Planet Nature

Although the census on marine life isn’t due to report properly until late next year, the scientists involved have decided to whet our appetites with details of deep see ‘jumbo dumbo’ octopi, ‘indescribable invertebrates’, and worms that drill for oil nearly a kilometre below the surface.

In total, five deep-sea projects will have undertaken 210 expeditions when the census has been completed.

“There is both a great lack of information about the ‘abyss’ and substantial misinformation,” says Robert Carney, of Louisiana State University. “Many species live there. However, the abyss has long been viewed as a desert. Worse, it was viewed as a wasteland where few to no environmental impacts could be of any concern.”

Now that they have stared into the abyss, says Carney, the census scientists are concerned. Here are some of the critters they are concerned about.

Collected between 1,000 to 3,000 meters deep, was a very large example of a finned octopod, normally called a dumbo due to its endearing habit of swimming by flapping a pair of large fins that look like ears.

This jumbo example was nearly two metres long and 6 kg heavy, the largest ever collected. In total nine species were found on the mid-Atlantic ridge, including one new to science.

Later a huge catch of corals, sea cucumbers and sea urchins was pulled up from the ridge. Researchers described it as “indescribable”. “It’s hard to believe that such exuberance of life exists a kilometre deep into the ocean,” says the census.

The team also pulled up a Neocyema, the strange orange thing pictured right, only the fifth example of this fish ever caught.

Perhaps the strangest find though was a Lamellibranchia tubeworm. When a robot arm lifted the worm clear of the sea floor, crude oil started leaking from the hole it had left behind. Apparently the worm had been feasting on the oil.

More photos below the fold...

The jumbo dumbo (Photo courtesy of Mike Vecchione)

New species of 'dumbo' (Photo courtesy of David Shale)

A proposed resolution to restrict human embryonic stem cell research at the University of Nebraska has failed. The University's Board of Regents today split their votes 4-4, defeating a measure that would have limited research to embryonic stem cell lines approved under former President George W. Bush. The resolution needed a majority of five votes to pass.

"That probably settles the question for the time being," Thomas Rosenquist, vice chancellor for research at the University of Nebraska Medical School in Omaha, told Nature. "It's permission to go ahead and take part in 21st-century research with embryonic stem cells."

Nebraska law prohibits the destruction of embryos for research. But the state does allow scientists to follow federal standards in embryonic stem cell research. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama removed government funding restrictions on new stem-cell lines derived from embryos left over from fertility treatment, and an advisory panel is currently mulling over which of hundreds of potential new cell lines to approve.

The governing board's decision "is a big relief", says Angie Rizzino, a stem cell biologist at the University of Nebraska Medical School. "But I fear that they'll be back in a year or two trying to put a block on embryonic stem cell research again."

Everyone's talking about the CRU data hack. Quirin Schiermeier reports on Nature News:

One of Britain's leading climate-research centres has had more than 1,000 files stolen from its computers and republished on the Internet. The cyber-attack is apparently aimed at damaging the reputations of prominent climate scientists.

The full story is here:

It's Friday evening, time once again for the "refresh game", where I sit on the CERN website waiting to find out what terrorism/food/drink crisis will befall the Large Hadron Collider next (TGB's Daniel Cressey is putting his money on a badger from the future quantum mechanically tunneling his way into the beamline).

At the moment, though, it's all looking pretty good! Commissioning of the machine should be completed any minute now, and the physicists and engineers in charge of the LHC could begin injecting beams of protons into the machine tonight. Optimistically, we could be about a week or two away from collisions.

Well, unless the United Nations intervenes. A cleverly-named group of LHC critics called conCERNed (get it? Because the LHC is at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is shortened to CERN in French? And CERN is right there in the word? Oh never mind), have filed a complaint with the UN's Human Rights Committee warning that the LHC might destroy the world. If true that would, it seem, infringe on a human right or two.

conCERNed would like to see the formation of an agency similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to regulate particle accelerators. But I wouldn't necessarily expect this to stop collisions in the coming weeks. Given what I've seen of IAEA diplomacy, even if the UN decides to form such an agency, it will take most of the LHC's first physics run just to draw up an agenda for its inaugural meeting.

Stay tuned for more updates next week!

