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Volume 493 Issue 7430, 3 January 2013

Giant spiral galaxies are assembled from smaller systems through a process known as hierarchical clustering. In orbit around these giants are dwarf galaxies, which are presumably remnants of the galactic progenitors. Recent studies of the dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way have lead some astronomers to suspect that their orbits are not randomly distributed. This suspicion, which challenges current theories of galaxy formation, is now bolstered by the discovery of a plane of dwarf galaxies corotating as a coherent pancake-like structure around the Andromeda galaxy, the Milky Ways close neighbour and in many respects its twin�. The structure is extremely thin yet contains about half of the dwarf galaxies in the Andromeda system. The authors report that 13 of the 15 satellites in the plane share the same sense of rotation. On the cover, a true colour image of the Andromeda galaxy, with two satellite galaxies visible, by Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT) and Giovanni Anselmi (Coelum Astronomia).

Editorial

  • Explicit recognition of researchers’ contributions to science is becoming more comprehensive. Not before time — especially as a means of crediting referees.

    Editorial

    Advertisement

  • International laboratory survey offers comfort — and caution.

    Editorial
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World View

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Seven Days

  • The week in science: Shootings set back polio vaccination in Pakistan; FDA approves first medicine for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis; and Italian Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini dies.

    Seven Days
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News

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Obituary

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News Feature

  • The world is starting to win the war against tuberculosis, but drug-resistant forms pose a new threat.

    • Leigh Phillips
    News Feature
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Comment

  • We must preserve the interactions of contemporary researchers for future scholars, urges Georgina Ferry.

    • Georgina Ferry
    Comment
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Books & Arts

  • This is your year if you want to rub shoulders with canine cosmonaut Laika or astronomer Galileo Galilei; travel through time, oscillate, get lost in a fog sculpture or ponder extinction; or listen to sound projected through liquid nitrogen. Jascha Hoffman offers his top tips on science's cultural calendar.

    • Jascha Hoffman
    Books & Arts
  • Cyrus Mody applauds an examination of the twentieth-century scientists who dreamed of breaking the bounds.

    • Cyrus C. M. Mody
    Books & Arts
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Correspondence

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News & Views Forum

  • Fossils found in rocks of the Ediacaran period in Australia have been previously characterized as early marine organisms. But a report suggests that these rocks are fossilized soils. So did some of these Ediacaran organisms in fact live on land, like lichens? A palaeontologist and a geologist weigh up the evidence. See Letter p.89

    • Shuhai Xiao
    • L. Paul Knauth
    News & Views Forum
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News & Views

  • A detailed simulation of the packing behaviour of deformable particles settles the debate about whether soft matter can adopt an unconventional crystal structure at high densities — it can. The hunt is now on for a real-world example.

    • Francesco Sciortino
    • Emanuela Zaccarelli
    News & Views
  • Deep-imaging observations of the Andromeda galaxy and its surroundings have revealed a wide but thin planar structure of satellite galaxies that all orbit their host in the same rotational direction. See Letter p.62

    • R. Brent Tully
    News & Views
  • Irrespective of an organism's size, the proportional sizes of its parts remain constant. An experimental model reveals size-dependent adjustment of segment formation and gene-expression oscillations in vertebrates. See Letter p.101

    • Naama Barkai
    • Ben-Zion Shilo
    News & Views
  • Malfunction of presenilin enzymes, which cleave proteins in cell membranes, can lead to Alzheimer's disease. A crystal structure of a microbial presenilin provides insights into the workings of this enzyme family. See Article p.56

    • Michael S. Wolfe
    News & Views
  • How influential are the various factors involved in curbing global warming? A study finds that the timing of emissions reduction has the largest impact on the probability of limiting temperature increases to 2 °C. See Letter p.79

    • Steve Hatfield-Dodds
    News & Views
  • Nanoscale imaging reveals that bacterial and fungal enzymes use different mechanisms to deconstruct plant cell walls. The finding may provide clues about how to enhance the efficiency of liquid-biofuel production from biomass.

    • Richard A. Dixon
    News & Views
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Article

  • An explicit theoretical construction of a metallic non-Fermi liquid ground state opens a route to attack long-standing problems such as the ‘strange metal’ phase of high-temperature superconductors.

