Volume 487 Issue 7406, 12 July 2012

Legal actions and oversight are necessary to keep the drug industry in line.

The discovery of the Higgs boson is a massive achievement — let's just savour it.

Nature reporter Quirin Schiermeier explains how one of his stories saw him face a High Court challenge — and win.

The week in science: Arsenic-loving bacterium needs phosphorus after all; polonium poisoning suspected in Yasser Arafat’s death; and China’s Three Gorges Dam reaches full power.

Experimentalists now hope to pin down the properties of the fabled particle.

Campaigners in Britain argue for public-interest defence.

With less-frequent selections, proposers worry about rising costs and complexity.

University of California, San Francisco, wants more control over fund-raising as state budget crisis continues.

Rare genetic variant suggests a cause and treatment for cognitive decline.

US FDA to consider risks and benefits more explicitly in drug approvals.

Faeces, lizards, keyboards, faces — Rob Knight likes to sequence the microbes on anything and everything. Next, he plans to sequence Earth.

Debate rages over whether researchers have managed to see an exceptionally rare form of radioactivity. Experiments this year should finally settle the issue.

Uncontrolled medical treatment in Asia and Africa costs lives and money. David Peters and Gerald Bloom call for governments, firms and citizen groups to get involved.

John M. Braxton calls for teaching-integrity committees to deal with academics who fail in their responsibilities.

Cecily Wolfe welcomes a life of cartographer Marie Tharp, revealing her part in the plate-tectonics revolution.

Bill Viola creates immersive video installations that focus on extreme emotions and primal human experiences such as birth and death. On the eve of the Sacred Geometry and Secular Science exhibition at the Loyola University Museum of Art in Chicago, Illinois, the artist talks about meditative video gaming, Renaissance “punks” and the power of mystery.

Philip Ball finds little contemporary relevance in a play from the cold-war era that probes scientific responsibility.

Nobel laureate who showed that people who share a resource can regulate themselves.

You can run across a swimming pool filled with a mixture of cornflour and water, but you sink if you stand still. Conventional understanding of this phenomenon is now being turned on its head. See Letter p.205

The 'nested' pattern of mutualistic interactions between plants and their pollinators is thought to promote species coexistence. But the key determinant may instead be the number of partners that species have. See Letter p.227

The effect of force on a chemical reaction has been visited in three different molecular environments. The results reveal a unifying framework that enables predictions of force-induced reactivity.

By freezing a DNA polymerase enzyme at several points along its reaction pathway, a sequence of X-ray crystal structures has been obtained, showing how the enzyme replicates DNA and revealing surprising mechanistic details. See Article p.196

Drug candidates that are related to a common metabolite called adenosine inhibit inflammation and reduce bone destruction in artificial joints. The finding suggests a potential approach to increasing the durability of prosthetic implants.

The spin Seebeck effect has hitherto relied on a temperature gradient in a magnetic system to generate an electric current based on the intrinsic spin of electrons. It has now been demonstrated in a non-magnetic material. See Letter p.210

Jellyfish move using a set of muscles that look remarkably similar to striated muscles in vertebrates. However, new data show that the two muscle types contain different molecules, implying that they evolved independently. See Letter p.231

Stress-induced behavioural measures of anhedonia in adult mice, but not measures of behavioural despair, required a decrease in the strength of excitatory synapses on D1 dopamine receptor-expressing nucleus accumbens medium spiny neurons owing to activation of melanocortin 4 receptors.

A new DNA analysis method termed long fragment read technology is described, and the approach is used to determine parental haplotypes and to sequence human genomes cost-effectively and accurately from only 10 to 20 cells.

Atomic-resolution time courses of phosphodiester bond formation catalysed by DNA polymerase η reveal transient intermediate states and an unexpected third metal ion in the reaction mechanism.

A dark-matter filament connecting the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223 has been detected from its weak gravitational lensing signal.

A jamming mechanism for the observed phenomenon of the sudden hardening of suspensions of micrometre-sized particles on impact (enough to enable a person to run over them) is described and quantified.

A giant spin Seebeck effect—three orders of magnitude greater than previously detected—has been observed in a non-magnetic material, InSb; the proposed mechanism relies only on phonon drag and spin–orbit interactions in a spin-polarized system, not on magnetic exchange.

A bilayer material comprising catalyst-bearing microstructures embedded in a responsive gel and actuated into and out of a reactant-containing ‘nutrient’ layer continuously interconverts chemical, thermal and mechanical energy and thereby shows autonomous, self-sustained homeostatic behaviour, which regulates the temperature of the system in a narrow range.

A simulation of ice sheet retreat reveals two meltwater pulses coinciding with MWP-1A and the ‘8,200-year’ event, caused by saddle collapses between ice domes.

The bird skull arose from the nonavian dinosaur skull by several episodes of paedomorphosis, in which descendants resemble the juveniles of their ancestors, according to a study of shape change during dinosaur ontogeny and phylogeny.

Examination of previous results and computational analysis of empirical data sets representing mutualistic plant–pollinator networks shows that a simple metric—the number of mutualistic partners a species has—is a better predictor of individual species survival (and hence, community persistence) than is the nestedness of ecological networks.

This phylogenomic study shows that core muscle proteins were already present in unicellular organisms before the origin of multicellular animals, and supports a convergent evolutionary model for striated muscles in which new proteins are added to ancient contractile apparatus during independent evolution of bilaterians and some non-bilaterians, resulting in very similar ultrastructures.

A new double-infection technique with viral vectors is used to interrupt transmission through the propriospinal neurons (PNs) in macaque monkeys, and this is found to impair reach and grasp movements, revealing a critical role for the PN-mediated pathway in the control of hand dexterity.

Exome sequencing is used to investigate the role of mutations and copy number aberrations in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer, revealing recurrent mutations in multiple chromatin/histone modifying genes, as well as genes involved in androgen signalling.

AMD1 and eIF5A are identified as two genes involved in the polyamine–hypusine pathway, a new tumour suppressor network regulating apoptosis.

The histone modification H3K9me3, the histone methyltransferase SUV39H1 and the H3K9me3-binding protein HP1α participate in maintaining the silent state of the two canonical T helper 1 cell signature genes (which encode interferon-γ and T-bet), ensuring T helper 2 lineage stability in vitro and in vivo; targeting this pathway has the potential to reduce asthma-related pathology.

A non-coding RNA termed Rsx, which has properties consistent with a role in X-chromosome inactivation, is identified in the marsupial Monodelphis domestica.

Researchers with a knack for promotion and a desire to help those in need may find their niche in biomedical marketing.

An epidemiologist challenges orthodoxy through interdisciplinary work.

Career opportunities.