CERN

Keith Kloor

While many are feeling pessimistic about the prospects for a deal at Copenhagen, Geoffrey Lean at Grist believes the big climate summit still has a pulse. He reports that “environment ministers from 40 key countries—assembled this week for a two-day preparatory meeting in Copenhagen—made good progress towards a political agreement.”

Lean doesn’t deny that the odds for success are still long. But the game is by no means over, he writes:

“It is all very difficult. But there is a chance that, with luck and skill, a climate-saving deal can be reached. And while far from ideal, the hope that a deal is still salvageable is a lot better than the doom that was so widely pronounced at the start of the week.”

Meanwhile, are people suffering from “climate fatigue,” and tuning out the steady drumbeat of alarming news on climate change? Richard Kerr in Science examines the communication challenges [subscription required]. He writes:

“Almost all climate scientists are of one mind about the threat of global warming: It's real, it's dangerous, and the world needs to take action immediately. But they disagree about the best way to convey the urgency of the situation to the public and policymakers.”

At Yale Environment 360, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that one thing not to do is hype the danger incessantly. Pointing to the consistent polling that shows Americans to have soft support for climate change measures, the authors assert:

“The lesson of recent years would appear to be that apocalyptic threats — when their impacts are relatively far off in the future, difficult to imagine or visualize, and emanate from everyday activities, not an external and hostile source — are not easily acknowledged and are unlikely to become priority concerns for most people.”

“Our engineers are exploring how we might contribute to this effort by developing a global forest platform that would enable anyone in the world, including tropical nations, to monitor deforestation and draw attention to it.”
Philipp Schindler, of Google UK, says his company may build a programme to allow internet users to identify illegal logging via satellite photos (Times).

“From the beginning, this case was marked by a fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional trial plan that allowed the jury to rely on findings by a prior jury.”
Murray Garnick, associate general counsel for Altria, says the company will appeal a $300 million damages award against its Philip Morris company to a former smoker in Florida who suffers from emphysema (Bloomberg).

“No new safety issue has been identified from reports issued to date.”
Marie-Paule Kieny, of the World Health Organisation, says H1N1 vaccination is not to blame for 41 deaths (Reuters).

“Dismantling this institution, which is a huge economic driver for the state, is a stupendously stupid thing to do, but that’s the path the Legislature has embarked on.”
Richard Mathies, dean of the College of Chemistry at Berkeley, takes issue with cuts to California’s education budget (LA Times).

More safety data is needed before an experimental flu vaccine made inside insect cells should be approved, a US federal advisory committee said yesterday.

A US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel voted 6-to-5 that Protein Sciences, a vaccine company based in Meriden, Connecticut, hadn’t proven that its FluBlok vaccine was safe enough to enter mass production. Nine of the 11 panellists, however, said the shot was effective in adults aged 18 to 49, although the vaccine did not appear to work as well in older patients.

The vaccine is made by inserting flu genes into an insect virus and growing it in caterpillar ovary cells. This process only takes two months, compared to the five or six needed to grow virus in chicken eggs, and so it has been touted as a way to speed up manufacturing when new vaccines against potentially pandemic flu strains are urgently needed — like now. Fewer than 50 million doses of H1N1 vaccine are currently available in the US.

The disappearance of the huge herbivores that once roamed North America triggered a massive change in the environment with new trees and more fires.

Reporting in Science, researchers say lake sediments show that the decline of mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and giant beavers allowed broadleaved trees to flourish as the beasties weren’t around to eat them. The rise of these trees then meant that more fuel for fires accumulated.

“Our work thus shows close connections among the late-glacial histories of fire, vegetation, and mammalian herbivores and suggests that the loss of a broad guild of consumers contributed to substantial restructuring of plant communities and an enhanced fire regime,” write Jacquelyn Gill, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her colleagues.

To make these links Gill’s team looked at sediment from Appleman Lake in Indiana and other sediments from New York sites. They traced fungus spores that live on dung as a proxy for megafauna. As the number of spores in the sediments decreases about 13.8 thousand years ago, new types of pollen appear, showing the increasing dominance of the broadleaf trees. At the same time a big increase in charcoal is seen, showing the increasing number of fires.

The big question though is what does this tell us about why the mammoth died out…

Posted for Meredith Wadman

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is once again under fire for lax oversight of conflicts of interest among the extramural researchers it supports.

