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Julius Gudmundsson and colleagues report the association of two SNPs on chromosomes 9 and 14 with thyroid cancer in European populations. The variants are near FOXE1 and NKX2-1, both good biological candidates, and individuals who are homozygous for both risk variants have a 5.7-fold greater risk of thyroid cancer.

Patrick Sulem and colleagues report a genome-wide association study of age at menarche, finding and replicating an association with LIN28B. The authors test a number of variants previously associated with height and BMI and find that five loci previously associated with BMI are also associated with age at menarche.

A genome-wide association study involving lung cancer finds that genetic sequences in the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunit gene cluster contribute to susceptibility. This paper finds that alleles present in a cluster of nicotinic acid receptor genes affect smoking quantity in European samples, and are therefore also associated with risk of lung cancer and peripheral arterial disease.

Sulem et al. report two previously unknown loci associated with variation in pigmentation in Northern Europeans. In two separate studies, Brown et al. and Gudbjartsson et al. report that some variants affecting human pigmentation, including variants on 20q11.22 near ASIP, also confer risk of cutaneous melanoma and basal cell carcinoma.

Following a replicated genome-wide association study for basal cell carcinoma, Thorunn Rafnar and Patrick Sulem and colleagues have identified a locus associated with multiple cancers that contains the telomerase reverse transcriptase gene TERT and the CLPTM1L gene implicated in cisplatin-induced apoptosis.

This is an issue edsumm for 13. Identification of the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum in a marine sedimentary sequence shows that sea surface temperatures near the North Pole increased from roughly 18 degrees Celsius to over 23 degrees Celsius — such warm values imply the absence of ice and thus exclude the influence of ice-albedo feedbacks on this Arctic warming.

Kari Stefansson and colleagues report results of a genome-wide association study for urinary bladder cancer. The strongest association was with a variant on 8q24, located 30 kb upstream of MYC in a haplotype block distinct from previously reported 8q24 cancer risk variants.

Simon Stacey and colleagues report several new susceptibility variants for basal cell carcinoma, including coding variants in KRT5, a variant at 9p21 near CDKN2A and CDKN2B and a variant at 7q32 near KLF14. The latter is an imprinted gene, and the effect at this locus is dependent on the parental origin of the risk allele.

Gudbjartsson et al. report that variants near two genes, ASIP and TYR, are associated with risk of cutaneous melanoma and basal cell carcinoma. These loci are among several loci initially discovered for their role in human pigmentation, as reported by Sulem et al. In a separate study, Brown et al. independently discover an association between variants near ASIP and melanoma risk.

Simon Stacey and colleagues report results of a genome-wide association study for cutaneous basal cell carcinoma. They identify two loci, at 1p36 and 1q42, associated with BCC risk, and show that neither is associated with melanoma or pigmentation traits.

Julius Gudmundsson and colleagues report a prostate cancer genome-wide association follow-on study. They report variants at 3q21.3, 8q24.21 and 19q13.2 newly associated to prostate cancer susceptibility and the fine-mapping of the association signal at 11q13.