Water capture by a desert beetle.

Some beetles in the Namib Desert collect drinking water from fog-laden wind on their backs. We show here that these large droplets form by virtue of the insect's bumpy surface, which consists of alternating hydrophobic, wax-coated and hydrophilic, non-waxy regions. The design of this fog-collecting structure can be reproduced cheaply on a commercial scale and may find application in water-trapping tent and building coverings, for example, or in water condensers and engines.     

New cooperative frequency domain differential modulation and demodulation

An innovative method of cooperative frequency domain differential modulation and demodulation is presented.This method applies the prior knowledge of channel propagation to selecting the variable differential length and carrying out frequency domain modulation.This strategy optimizes the design of system parameters to effectively improve the anti-interference ability of the differential system in time-varied multipath channel circumstance without making the execution more complicating.The simulations and comparisons demonstrate the proposed method is effective,and the results show that it is especially suitable for the fading channel with strong propagation and fast time-variation.     

Community Development and Renaissance Social Humanism: Some Lessons for Systems Science

Starting from the crisis in our communities—research has indicated it to be widely spread—the author explores the scientific tradition preceding the rise of modernism in order to draw out a more humane way of thinking that may help our contemporary societies. He discerns between two types of Renaissance humanism, one characterised by its cleverness, the other by its compassion and desire to restore dignity to the lives of people struggling to escape the clutches of medievalism. The father of the latter is Erasmus of Rotterdam and we follow the development of his conception of a social humanism as it branches out, through the work of his successors, into every scientific discipline, both natural and human. These disciplines are united by an embracing systemic idea of philosophy that unites the mind with the heart and which Erasmus called “Philosophia Christi”. We examine the two main pillars upon which this philosophy is built, love for our neighbour and education as the only legitimate instrument to change society, and the extraordinary impact it had on science and on communities living in the seventeenth century. We contrast this with the idea of power, the chosen instrument of modernity to transform society, and trace some of its tragic outcomes. We conclude by discussing the incorporation of an Erasmian type of social humanism into systems education and the future development of such programmes.     

Novel neurotrophic factor CDNF protects and rescues midbrain dopamine neurons in vivo

In Parkinson's disease, brain dopamine neurons degenerate most prominently in the substantia nigra. Neurotrophic factors promote survival, differentiation and maintenance of neurons in developing and adult vertebrate nervous system. The most potent neurotrophic factor for dopamine neurons described so far is the glial-cell-line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF). Here we have identified a conserved dopamine neurotrophic factor (CDNF) as a trophic factor for dopamine neurons. CDNF, together with its previously described vertebrate and invertebrate homologue the mesencephalic-astrocyte-derived neurotrophic factor, is a secreted protein with eight conserved cysteine residues, predicting a unique protein fold and defining a new, evolutionarily conserved protein family. CDNF (Armetl1) is expressed in several tissues of mouse and human, including the mouse embryonic and postnatal brain. In vivo, CDNF prevented the 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA)-induced degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in a rat experimental model of Parkinson's disease. A single injection of CDNF before 6-OHDA delivery into the striatum significantly reduced amphetamine-induced ipsilateral turning behaviour and almost completely rescued dopaminergic tyrosine-hydroxylase-positive cells in the substantia nigra. When administered four weeks after 6-OHDA, intrastriatal injection of CDNF was able to restore the dopaminergic function and prevent the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in substantia nigra. Thus, CDNF was at least as efficient as GDNF in both experimental settings. Our results suggest that CDNF might be beneficial for the treatment of Parkinson's disease.     

Expanding the diversity of chemical protein modification allows post-translational mimicry

One of the most important current scientific paradoxes is the economy with which nature uses genes. In all higher animals studied, we have found many fewer genes than we would have previously expected. The functional outputs of the eventual products of genes seem to be far more complex than the more restricted blueprint. In higher organisms, the functions of many proteins are modulated by post-translational modifications (PTMs). These alterations of amino-acid side chains lead to higher structural and functional protein diversity and are, therefore, a leading contender for an explanation for this seeming incongruity. Natural protein production methods typically produce PTM mixtures within which function is difficult to dissect or control. Until now it has not been possible to access pure mimics of complex PTMs. Here we report a chemical tagging approach that enables the attachment of multiple modifications to bacterially expressed (bare) protein scaffolds: this approach allows reconstitution of functionally effective mimics of higher organism PTMs. By attaching appropriate modifications at suitable distances in the widely-used LacZ reporter enzyme scaffold, we created protein probes that included sensitive systems for detection of mammalian brain inflammation and disease. Through target synthesis of the desired modification, chemistry provides a structural precision and an ability to retool with a chosen PTM in a manner not available to other approaches. In this way, combining chemical control of PTM with readily available protein scaffolds provides a systematic platform for creating probes of protein-PTM interactions. We therefore anticipate that this ability to build model systems will allow some of this gene product complexity to be dissected, with the aim of eventually being able to completely duplicate the patterns of a particular protein's PTMs from an in vivo assay into an in vitro system.     

