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Nature press release for 12 July issue
July 12, 2001[412175] RELICS: NEW HOMINID FOSSILS (pp175-178, 178-181; N&V)
Some glimpses of the earliest human ancestry are revealed this week as researchers present new fossils of hominids — members of the human family — that lived more than 5 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia.
Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the University of California, Berkeley, reports new hominid specimens from the Middle Awash area of Ethiopia that date to between 5.8 and 5.2 million years ago. The fossils are fragmentary remains of teeth, jaws and limb bones, and are believed to belong to an early form of Ardipithecus ramidus, which at the time of its original description was the earliest known hominid, at 4.4 million years old (see T. D. White et al., Nature vol. 371, pp. 306–312, 1994).
In the same issue, Giday WoldeGabriel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, and colleagues describe the geology and environment of the location in which the new specimens were found. Their findings support the view that hominids spent some time in forests before moving to more open country some time after 4.4 million years ago.
Henry Gee of Nature sets the results in the context of recent hominid discoveries in an accompanying News and Views article.
CONTACT:
Yohannes Haile-Selassie (currently in Addis Ababa) tel +251 9 22 41 38 (mobile), email ethio@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Giday WoldeGabriel tel +1 505 667 7590, email wgiday@lanl.gov
Professor Tim White (co-author) In Ethiopia after 07/08/01 and prefers interviews via E-mail (timwhite@socrates.berkeley.edu ). Please, no attachments.
[412145] EARTH: LOST CITY FOUND (pp145-149; N&V)
A huge new type of hydrothermal vent field, named ‘Lost City’, has been discovered in the North Atlantic, 15 kilometres from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, researchers report in this week’s Nature. Mineral deposits produced by the vents stand up to 60 metres above the sea-floor, making them the largest hydrothermal chimneys of their kind ever observed.
Most known hydrothermal fields are found along ocean ridges where young rocks and molten magma are close to the surface. The newly discovered vent field is located on 1.5-million-year-old crust and fuelled by vent fluids much cooler than normal ‘black smoker’ vents. The discovery, reported by Deborah Kelley of the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues, implies that the number of hydrothermal vents on the sea floor may be far greater than previously thought.
The temperature and chemical composition of the Lost City vent fluids are similar to those predicted to have occurred during the early years of life on Earth. So the rich microbial communities found there — which await full investigation — may reveal new insights into the origin of life on Earth.
“We can be sure that studies of Lost City will provide new ways of thinking about hydrothermal activity and its relationship to ocean chemistry, and perhaps to the evolution of early life on Earth,” says Karen Von Damm of the University of New Hampshire in an accompanying News and Views article.
CONTACT:
Deborah Kelley tel +1 206 543 9279, e-mail kelley@ocean.washington.edu
Karen Von Damm tel +1 603 862 1718, e-mail kvd@cisunix.unh.edu
[412150] BRAIN: fMRI GOES WITH THE FLOW (pp150-157; N&V)
This week, in a technical tour de force, Nikos Logothetis and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics at Tübingen in Germany report that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows brain cells (neurons) receiving and processing electrical signals. Previously, no one knew whether the bright areas in fMRI images were due to this or to some other aspect of neuron function, such as their production of electrical pulses when stimulated by other neurons.
Logothetis’ team prove for the first time that what the fMRI technique really measures are changes to the flow of blood in the brain. When a group of neurons in the brain becomes active, it needs more blood, and so it generates a signal in an fMRI scan.
Using a completely new technique, Logothetis and colleagues measured the fMRI signal in the primary visual cortex of monkeys at the same time as the electrical activity of the neurons. They found that the fMRI signal was most strongly related to the input and processing of signals, rather than the production of output pulses. This, they say, makes sense: processing inputs is the most energy-consuming part of a neuron’s job, and so needs more fuel. This fuel is glucose, burnt up by oxygen — both of which are carried in the bloodstream.
In an accompanying News and Views article Marcus E. Raichle of the Washington University Medical Center in St Louis describes the work as “a major step forward” that “portends even more exciting advances in the future”.
CONTACT:
Nikos Logothetis tel +49 7071 601 650 email nikos.logothetis@tuebingen.mpg.de
Marcus Raichle tel +1 314 362 6907 e-mail: marc@npg.wustl.edu
[412163] SPACE: SATURN’S DIRTY DOZEN (pp163-166; N&V)
Twelve new moons of Saturn have been discovered. This brings the planet’s total to 30: the most in the Solar System. The new moons are small — from about 6 to 30 kilometres in diameter — and are moving in irregular, tilted orbits.
