abruptly slows and forms the heliosheath. Voyager 2 crossed the termination shock at 83.7 au in the southern hemisphere. The intensity of 4–5 MeV protons accelerated by the shock near Voyager 2 was three times that observed concurrently by Voyager 1, indicating differences in the shock at the two locations.

A transition between the supersonic solar wind and the subsonic heliosheath happens at the 'termination shock'. This paper reports observations of the magnetic field structure and dynamics of the termination shock, made by Voyager 2 on 31 August–1 September 2007 at 83.7 au from the Sun. The data revealed a complex shock of moderate strength undergoing reformation on a scale of a few hours, rather than the expected days

Plasma waves are a characteristic feature of shocks in plasmas, and the electric fields of these waves play a key role in dissipating energy in the shock and driving the particle distributions back toward thermal equilibrium. Starting on 31 August 2007 and ending on 1 September 2007, a series of intense bursts of broadband electrostatic waves signalled a series of crossings of the termination shock at a heliocentric radial distance of 83.7 au.

The recent Voyager 2 measurements across the termination shock found that the shocked solar wind plasma contains only ∼20 per cent of the energy released by the termination shock, whereas energetic particles above ∼28 keV contain only ∼10 per cent. This paper reports the detection and mapping of energetic neutral atoms produced by charge exchange of suprathermal ions with interstellar neutrals. These termination shock-energized pickup ions contain the missing ∼70 per cent of the energy dissipated in the termination shock, and they dominate the pressure in the heliosheath.

The spreading of a paste or emulsion on a surface is a familiar process, yet the underlying physics is highly complex, as the properties of these materials lie somewhere between those of solids and liquids. Thin films of such materials can exhibit very different behaviour compared to the bulk, being highly dependent on both the film thickness and the roughness of the surface on which they are flowing. For example, a thin creamy film may spread much more easily than what would be expected from its bulk flow properties.

A simple and much-studied example of vibrationally inelastic collisions is the crashing of a hydrogen atom into a deuterium molecule. This experiment reveals a different inelastic scattering mechanism: it observed vibrational excitation even in collisions where the two species merely graze each other, and which is attributed to extension of the D-D bond through interaction with the passing H atom. This tug of war mechanism should be at play whenever attraction can develop between the colliding partners.

The recent discovery of diamond graphite inclusions in the Earth's oldest zircon grains from the Jack Hills metasediments in Western Australia provides a unique opportunity to investigate Earth's earliest known carbon reservoir. This paper reports ion microprobe analyses of the carbon isotope composition of these diamond-graphite inclusions and finds low carbon isotopic ratios, which may reflect deep subduction of biogenic surface carbon. But such carbon isotope values may also be produced by inorganic chemical reactions.

The ecological impact of ocean acidification as a result of climate change is difficult to predict. A natural CO₂ venting site is used here to demonstrate the shifts occurring in a rocky shore marine community as a result of a pH gradient.

Extinction is a fundamental process in biological systems, and is central to our understanding of biodiversity and evolution. The use of mathematics linked to experiments on insect populations shows that different kinds of randomness in the life of an animal combine together in such a way that the risk of extinction is many times higher than previously thought possible.

This paper identifies a novel population of progenitor cells that come from the pro-epicardial organ. These cells, which express the transcription factor Tbx18, migrate to the outer surface of the heart to form the epicardium, and they also contribute to myocytes in the ventrical septum and atrial and ventricular walls, as well as to cardiac fibroblasts and coronary smooth muscle cells. Thus these progenitors seem to be pluripotent.

In this paper, a new type of cardiac progenitor, marked by the transcription factor Wt1, is shown to reside in the proepicardium and epicardium. It is shown that during normal heart development, a subset of Wt1⁺ precursors differentiated into fully functional cardiomyocytes, and they arise from Wt1 progenitors that express Nkx2-5 and Isl1, suggesting that they share a developmental origin with multipotent Nkx2 5⁺/Isl1⁺ progenitors.

Caenorhabditis elegans uses a pair of anatomically similar sensory neurons in its head to taste salt and moves towards higher concentrations. It is shown that the neuron on the left fires when salt concentration increases, whereas the one on the right responds to a decrease in concentration. Accordingly, activity in the left sensory neuron stimulates the animal to crawl ahead, while activity of the cell on the other side induces turning.

Relapse to cocaine use after abstinence is often induced by drug-associated cues. Cocaine-seeking depends on activation of glutamatergic AMPA receptors in the nucleus accumbens. It is now shown that the number of AMPA receptors increases during abstinence in rodents, and that these new receptors also have a higher conductance. Moreover, these additional receptors were critical for the increased reactivity of nucleus accumbens neurons to cocaine-related cues.

The membranes of modern cells are made of phospholipids, which are formidable barriers to the uptake of polar and charged molecules, a challenge to our understanding of the origins of cellular life. Membranes made of simple amphiphiles, such as fatty acids, allow the passage of charged molecules (such as nucleotides), while retaining longer genetic polymers made from them inside such protocells. Primitive cells could thus have acquired complex nutrients from their environment in the absence of any transport machinery.

A signal-induced non-coding RNA is shown to act like a ligand to activate a specific RNA-binding protein, TLS. This protein in turn represses gene transcription by inhibiting a histone acetyltransferase coactivator.

As much of the developed world moves to recognize same-sex relationships, gay scientists in some places are swimming against a conservative tide that limits partners' rights. Bryn Nelson reports

Reproductive-sciences researcher has made it big since a tough move to the United States.

Shock physics gets a funding jolt.

Lab meetings are great. But getting people to participate can be difficult.

Casualties of war.

Unusual brain receptors weaken resistance to cocaine cravings.