    • Hong-Chen Jiang
    • Matthew S. Block
    • Matthew P. A. Fisher
    Article
  • A Staphylococcus aureus leukotoxin targets cells expressing the chemokine receptor CCR5, a mechanism for the specificity of leukotoxins towards different immune cells.

    • Francis Alonzo III
    • Lina Kozhaya
    • Victor J. Torres
    Article
  • Presenilin, the catalytic component of γ-secretase, cleaves amyloid precursor protein into short peptides that form the plaques that are found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease; here the structure of a presenilin homologue is described, which will serve as a framework for understanding the mechanisms of action of presenilin and γ-secretase.

    • Xiaochun Li
    • Shangyu Dang
    • Yigong Shi
    Article
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Letter

  • Two giant, linearly polarized radio lobes have been found emanating from the Galactic Centre, and are thought to originate in a biconical, star-formation-driven outflow from the Galaxy’s central 200 parsecs that transports a huge amount of magnetic energy, about 1055 ergs, into the Galactic halo

    • Ettore Carretti
    • Roland M. Crocker
    • Sergio Poppi
    Letter
  • Exposing a fused silica sample to a strong, waveform-controlled, few-cycle optical field increases the dielectric’s optical conductivity by more than 18 orders of magnitude in less than 1 femtosecond, allowing electric currents to be driven, directed and switched by the instantaneous light field.

    • Agustin Schiffrin
    • Tim Paasch-Colberg
    • Ferenc Krausz
    Letter
  • The ultrafast reversibility of changes to the electronic structure and electric polarizability of a dielectric with the electric field of a laser pulse, demonstrated here, offers the potential for petahertz-bandwidth optical signal manipulation.

    • Martin Schultze
    • Elisabeth M. Bothschafter
    • Ferenc Krausz
    Letter
  • Modelling that integrates the effects of uncertainties in relevant geophysical, technological, social and political factors on the cost of keeping transient global temperature increase to below certain limits shows that political choices have the greatest effect on the cost distribution.

    • Joeri Rogelj
    • David L. McCollum
    • Keywan Riahi
    Letter
  • The oxygen fugacity of the deepest rock samples from Earth’s mantle is found to be more oxidized than previously thought, with the result that carbon in the asthenospheric mantle will be hosted as graphite or diamond but will be oxidized to produce carbonate melt through the reduction of Fe3+ in silicate minerals during upwelling.

    • Vincenzo Stagno
    • Dickson O. Ojwang
    • Daniel J. Frost
    Letter
  • A new interpretation of fossilized soils (palaeosols) suggests that at least some Ediacaran (625–542 million years ago) organisms lived on land; thus these Ediacaran fossils were not animals, but a fungus-dominated terrestrial biota that predated vascular plants by about 100 million years.

    • Gregory J. Retallack
    Letter
  • Studying six vespertilionid bat species of different sizes to investigate the reason why smaller bats have higher frequency echolocation calls, a model is put forward that the size/frequency range is modulated by the need to maintain a focused, highly directional echolocation beam.

    • Lasse Jakobsen
    • John M. Ratcliffe
    • Annemarie Surlykke
    Letter
  • Visual responses during wakefulness are dominated by inhibition, and this inhibition shapes visual selectivity by restricting the temporal and spatial extent of neural activity.

    • Bilal Haider
    • Michael Häusser
    • Matteo Carandini
    Letter
  • An ex vivo primary culture assay is developed that recapitulates mouse embryonic mesodermal patterning and segment formation; using this approach, it is shown that oscillating gene activity is central to maintain stable proportions during development.

    • Volker M. Lauschke
    • Charisios D. Tsiairis
    • Alexander Aulehla
    Letter
  • DNA damage or replication stress induces the activation of checkpoint kinases, pausing the cell cycle so that DNA repair can take place; checkpoint activation must be regulated to prevent the cell-cycle arrest from persisting after damage is repaired, and now the Slx4–Rtt107 complex is shown to regulate checkpoint kinase activity by directly monitoring DNA-damage signalling.

    • Patrice Y. Ohouo
    • Francisco M. Bastos de Oliveira
    • Marcus B. Smolka
    Letter
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Column

  • Asian researchers and engineers are too rarely made US science leaders, say Lilian Gomory Wu and Wei Jing

    • Lilian Gomory Wu
    • Wei Jing

    Collection:

    Column
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Q&A

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Futures

  • Everything as it should be.

    • Deborah Walker
    Futures
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