The moons fall into several clusters, leading Brett Gladman, of the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur, Nice, France, and colleagues to conclude that they are the remnants of larger satellites that have been fragmented by collisions. The moons probably began life as wandering bodies that were captured by Saturn’s gravity.
Gladman and colleagues found the moons by scanning Saturn with sophisticated electronic detectors mounted on medium-sized, ground-based telescopes. In an accompanying News and Views article, Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland suggests that the same techniques will soon find more moons around Jupiter.
CONTACT:
Brett Gladman tel +33 4 92 07 63 22, e-mail gladman@obs-nice.fr
Douglas Hamilton tel +1 301 405 1548, e-mail hamilton@astro.umd.edu
[412181] EVOLUTION: SPECIES EXPLOSION RAPID AND RECENT (pp181-183)
South Africa’s Cape region hosts a spectacular abundance of plant species. These evolved rapidly and recently, report James E. Richardson of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Surrey, UK, and colleagues in this week’s Nature. Diversification, they estimate, began 7–8 million years ago when changes in ocean currents dried out the area. Other factors that drove the riot of speciation were a high diversity of soil types, microclimates created by the region’s mountains and fires.
“We need to understand the evolutionary origins and ages of such ‘hotspots’ to conserve them effectively,” say the researchers. The scant fossil and climate records have to date made the history of continental species hard to piece together.
CONTACT:
James E Richardson (currently at the University of California, Santa Cruz) e-mail jamesr@darwin.ucsc.edu
[412190] LIFELINES: TB’s STICKING POINT (pp190-194)
One factor that makes tuberculosis (TB) hard to treat is that the bacteria causing it — Mycobacterium tuberculosis — spreads from the lungs to other parts of the body. Camille Locht of the Institut Pasteur de Lille, France, and colleagues now show that this process depends on interactions between one of the bacteria’s surface proteins, ‘mycobacterial heparin-binding haemagglutinin adhesin’ (HBHA), and the cells that line our vessels and tissues — epithelial cells.
In mice, disrupting the gene that codes for this protein (hbha) reduces colonization by M. tuberculosis of the spleen, but not the lungs, the group reports. The leprosy pathogen and other mycobacteria produce similar adhesins, suggesting that these molecules facilitate their dissemination and growth on mucosal surfaces, and hence might be a potential target for new drugs and vaccines.
TB, the world’s leading cause of death due to a single infectious agent, kills 3 million people and infects a further 10 million each year.
CONTACT:
Camille Locht tel +33 3 20 87 1151, e-mail camille.locht@pasteur-lille.fr
[412140] ENVIRONMENT: POLLUTED SEWAGE AS FERTILIZER (pp140-141)
Sewage sludge used as fertilizer in the United States contains high concentrations of organic pollutants. Robert Hale and colleagues, of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Gloucester Point, found brominated diphenyl ethers (BDEs), widely used as flame retardants, in samples of ‘biosolids’ from both the eastern US and California, and also in freshwater fish.
The BDEs may have come from polyurethane foam, which contains large amounts of a flame retardant called Penta. The concentrations of this chemicalin human breast milk are rising exponentially, and the European Commission has recently called for a ban. “It seems that BDEs are an important — but generally unrecognized — persistent organic pollutant in the United States,” write the researchers in a Brief Communication.
CONTACT:
Robert Hale tel +1 804 684 7228, e-mail hale@vims.edu
[412141] BRAIN: COKE CRAVINGS CONTINUE (pp141-142)
Craving for cocaine gets worse, rather than better, as the period after withdrawal lengthens, at least in rats. The result mirrors the suggestion that craving in human cocaine addicts ‘incubates’, to emerge months after drug taking has stopped.
In a Brief Communication, Yavin Shaham and colleagues, of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Baltimore, describe how they trained rats to self-administer cocaine, and then withdrew the drug for periods ranging from 1 to 60 days. When presented with the cues associated with cocaine once more, rats that had been off the drug the longest made the most effort to get another fix.
CONTACT:
Yavin Shaham tel +1 410 550 1746, e-mail yshaham@intra.nida.nih.gov
[412139] ECOLOGY: SHORT SHARK SHOCK (pp139-140)
Male great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are wanderers, but females are stay-at-homes. This finding, together with other aspects of their biology such as their long lives and low number of offspring, gives shark ecology more in common with that of whales and dolphins than with fish, and may have implications for the conservation of these endangered predators.