A November 18 report by the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH’s parent agency, recommends that the agency significantly tighten its policing of conflicts. NIH is the world’s largest biomedical research funder, and it channels 80% of its $31 billion budget to extramural grants.

The inspector general reached his conclusions by examining the financial conflict documentation from 41 extramural institutions for the government’s 2006 fiscal year. Current regulations require grantee institutions to “reduce, manage or eliminate” conflicts reported by their researchers that could reasonably be affected by their NIH-funded work.

The inspector found that, among the documentation for 184 conflicts involving 165 researchers, only six researchers’ conflicts were eliminated by their universities. The lion’s share, totalling 136, were “managed”. Grantee institutions “rarely” reduce or eliminate conflicts, the report concluded.

Among the report’s recommendations: that universities collect financial interest data in specific dollar amounts and not in ranges such as “$10,000-$50,000”. It also recommends that NIH require researchers to report to their institutions all their financial interests and not just those that they judge could reasonably be affected by their NIH-supported research.

“Full and complete disclosure ensures that the determination of whether a significant financial interest relates to the research rests with the grantee institution and not with the researcher,” the report argues.

Specific dollar amounts would certainly shed more light on the equity holdings of researchers. These were found by the inspector to be the most common financial interest, with 111 of the researchers reporting equity holdings, and six of these holding more than $100,000.

NIH is in the process of rewriting its conflict of interest reporting requirements; it is expected to issue new regulations by year’s end (see: Researcher payment reporting under scrutiny).

The report follows a similar briefing from the inspector general in January 2008 (see: NIH in the dark over conflicts of interest). Investigations by Senator Charles Grassley have pointed out several cases of underreporting of six-figure amounts by NIH-funded researchers (see: Money in biomedicine: The senator's sleuth).

Sally Rockey, acting deputy director of the office of extramural research at NIH, said in a statement that, "NIH has demonstrated its commitment to oversight activities and continues to make them an agency priority." She added that the inspector's recommendations "will be considered by the NIH along with public comments ... as it formulates a new regulation that will facilitate effective compliance."

Maitland Jones, Jr, teaches in the Department of Chemistry at New York University.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

When I was 12 or 13, I met William Doering. I had asked/demanded (remember I was all of 12) of my parents to be allowed to play the 12-year old tennis circuit that summer. My parents properly replied, "Time to get a job, kid." They met Doering at a party and coerced, or bribed, him into giving their kid what would today be called an internship at Hickrill, a privately funded basic research lab that happened to be near where we lived. There I not only met Doering, for whom I would work for the next ten years or so, but several other wonderful organic chemists, including Larry Knox, for whom I directly worked at Hickrill, washing dishes and being a general gopher. I knew nothing, of course, but the atmosphere was electric, the work intense, and the passion palpable. No one with the slightest interest in science could emerge from that place unchanged.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

All my life I have loved jazz, and I have spent an enormous number of hours in dingy clubs over the last five or six decades. I know a lot about the music and run a jazz series in Princeton, New Jersey. I probably - certainly - could not be a musician, but I could run a club, or maybe be a critic. I still might do that.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

Well, I closed the research lab when I moved from Princeton to NYU, so I can only answer that in retrospect. My group worked on the chemistry of reactive intermediates, carbenes, benzynes, and the like. We also expanded into the chemistry of boron cage compounds, and the interactions of reactive intermediates with those three-dimensionally aromatic compounds. We hoped only that it would lead to a better understanding of how molecules react - and of how "electrons talk to each other."

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Thelonious Monk. I saw and heard Monk when I was a kid. Indeed, I was at the Five Spot for a few of the times Monk played with John Coltrane. I didn't have a good enough understanding of the music then, and I'd like to talk to Monk about his music, or, better, to see him play again, nowI have a deeper appreciation of it.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

A long long ago, probably in the 1970's - or even 1960's. Peter Gaspar was visiting Princeton for a semester, and we happened on a result of Bill (Florida) Jones's that had, we thought, important implications for the chemistry of phenylcarbenes. So I ran the experiments, evaporating p-tolyl diazomethane through a hot pyrolysis tube and collecting the products, styrene and benzocyclobutene, as Peter and I expected/hoped. Write it out - it is a remarkable transformation. Then work out a mechanism. It's wonderful chemistry. It turns out that a student of Harold Shechter's had run similar experiment but for some reason Harold never published them at the time and they languished in Dissertation Abstracts.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

It has to be a book I've read because one can't take chances on a desert island, so I might pick Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, for sheer flat-out virtuosity. Even if one doesn't get all the references - or even if one doesn't get the point at all - one can read it page by page, sentence by sentence, just for the brilliancy of the writing. And it's long. If I am allowed another, I'd take David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest - for much the same reasons. Or maybe Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. Or....

