Comment in 2013

A global, long-term programme of ecological monitoring is needed to track ocean health, say J. Anthony Koslow and Jennifer Couture.

Finding that part of the story of Louis Pasteur's rabies vaccine is false, Héloïse Dufour and Sean Carroll explore how science fables are born, spread and die.

The United States should install an earthquake early-warning system now — and before the next big one hits, says Richard Allen.

Physicists and engineers must do more than peddle ideas if their technologies are to translate effectively beyond the lab, says Hans Zappe.

It is time to weigh up the pros and cons of using genetic engineering to rescue species from extinction, say Michael A. Thomas and colleagues.

The first large-scale environmental surveys, carried out on the US arid lands, hold scientific lessons for policy-making still relevant today, explains K. John Holmes.

Home-made national approaches can be effective for climate-change mitigation if countries agree on rules and build trust, says Elliot Diringer.

It is time to probe whether the trend for patient and public involvement in medical research is beneficial, say Sophie Petit-Zeman and Louise Locock.

European collaboration is not far behind that in the United States, but there is still work to be done on cross-border funding and financial inequalities, says Paul Boyle.

Ian Boyd calls for an auditing process to help policy-makers to navigate research bias.

Glia, the non-neuronal cells that make up most of the brain, must not be left out of an ambitious US mapping initiative, says R. Douglas Fields.

Fifty years after a paper linked sea-floor magnetic stripes with continental drift, Naomi Oreskes explains its legacy as a lesson in achieving scientific consensus.

A mathematical paradox posed in a letter 300 years ago sowed the seed of economic theory by asking what money is worth, explains George Szpiro.

Imagery can help to bridge conceptual boundaries, but it can also cause trouble — as shown by the proliferation of engineering talk in biology, argues Eleonore Pauwels.

In decades of clinical-trial data, new treatments are better than standard ones just over half the time. That's as it should be, say Benjamin Djulbegovic and colleagues.

Reconfiguring protection priorities around global warming could be of limited use or even harmful, say Morgan W. Tingley, Lyndon D. Estes and David S. Wilcove.

Kathy L. Hudson and Francis S. Collins discuss how and why the US National Institutes of Health worked with the family of Henrietta Lacks, the unwitting source of the HeLa cell line, to craft an agreement for access to HeLa genome data.

Recycling, renewables and a reinvigorated domestic energy market will allow China to lead the world in low-carbon development, say Zhu Liu and colleagues.

Male and female cells can behave differently — it is time that researchers, journals and funders took this seriously, says Elizabeth Pollitzer.

Methane released by melting permafrost will have global impacts that must be better modelled, say Gail Whiteman, Chris Hope and Peter Wadhams.