Andrew Martin of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues, analysed mitochondrial DNA — which passes down the female line — in different shark populations and found that sharks from Australia and New Zealand were unlike those in South African coastal waters off South Africa, with little gene flow between the two, confirming that females prefer to stick to their home ground. Nuclear DNA showed no such differentiation, indicating that male sharks roam the oceans, write the researchers in a Brief Communication.
CONTACT:
Andrew Martin tel +1 303 492 2573, e-mail am@stripe.colorado.edu
[412198] LIFELINES: CELL SUICIDE OR CELL EUTHANASIA? (pp198-202, 202-206; N&V)
Janitor cells that engulf their dead compatriots are not averse to finishing off the job on a cell that’s only nearly dead. Engulfment itself can promote cell suicide (apoptosis), H. Robert Horvitz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and colleagues have found from studies of apoptosis-regulating genes in the roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans.
Also in this week’s Nature, Michael O. Hengartner, of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and colleagues explain how they have used time-lapse video microscopy to follow, in detail, how genes regulate cell suicide. They too conclude that the genes that mediate corpse removal can also actively kill cells.
The extent and timing of apoptosis has important consequences for development, body maintenance, tumour formation and disease, explain Douglas R. Green and Helen M. Beere of La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, San Diego, California, in an accompanying News and Views article.
CONTACT:
Michael O Hengartner (currently at the University of Zurich) tel +41 1 635 3140, e-mail michael.hengartner@molbio.unizh.ch
H Robert Horvitz tel +1 617 253 4671, e-mail horvitz@mit.edu
Douglas R. Green tel +1 858 678 3543, e-mail dgreen5240@aol.com
[412158] SPACE: SPACE-TIME PASSES TEST (pp158-160)
General relativity passes a tough test in this week’s Nature. W. van Straten of the Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues report that they have characterized, with unprecedented accuracy, the orbit of the binary millisecond pulsar PSR J0437-4715, a mere 450 light years away.
The group’s radio observations reveal the three-dimensional structure of the orbiting neutron star (the actual pulsar) and its white dwarf companion. These initial observations of the binary system provide a positive test of general relativistic predictions of space-time curvature.
Pulsar PSR J0437-4715 now has a claim to being the most precisely located astronomical object. This, combined with its unsurpassed timing stability, mean it may play a role in many future cosmological debates.
CONTACT:
Willem van Straten tel +61 39214 5244, e-mail wvanstra@mania.physics.swin.edu.au
[412183] …AND FINALLY: WINDS OF CHANGE (pp183-186)
This week Thomas W. Schoener of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues relate how the arrival of Hurricane Floyd in the Bahamas was a fortuitous scientific event. The hurricane arrived two years into an experiment involving predator introduction into island-based ecological communities, providing an unexpected opportunity to observe the effects of a catastrophic event on the structure of an ecosystem. This is an important factor in estimating the potential impact of global climate change.
On islands where there was no predator, the prey lizard survived the storm, mostly in the form of eggs, and populations recovered to original levels. But on two-thirds of the islands where a predatory lizard had been introduced, the prey populations became extinct after the hurricane. This shows how biotic interactions can magnify the impact of a catastrophic event. “Conservation biology might profit from consideration of both kinds of effects in analysing extinction risk,” Schoener’s group concludes.
CONTACT:
Thomas W Schoener tel +1 916 752 7465, e-mail twschoener@ucdavis.edu
Nature Publishing Group Reference
This week, in a technical tour de force, Nikos Logothetis and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics at Tübingen in Germany report that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows brain cells (neurons) receiving and processing electrical signals. Previously, no one knew whether the bright areas in fMRI images were due to this or to some other aspect of neuron function, such as their production of electrical pulses when stimulated by other neurons.
Logothetis’ team prove for the first time that what the fMRI technique really measures are changes to the flow of blood in the brain. When a group of neurons in the brain becomes active, it needs more blood, and so it generates a signal in an fMRI scan.