Music is easy: Charlie Parker, the Collected Dials and Savoys.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions – and why?

There are only a small number of the great physical organic chemists left - Doering and Roberts, I guess. Few know them now, I'm afraid, as the discipline has fallen so far out of favor. It would be nice to let them have a chance to make the case again.

Posted for David Cyranoski

The Chinese government has sent inspection teams to check on H1N1 reporting after a famed Chinese doctor accused local governments of covering up swine flu cases.

Zhong Nanshan of Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases in southern China, called into question the official number of deaths from H1N1, telling the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper that the quoted figure of 53 was too low. “I just don’t believe that there have been 53 H1N1 deaths nationwide,” he said.

Yesterday Ministry of Health spokesman Deng Haihua, said any officials who do not carry out their H1N1 reporting duties or who delay reporting will be “held accountable”. He also said that teams had been sent to inspect pandemic control. In total nine groups have been sent to Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Zhejiang, Hunan, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, and Xinjiang (official statement).

While many have pointed out that limitations on testing capacity have led to an underreporting, Zhong suggested that some hospitals were intentionally not testing those who died from pneumonia for H1N1.

His words carry weight because he shot to fame during the Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003 for quickly recognizing and reacting to the threat posed by the new virus while government officials around the country tried to cover it up.

All Nature’s pandemic flu coverage is collected on our news special page

Air quality rules will now be quite strict in India -- you can't pollute an industrial hub more than you pollute your homes.

A revised set of National Ambient Air Quality Standards is sending mixed signals across the country. My neighbour asked me in the elevator last evening," Does it mean we are allowed to pollute as much as the industries do? Or will it mean industries will have to lower emissions to meet standards set for households?"

True to his style, India's environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh has unveiled another set of 'path-breaking' rules after taking controversial stands on India's emissions and receding of the Himalayan glaciers.

"We have removed the distinction between industrial and residential areas. This is very important. Now standards will be uniform irrespective of whether it is classified as industrial or residential area," Ramesh said after making the fresh announcement. The new standards, in line with European Union norms, will promote clean fuel and that is expected to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Earlier rules allowed lower air quality in industrial areas compared to residential areas.

The usual peeve, as always, will be implementation. Though the Central Pollution Control Board and its sisters in the state have shown promise as capable implementing authorities, much can be said about their willingness and efficiency. Proactive, forward-thinking rules are always welcome, but is anyone listening?

I spent last week-end at the 9th Tateshina Conference on Organic Chemistry in Nagano, a couple of hours east of Tokyo on the train (from which I enjoyed a superb view of Mt Fuji on the way back).

This meeting is the Asian sister of the EUCHEM Conference on Stereochemistry, better known as the ‘Bürgenstock Conference’. At a time when there are many – and varied – conferences, these two adopt a very particular format (you can read our editorial on ‘meeting matters’ here, no subscription is required but you need a nature.com account).

Limited to around 60-70 invited participants, mostly from Japan, China, Singapore and Korea, the Tateshina Conference is designed to favour communication. Delegates gather in a secluded location (rendered particularly beautiful by the autumn leaves) for 48 hours, with about half a day left free so that they can engage in scientific chats, or make the most of the venue, or combine both. A large chunk of time is devoted to dialogue: a 25 minute presentation is followed by at least 15 minutes of discussion – rather than the mere 5 minutes allocated in most meetings – leading to some lively exchanges. And, this isn’t chemistry-related but I cannot not mention that we were treated to a fantastic clavichord recital, including a guest appearance from our chairman, Eiichi Nakamura, for a clavichord-flute ensemble.

