Highlights

Every year, a committee of experts sits down with a tough job to do: from among all ICREA publications, they must find a handful that stand out from all the others. This is indeed a challenge. The debates are sometimes heated and always difficult but, in the end, a shortlist of  the most outstanding publications of the year is produced. No prize is awarded, and the only additional acknowledge is the honour of being chosen and highlighted by ICREA. Each piece has something unique about it, whether it be a particularly elegant solution, the huge impact it has in the media or the sheer fascination it generates as a truly new idea. For whatever the reason, these are the best of the best and, as such, we are proud to share them here.

LIST OF SCIENTIFIC HIGHLIGHTS

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  • Dental calculus reveals evidence for food, medicine, cooking and plant processing in prehistoric Central Sudan. (2014)

    Hardy, Karen (UAB)

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    Dental calculus reveals evidence for food, medicine, cooking and plant processing in prehistoric Central Sudan.

    Accessing information on plant consumption before the adoption of agriculture is challenging. However, there is growing evidence for use of locally available wild plants from an increasing number of pre-agrarian sites, suggesting broad ecological knowledge. The extraction of chemical compounds and microfossils from dental calculus removed from ancient teeth offers an entirely new perspective on dietary reconstruction, as it provides empirical results on material that is already in the mouth. In this paper we presented a suite of results from the multi-period Central Sudanese site of Al Khiday. We demonstrated the ingestion in both pre-agricultural and agricultural periods of Cyperus rotundus tubers. This plant is a good source of carbohydrates and has many useful medicinal and aromatic qualities, though today it is considered to be the world's most costly weed. Its ability to inhibit Streptococcus mutans may have contributed to the unexpectedly low level of caries found in the agricultural population. Other evidence extracted from the dental calculus includes smoke inhalation, dry (roasting) and wet (heating in water) cooking, a second plant possibly from the Triticaceae tribe and plant fibres suggestive of raw material preparation through chewing.Featured in National Geographic, El Mundo, Voice of America, New York Times, BBC East, BBC 5 Live, Dental Tribune International, Haaretz, Israel, Voice of America, National Public Radio Washington DC. 

  • The history of life in the universe may have been governed by the frequency of giant stellar explosions (2014)

    Jiménez Tellado, Raúl (UB)

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    The history of life in the universe may have been governed by the frequency of giant stellar explosions

    Two astronomers, Tsvi Piran of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Raul Jimenez, ICREA at the University of Barcelona, argue that some regions of the galaxy are less friendly to life than others. Their interest in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which are the most energetic phenomena yet discovered in the universe, has lead them to analyze how this powerful events could affect the chances of developing life in Earth-like planets. The idea is that a GRB occuring nearby (nearby, in this context, means within about 10,000 light-years) to an Earth-like planet, can wreck its biosphere.The pattern of GRBs shows that they have got rarer over the course of time an also that they are more likely to happen around the center of the Galaxy. Their study shows that GRBs would be common enough so that a planet, almost anywhere in the galaxy, would have suffered from at least one in the past billion years. They estimate that even now, only 10% of the universe’s galaxies would host sufficiently few GRBs to give the evolution of complex life a fair run.Their finding has attarcted mayor media attention, among others from The Economist, Science, Sci. American, CNN, etc.

  • The Decay of Consent: International Law in an Age of Global Public Goods (2014)

    Krisch, Nico (IBEI)

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    The Decay of Consent: International Law in an Age of Global Public Goods

    International law’s consent-based structure is often seen as inadequate for solving global public goods problems, and many commentators expect a turn toward non-consensualism in response. This article focuses on three issue areas to analyze whether we can indeed observe such a turn. In the resulting picture, international law retains much of its consensual character, but it is increasingly sidelined in favour of other – especially informal and unilateral – modes of governance in which consent plays a more limited role and hierarchy is often pronounced.

  • The importance of `silent' mutations in cancer (2014)

    Lehner, Ben (CRG)
    Gabaldón Estevan, Toni (IRB Barcelona)
    Valcárcel Juárez, Juan (CRG)

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    The importance of `silent' mutations in cancer

    'Silent’ (or synonymous) mutations change the sequence of a gene without directly altering the sequence of the protein that it encodes.  Through an analysis of the DNA sequences of  >3000 human tumours this study - which involved three ICREA professors from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) - showed that these silent mutations frequently contribute to cause cancer in humans.  The mechanisms by which these mutations function may be diverse, but it was shown that they often alter how the different parts of a gene are spliced together to encode proteins.   In total, it was estimated that between 1 in 2 and 1 in 5 of the silent mutations observed in known oncogenes (cancer promoting genes) contributed to the development of a tumour.  The computational methodology developed in the study also revealed that genes that cause cancer when they are overexpressed - i.e. when they produce too much protein - often harbour mutations in regulatory regions at the ends of the genes (i.e. in their 3’-untranslated regions).

  • Quantum nonlocality in many body systems (2014)

    Lewenstein, Maciej Andrzej (ICFO)
    Acín Dal Maschio, Antonio (ICFO)

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    Quantum nonlocality in many body systems

    Science has recently published a study carried out at ICFO with collaboration from the Institute for Nuclear Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in which the researchers have been able to detect non-locality in many-body quantum systems by constructing multipartite Bell inequalities involving two-body correlations only.

    Numerous studies have been carried out regarding entanglement of many-body quantum systems particles, since it proves to be a fundamental key aspect to understanding their properties. However, very little work has been done concerning the nonlocality of these systems, simply because the known Bell inequalities involve correlations among many parties which are out of reach within the current experimental technology. As a consequence, nonlocality of many-body quantum systems cannot be tested experimentally.

    In this study, entitled “Detecting nonlocality in many-body quantum states”, ICFOnians Jordi Tura, Remigiusz Augusiak, Belen Sainz and ICREA Professors at ICFO Antonio Acín and Maciej Lewenstein, in collaboration with T. Vértesi from Hungary, designed classes of multipartite Bell inequalities constructed from the easiest-to-measure quantities, the two-body correlators. These inequalities are, nevertheless, capable of revealing the nonlocality properties of many-body quantum states, in particular those relevant for nuclear and atomic physics. In addition, the inequalities proposed by this study, can be verified by measuring the total spin components of the particles, which opens a new window to experimental detection of many-body nonlocality in physical systems in which individual particles cannot be addressed.

  • A study suggests that North Africans domesticated cereal crops at least 500 years earlier than previously thought (2014)

    Madella, Marco (UPF)

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    A study suggests that North Africans domesticated cereal crops at least 500 years earlier than previously thought

    Neolithic North Africans began exploiting cereal crops at least 500 years earlier than previously thought, according to new research published in PLOS ONE.Cereal crops such as wheat and barley were first domesticated in the Near East some 10,500 years ago, then spread west, to Europe and the Mediterranean, and east, through central and south Asia.Working at two Neolithic cemeteries in northern and central Sudan, the researchers examined phytoliths obtained from samples of dental plaque from 20 of the skeletons and from other archaeological deposits. Sometimes referred to as ‘plant stones,’ phytoliths are formed when silica in ground water is taken up by plants and deposited between the cells, giving rise to tiny, skeleton-like structures.The phytoliths were compared to a reference collection to confirm that they were indeed cereal crops. Radiocarbon dating further revealed that the phytoliths predated evidence of cereals previously found in Africa from the Neolithic Fayum.  Those from the cemetery in northern Sudan were at least 7,000 years old, and that those from central Sudan were between 7,500 and 6,500 years old.

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