Chiral magnetic order at surfaces driven by inversion asymmetry

Chirality is a fascinating phenomenon that can manifest itself in subtle ways, for example in biochemistry (in the observed single-handedness of biomolecules) and in particle physics (in the charge-parity violation of electroweak interactions). In condensed matter, magnetic materials can also display single-handed, or homochiral, spin structures. This may be caused by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, which arises from spin-orbit scattering of electrons in an inversion-asymmetric crystal field. This effect is typically irrelevant in bulk metals as their crystals are inversion symmetric. However, low-dimensional systems lack structural inversion symmetry, so that homochiral spin structures may occur. Here we report the observation of magnetic order of a specific chirality in a single atomic layer of manganese on a tungsten (110) substrate. Spin-polarized scanning tunnelling microscopy reveals that adjacent spins are not perfectly antiferromagnetic but slightly canted, resulting in a spin spiral structure with a period of about 12 nm. We show by quantitative theory that this chiral order is caused by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and leads to a left-rotating spin cycloid. Our findings confirm the significance of this interaction for magnets in reduced dimensions. Chirality in nanoscale magnets may play a crucial role in spintronic devices, where the spin rather than the charge of an electron is used for data transmission and manipulation. For instance, a spin-polarized current flowing through chiral magnetic structures will exert a spin-torque on the magnetic structure, causing a variety of excitations or manipulations of the magnetization and giving rise to microwave emission, magnetization switching, or magnetic motors.     

Clathrate nanostructures for mass spectrometry

The ability of mass spectrometry to generate intact biomolecular ions efficiently in the gas phase has led to its widespread application in metabolomics, proteomics, biological imaging, biomarker discovery and clinical assays (namely neonatal screens). Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) and electrospray ionization have been at the forefront of these developments. However, matrix application complicates the use of MALDI for cellular, tissue, biofluid and microarray analysis and can limit the spatial resolution because of the matrix crystal size (typically more than 10 mum), sensitivity and detection of small compounds (less than 500 Da). Secondary-ion mass spectrometry has extremely high lateral resolution (100 nm) and has found biological applications although the energetic desorption/ionization is a limitation owing to molecular fragmentation. Here we introduce nanostructure-initiator mass spectrometry (NIMS), a tool for spatially defined mass analysis. NIMS uses 'initiator' molecules trapped in nanostructured surfaces or 'clathrates' to release and ionize intact molecules adsorbed on the surface. This surface responds to both ion and laser irradiation. The lateral resolution (ion-NIMS about 150 nm), sensitivity, matrix-free and reduced fragmentation of NIMS allows direct characterization of peptide microarrays, direct mass analysis of single cells, tissue imaging, and direct characterization of blood and urine.     

Group formation stabilizes predator-prey dynamics

Theoretical ecology is largely founded on the principle of mass action, in which uncoordinated populations of predators and prey move in a random and well-mixed fashion across a featureless landscape. The conceptual core of this body of theory is the functional response, predicting the rate of prey consumption by individual predators as a function of predator and/or prey densities. This assumption is seriously violated in many ecosystems in which predators and/or prey form social groups. Here we develop a new set of group-dependent functional responses to consider the ecological implications of sociality and apply the model to the Serengeti ecosystem. All of the prey species typically captured by Serengeti lions (Panthera leo) are gregarious, exhibiting nonlinear relationships between prey-group density and population density. The observed patterns of group formation profoundly reduce food intake rates below the levels expected under random mixing, having as strong an impact on intake rates as the seasonal migratory behaviour of the herbivores. A dynamical system model parameterized for the Serengeti ecosystem (using wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) as a well-studied example) shows that grouping strongly stabilizes interactions between lions and wildebeest. Our results suggest that social groups rather than individuals are the basic building blocks around which predator-prey interactions should be modelled and that group formation may provide the underlying stability of many ecosystems.