This all contributed to a unique atmosphere — but I won’t tell you about the science because in order to encourage open and stimulating communication, it is agreed that any information presented isn’t for public use. Judging from the wide range of topics discussed I can reveal, however, that many areas of chemistry come under the umbrella of organic chemistry.

Anne

Anne Pichon (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) contains the most reliable and up-to-date genomic information available on the most widely used model organism in the plant kingdom. But TAIR now faces collapse: the US National Science Foundation (NSF) is phasing out funding after 10 years as the data resource's sole supporter.
According to an Editorial in Nature this week (462, 252; 2009), "TAIR's plight is emblematic of a broader crisis facing many of the world's biological databases and repositories. Research funding agencies recognize that such infrastructures are crucial to the ongoing conduct of science, yet few are willing to finance them indefinitely. Such agencies tend to support these resources during the development phase, but then expect them to find sustainable funding elsewhere. Unfortunately, that is not easy." Other funding agencies and private firms are not likely to step in to provide long-term support, even for relatively modest repositories and databases.
It is time for a whole new approach, argues the Editorial. "Front-line biology cannot function without these resources, so solutions must be found at both national and international levels.
Governments must ensure that at least one of their national funding agencies has money specifically set aside for the long-term support of bioresource infrastructures. A good model to emulate would be the United Kingdom's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, which allows databases and other such resources to apply for ring-fenced funding, saving them from having to compete with hypothesis-driven grants, which are the agencies' mainstay.
But action is also needed on the international front. The sharing of bioresources does not and should not stop at national borders. For example, only about a quarter of TAIR users are based in the United States. China is the second biggest user at around 12%, followed by Japan at around 10%. This is not atypical. Yet it is difficult for a single national agency to justify maintaining a resource for the rest of the world. What is required is an international cost-sharing organization that could fund competitively selected infrastructures, large and small.
An international solution may be a long time coming. In the meantime, bioresource infrastructures might be wise to invest some time in public relations, giving paymasters a greater understanding of the consequences of their decisions."

See also a related News story in the same issue of Nature (462, 258-259; 2009): Japanese science faces deep cuts.

Gene silencing predicted to improve drug manufacturing
Biotech firm hopes to use RNA interference to boost drug yields.

Europe puts brakes on fusion project
Firing up ITER in 2018 is not feasible, warn council delegates.

Maize genome mapped
Sequence should help corn breeders meet global demands for food and fuel.

University of Oxford, UK

A palaeontologist ponders how biodiversity is spread across the vertebrate tree of life.

Why do some biological groups burst at the seams with many different species, whereas others, despite their deep evolutionary heritage, contain only a handful of members? Many of my old vertebrate-biology textbooks are rife with qualitative scenarios, peddled with surprising degrees of confidence, that explain how species-rich branches can chalk up their success to key evolutionary 'innovations' and how less-diverse ones haven't kept up with changing conditions. What you won't find are details of how these exceptional groups might be identified in the first place.

Michael Alfaro of the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues have now quantified this black art (Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 13410–13414; 2009). They marry statistically explicit models with fossil-calibrated evolutionary trees and counts of living species to ask a basic, but surprisingly unanswered question: precisely which branches of the vertebrate family tree are more or less species-rich than expected given their age?

The authors identify nine groups that show substantial changes from the background tempo of vertebrate evolution: 'living fossils' such as lungfishes are characterized by lower-than-predicted diversity, whereas other branches, such as the perch-like fishes and a subset of mammals, contain vastly more species than expected.

As a palaeontologist, I am intrigued that three of the exceptionally diverse radiations are thought (although not without controversy) to have proliferated following the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs, hinting at the far-reaching consequences of this event in structuring the modern vertebrate fauna. Most importantly, these authors establish a clear quantitative framework that can be used to test all those textbook stories. I'm confident that in a few years, my students will learn a much more nuanced picture of vertebrate diversification than I ever did, one that will trace its own roots back to studies such as this.

“I’m here in solidarity with people across the state of California that are being subjugated to these outrageous fee increases. It’s completely unjust to put the burden on students.”
Kyle Tramberly, a junior at UC San Diego, is one of those protesting over fee increases in the UC system. Earlier today some students stormed UCLA’s Campbell Hall and blockaded themselves inside (LA Times).

