A single miR can simultaneously affect dozens of target genes, which can result in a wide change in the expression profile.
Surprisingly, some of the sharpest increases came in the Middle East and North Africa, including Iran, Libya, Syria, Jordan and Tunisia.Ricardo Hausmann, a professor at Harvard University (and a former Venezuelan minister), argues that the changing male-female balance at school and work will unleash wider changes in the family and society.
Winstanley had always been the more business-oriented of the two, and his departure coincided with wider changes in the profession.
Looked at a little more closely, however, the news reflects wider changes in the region, and a sense that Washington is retreating from it.
Perhaps recent developments owe something to wider changes in the culture at large – to a dotcom boom that has provided new supermen, and a new site for drama.
Just as it accelerated the uptake of open access publishing in the UK over recent years, the trust now wants to campaign for wider changes in the way science works.
But without policy reforms and institutional changes - including phasing out water intensive crops, conservation methods in irrigation and wider changes in the behaviour of farmers and other water consumers - restoration efforts will be successful only with an unusually wet period in the years to come.
Novelist Elif Shafak, who sits on this year's judging panel alongside chair Margaret Mountford, the journalists Naga Munchetty and Laurie Penny, and the writer and singer Tracey Thorn, said that the mix of debut authors and well-established writers on this year's shortlist "reflects wider changes in the world of publishing today".
Though many of the communities they form or join, such as Academia.edu, Mendeley or Total-Impact aren't new, wider changes in the research environment (namely, growing support for open access and policy shifts mandating impact measurement) have given altmetrics a new urgency.