Using a completely new technique, Logothetis and colleagues measured the fMRI signal in the primary visual cortex of monkeys at the same time as the electrical activity of the neurons. They found that the fMRI signal was most strongly related to the input and processing of signals, rather than the production of output pulses. This, they say, makes sense: processing inputs is the most energy-consuming part of a neuron’s job, and so needs more fuel. This fuel is glucose, burnt up by oxygen — both of which are carried in the bloodstream.
In an accompanying News and Views article Marcus E. Raichle of the Washington University Medical Center in St Louis describes the work as “a major step forward” that “portends even more exciting advances in the future”.
CONTACT:
Nikos Logothetis tel +49 7071 601 650 email nikos.logothetis@tuebingen.mpg.de
Marcus Raichle tel +1 314 362 6907 e-mail: marc@npg.wustl.edu
[412163] SPACE: SATURN’S DIRTY DOZEN (pp163-166; N&V)
Twelve new moons of Saturn have been discovered. This brings the planet’s total to 30: the most in the Solar System. The new moons are small — from about 6 to 30 kilometres in diameter — and are moving in irregular, tilted orbits.
The moons fall into several clusters, leading Brett Gladman, of the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur, Nice, France, and colleagues to conclude that they are the remnants of larger satellites that have been fragmented by collisions. The moons probably began life as wandering bodies that were captured by Saturn’s gravity.
Gladman and colleagues found the moons by scanning Saturn with sophisticated electronic detectors mounted on medium-sized, ground-based telescopes. In an accompanying News and Views article, Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland suggests that the same techniques will soon find more moons around Jupiter.
CONTACT:
Brett Gladman tel +33 4 92 07 63 22, e-mail gladman@obs-nice.fr
Douglas Hamilton tel +1 301 405 1548, e-mail hamilton@astro.umd.edu
[412181] EVOLUTION: SPECIES EXPLOSION RAPID AND RECENT (pp181-183)
South Africa’s Cape region hosts a spectacular abundance of plant species. These evolved rapidly and recently, report James E. Richardson of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Surrey, UK, and colleagues in this week’s Nature. Diversification, they estimate, began 7–8 million years ago when changes in ocean currents dried out the area. Other factors that drove the riot of speciation were a high diversity of soil types, microclimates created by the region’s mountains and fires.
“We need to understand the evolutionary origins and ages of such ‘hotspots’ to conserve them effectively,” say the researchers. The scant fossil and climate records have to date made the history of continental species hard to piece together.
CONTACT:
James E Richardson (currently at the University of California, Santa Cruz) e-mail jamesr@darwin.ucsc.edu
[412190] LIFELINES: TB’s STICKING POINT (pp190-194)
One factor that makes tuberculosis (TB) hard to treat is that the bacteria causing it — Mycobacterium tuberculosis — spreads from the lungs to other parts of the body. Camille Locht of the Institut Pasteur de Lille, France, and colleagues now show that this process depends on interactions between one of the bacteria’s surface proteins, ‘mycobacterial heparin-binding haemagglutinin adhesin’ (HBHA), and the cells that line our vessels and tissues — epithelial cells.
In mice, disrupting the gene that codes for this protein (hbha) reduces colonization by M. tuberculosis of the spleen, but not the lungs, the group reports. The leprosy pathogen and other mycobacteria produce similar adhesins, suggesting that these molecules facilitate their dissemination and growth on mucosal surfaces, and hence might be a potential target for new drugs and vaccines.
TB, the world’s leading cause of death due to a single infectious agent, kills 3 million people and infects a further 10 million each year.
CONTACT:
Camille Locht tel +33 3 20 87 1151, e-mail camille.locht@pasteur-lille.fr
[412140] ENVIRONMENT: POLLUTED SEWAGE AS FERTILIZER (pp140-141)
Sewage sludge used as fertilizer in the United States contains high concentrations of organic pollutants. Robert Hale and colleagues, of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Gloucester Point, found brominated diphenyl ethers (BDEs), widely used as flame retardants, in samples of ‘biosolids’ from both the eastern US and California, and also in freshwater fish.
The BDEs may have come from polyurethane foam, which contains large amounts of a flame retardant called Penta. The concentrations of this chemicalin human breast milk are rising exponentially, and the European Commission has recently called for a ban. “It seems that BDEs are an important — but generally unrecognized — persistent organic pollutant in the United States,” write the researchers in a Brief Communication.