“We knew about SuperCroc, the titan of all crocs, but we didn't have quite an idea of what existed in the shadows of the Cretaceous. We have crocs here [in what was once Gondwana] that ate plants and galloped and ate dinosaurs and were flat as a board.”
Paul Sereno, of the University of Chicago and National Geographic, has unearthed some terrifying prehistoric crocodiles.

“We have no time to waste here. The ecological services must be restored.”
Christian Lambrechts, a United Nations environment programme expert seconded to the Kenyan government, comments on the eviction of thousands of people who were squatting in the country’s Mau forest (Guardian).

Olive Heffernan
This week's Nature [subscription required] is the third in a series of special issues celebrating the life of Charles Darwin. It focuses on the dire challenges to Earth's biodiversity — and finds some reason for hope.

Among the numerous biodiversity-related contributions is an opinion piece by Will Turner of Conservation International with Michael Oppenheimer and David S. Wilcove of Princeton University. They argue that natural ecosystems offer some of our greatest tools in mitigating climate change and, as such, must be made a bulwark against climate change, rather than a casualty of it. They write:

REDD is just one of many possible ways to exploit the potential of natural ecosystems to slow climate change and lessen its effects on people. Natural habitats are a hugely valuable tool in the fight against global warming. Use them wisely and they could save many lives and vast sums of money in the decades to come. Abuse them, and much of Earth's biodiversity could be lost, along with the fight against climate change. Urgent action is needed to understand how best to exploit this promise and develop mechanisms that can be woven into the practices of governments, corporations, communities and institutions worldwide.

Turner and co-authors say that natural ecosystems are a clear mitigation option because of their sequestration potential, but also because "the maintenance and restoration of natural habitats are among the cheapest, safest and easiest solutions at our disposal in the effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and promote adaptation to unavoidable changes". See the full article here.

For the past 22 hours, 35 radio telescopes from around the world have been holding hands and working toward a common goal: creating the most powerful grid that's ever spanned the skies (NRAO press release).

2 hours from now, the telescopes will again go their separate ways, having measured the positions of 243 quasars — distant, blazing-bright galaxies with supermassive black holes at their cores. Quasars are ideal reference points in the sky because they're both visible and stable (due to their distance) to Earthlings. Because large groups of telescopes — whichever subset is facing the quasars of interest — are measuring the positions in unison, they are able to cover most of the sky and avoid problems of combining data from different observing sessions.

The telescope teams are measuring 1 to 3 quasars at a time for anywhere from 30 to 500 seconds each. As they crunch along, their activities and measurements are visible in real time at the Bordeaux Observatory's website.

The 24-hour, 7-continent effort demolishes the previous world record for telescope collaborations, which included 23 scopes. If all continues to go according to plan, the result will be a new, stronger reference grid for the sky, allowing more precise measurements of everything from gravity to movements of the tectonic plates.

Image: jpl.NASA.gov

An endangered fish is actually two even more endangered fish, according to new research.

Although it is already listed as ‘critically endangered’ the poor old European common skate may be in an even worse state than we thought. A new paper published in Aquatic Conservation says what we thought was the skate Dipturus batis is actually two different animals.

“Morphology, genetics, and life history reveal that two distinct species have been erroneously confused since the 1920s under the single scientific name D. batis,” write Samuel Iglésias, of the French National Museum of Natural History, and colleagues.

Iglésias says the ‘common skate’ species should be split into the blue skate (provisionally D. cf. flossada) and the flapper skate (D. cf. intermedia). This is not just of academic importance.

“Revisions of incorrect synonymizations - called species resurrections - are common works for systematists, but in the present case the resurrection of D. cf. intermedia is of great conservation significance,” the authors note.

The problem is that the not-quite-so-bad state of blue skate populations has been masking the really, really bad state of the flapper. And the old ‘common skate’ is already noted as the first fish brought to the brink of extinction by commercial fishing and this confusion of blue and flapper has hamstrung those trying to conserve the species – both of which deserve independent ‘critically endangered status’ says the paper.

“The risk of extinction of these depleted species is higher than previously assessed and appears unavoidable without immediate and incisive conservation action,” Iglésias concludes.

Human embryonic stem cells could be one step closer to the clinic. Santa Monica, California-based Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) announced today that it has applied to US regulators to launch a new clinical trial aimed at reversing vision loss with retinal cells recreated from embryonic stem (ES) cells.

The company plans to test the stem cell-derived retinal cells in 12 patients suffering from Stargardt's disease, a form of inherited juvenile macular degeneration that affects around one in 10,000 children.

ACT researchers previously showed that ES cells could give rise to retinal pigment epithelium cells, the photoreceptors that go awry in the disease. They then demonstrated that the cells could restore vision in a rat model of retinal disease. And in September, the researchers reported that the cells were long-lasting and safe in a mouse model of Stargardt's.

"Our research clearly shows that stem cell-derived retinal cells can rescue visual function in animals that otherwise would have gone blind," said Robert Lanza, ACT's chief scientific officer, in a statement. "We are hopeful that the cells will be similarly efficacious in patients."

ACT's investigational new drug (IND) application is only the second filing with the US Food and Drug Administration for a therapy involving human ES cells. The first company out of the gate, Menlo Park, California-based Geron Corp., had its stem-cell derived therapy to treat spinal cord injury patients approved last January. But the FDA put a hold on the trial before a single patient had been injected with the cells, citing safety concerns. Geron now says it plans to restart the trial in the second half of next year.

For more on why stem cell-derived transplants could work to delay or prevent blindness, see the June 2009 news feature from the sadly now-defunct Nature Reports Stem Cells.

Image: The left eye of a Stargardt's patient from Özdek et al., Eye 19, 1222–1225 (2005).

People in Papua New Guinea who took part in cannibalistic rituals appear to have rapidly evolved resistance to the deadly prion disease kuru.

Researchers who performed genetic analysis on 3,000 people from the Eastern Highland populations of the island found a novel gene variant that they say is an acquired resistance factor which was selected for during PNG’s kuru epidemic in the first half of the last century.

In total 709 villagers in these populations ate the brains of their dead in rituals but only 152 died of the CJD-like disease kuru, the team report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“It’s absolutely fascinating to see Darwinian principles at work here. This community of people has developed their own biologically unique response to a truly terrible epidemic, ” says study author John Collinge of the Medical Research Council Prion Unit at University College London (press release).

“The fact that this genetic evolution has happened in a matter of decades is remarkable.”

Collinge suggests that the discovery may shed light on possible cures or treatments for prion diseases in general.

Eating brains in ‘mortuary feasts’ was banned in PNG in the 1950s and kuru has since disappeared.

One of the most fundamental aspects of our job here at the Nature research journals is overseeing the peer-review process. In making our decisions on whether to accept a manuscript for publication, the advice given to us by experts on the topic in question is absolutely crucial. And we get a wide range of responses from referees - sometimes we get very lengthy and detailed reports (some of which even rival the word count of the original manuscript being evaluated - yes, really), and sometimes we get very short reports of just a sentence or two.

What do we want? Well, Nature Physics have written a wonderfully lucid editorial explaining just that. If you referee for any journal, but especially those in the Nature stable, this is required reading. You can find the editorial here - it is freely available, but you do need to have a nature.com account.

I'll leave you with one of the most important sentences from the editorial to whet your appetite and encourage you to go and read it - Whatever you think about a paper, it is vital to explain to us exactly why you think it.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Epigenetic mechanisms are increasingly appreciated to have an important role in immune cell functional diversity and adaptability, and understanding these mechanisms holds considerable potential for revealing new opportunities to therapeutically modulate the immune response in a range of diseases.
This Nature Reprint Collection provides a compilation of some of the research papers that have contributed to the advances in the field of immune cell epigenetics, as well as reviews discussing aspects of this new and exciting field. The collection brings together articles from Nature, Nature Immunology, Nature Reviews Immunology and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery that have contributed to advances and discussions in the field of immune cell epigenetics.
The articles in this collection are freely available online until 30 April 2010.

More Nature Collections.
Nature Immunology supplements and focuses.

See also: Epigenetic Dynamics in the Immune System, a conference organized by Nature Immunology and Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 19 February 2010 in San Antonio, Texas.

Gene-makers form security coalition
Latest salvo in the gene-synthesis 'standards war' sees firms set up a competing code.

Curbing population growth crucial to reducing carbon emissions
Access to contraception could tackle global warming, says United Nations.

Antarctic temperature spike surprises climate researchers
Polar region was unexpectedly warm between ice ages.