CONTACT:
Robert Hale tel +1 804 684 7228, e-mail hale@vims.edu
[412141] BRAIN: COKE CRAVINGS CONTINUE (pp141-142)
Craving for cocaine gets worse, rather than better, as the period after withdrawal lengthens, at least in rats. The result mirrors the suggestion that craving in human cocaine addicts ‘incubates’, to emerge months after drug taking has stopped.
In a Brief Communication, Yavin Shaham and colleagues, of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Baltimore, describe how they trained rats to self-administer cocaine, and then withdrew the drug for periods ranging from 1 to 60 days. When presented with the cues associated with cocaine once more, rats that had been off the drug the longest made the most effort to get another fix.
CONTACT:
Yavin Shaham tel +1 410 550 1746, e-mail yshaham@intra.nida.nih.gov
[412139] ECOLOGY: SHORT SHARK SHOCK (pp139-140)
Male great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are wanderers, but females are stay-at-homes. This finding, together with other aspects of their biology such as their long lives and low number of offspring, gives shark ecology more in common with that of whales and dolphins than with fish, and may have implications for the conservation of these endangered predators.
Andrew Martin of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues, analysed mitochondrial DNA — which passes down the female line — in different shark populations and found that sharks from Australia and New Zealand were unlike those in South African coastal waters off South Africa, with little gene flow between the two, confirming that females prefer to stick to their home ground. Nuclear DNA showed no such differentiation, indicating that male sharks roam the oceans, write the researchers in a Brief Communication.
CONTACT:
Andrew Martin tel +1 303 492 2573, e-mail am@stripe.colorado.edu
[412198] LIFELINES: CELL SUICIDE OR CELL EUTHANASIA? (pp198-202, 202-206; N&V)
Janitor cells that engulf their dead compatriots are not averse to finishing off the job on a cell that’s only nearly dead. Engulfment itself can promote cell suicide (apoptosis), H. Robert Horvitz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and colleagues have found from studies of apoptosis-regulating genes in the roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans.
Also in this week’s Nature, Michael O. Hengartner, of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and colleagues explain how they have used time-lapse video microscopy to follow, in detail, how genes regulate cell suicide. They too conclude that the genes that mediate corpse removal can also actively kill cells.
The extent and timing of apoptosis has important consequences for development, body maintenance, tumour formation and disease, explain Douglas R. Green and Helen M. Beere of La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, San Diego, California, in an accompanying News and Views article.
CONTACT:
Michael O Hengartner (currently at the University of Zurich) tel +41 1 635 3140, e-mail michael.hengartner@molbio.unizh.ch
H Robert Horvitz tel +1 617 253 4671, e-mail horvitz@mit.edu
Douglas R. Green tel +1 858 678 3543, e-mail dgreen5240@aol.com
[412158] SPACE: SPACE-TIME PASSES TEST (pp158-160)
General relativity passes a tough test in this week’s Nature. W. van Straten of the Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues report that they have characterized, with unprecedented accuracy, the orbit of the binary millisecond pulsar PSR J0437-4715, a mere 450 light years away.
The group’s radio observations reveal the three-dimensional structure of the orbiting neutron star (the actual pulsar) and its white dwarf companion. These initial observations of the binary system provide a positive test of general relativistic predictions of space-time curvature.
Pulsar PSR J0437-4715 now has a claim to being the most precisely located astronomical object. This, combined with its unsurpassed timing stability, mean it may play a role in many future cosmological debates.
CONTACT:
Willem van Straten tel +61 39214 5244, e-mail wvanstra@mania.physics.swin.edu.au
[412183] …AND FINALLY: WINDS OF CHANGE (pp183-186)
This week Thomas W. Schoener of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues relate how the arrival of Hurricane Floyd in the Bahamas was a fortuitous scientific event. The hurricane arrived two years into an experiment involving predator introduction into island-based ecological communities, providing an unexpected opportunity to observe the effects of a catastrophic event on the structure of an ecosystem. This is an important factor in estimating the potential impact of global climate change.
On islands where there was no predator, the prey lizard survived the storm, mostly in the form of eggs, and populations recovered to original levels. But on two-thirds of the islands where a predatory lizard had been introduced, the prey populations became extinct after the hurricane. This shows how biotic interactions can magnify the impact of a catastrophic event. “Conservation biology might profit from consideration of both kinds of effects in analysing extinction risk,” Schoener’s group concludes.
CONTACT:
Thomas W Schoener tel +1 916 752 7465, e-mail twschoener@ucdavis.edu
Nature Publishing Group Reference
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