Volume 498 Issue 7453, 13 June 2013

Oversight and public debate about access to personal data are crucial to preserving privacy.

Lucrative prizes emulating the Nobels bring welcome money and publicity for science.

It is only a matter of time until idealism sees the release of confidential genetic data on study participants, says Steven E. Brenner.

The week in science: US sets agenda for gun research; China makes another space launch; and rethinking restrictions on controversial diabetes drug Avandia.

Cap-and-trade pilot schemes set stage for nationwide roll-out.

Pilot project will bring drug companies together to test targeted lung-cancer therapies.

Regulator triggers efforts to standardize faecal transplants.

Photons emerge as competitors to electrons in computer circuits.

State-of-the-art collar reveals animal’s quick reflexes and phenomenal acceleration.

Funding jitters rife ahead of government spending review.

The launch of several science mega-prizes is making some researchers millionaires — but others question whether such awards are the best way to promote their field.

Unmanned aerial vehicles are poised to take off as popular tools for scientific research.

Recent developments have rekindled the ethical debate over human cloning. This is no time for complacency, caution Martin Pera and Alan Trounson.

Arab Muslim countries need a new generation of observatories to rejoin the forefront of the field, says Nidhal Guessoum.

Robert Macfarlane reflects on the recent resurgence in nature writing.

Andrew Robinson mulls over a study of India's adaptation of low-tech inventions.

Kelly Stewart revels in a graphic biography that follows the human and scientific stories of three iconic primate researchers.

Human embryonic stem cells have at last been generated by a technique called somatic-cell nuclear transfer. Further research on such cells should provide insight into ways of improving the generation of stem cells by reprogramming.

Ultracold atomic gases are excellent platforms for exploring phenomena in condensed-matter physics. They have now been used to engineer the spin Hall effect and to make the atomic counterpart of the spin transistor. See Letter p.201

Stem-cell differentiation is controlled by RNA processing — as well as by gene expression and transcription. This finding is a milestone towards realizing these cells' potential for research and therapy. See Letter p.241

Malaria infections are not always lethal. One reason for this may be that transmission from mosquitoes creates malaria parasites that trigger a more protective mammalian immune response. See Letter p.228

Traces of hydrogen gas, detected over vast regions of space, have for the first time been used as a standard ruler to measure dark energy — the unknown cosmic energy that is causing the Universe's expansion to speed up.

The conversion of poor-quality arable lands to grassland has prevented soil erosion and sequestered carbon. A study finds that greenhouse gases will be emitted if these lands return to cultivation, especially if they are ploughed.

Experiments on silicon diffusion in the mineral olivine cast doubt on the widely held belief that water has a significant effect on the rheological properties of Earth's upper mantle. See Letter p.213

GIRK channels allow potassium ions to cross the cell membrane, thereby affecting the electrical status of the cell and so its functioning. Structural data now provide insight into the channels' mode of operation. See Article p.190

A novel tracking collar provides highly precise location, speed and acceleration data from 367 runs by five cheetahs in the wild; although a top speed of 58 m.p.h. was reported, few runs were above 45 m.p.h. with the average run around 31 m.p.h., and hunting success depended on grip, manoeuvrability and muscle power rather than outright speed.

An X-ray structure and electrophysiological analysis of mammalian G-protein-gated inward rectifier potassium channel GIRK2 in complex with βγ reveals a pre-open channel structure consistent with channel activation by membrane delimited G-protein subunits.

Investigations show that all the second-generation stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 fail to reach the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase; every AGB star in the sample has a low sodium abundance, indicating that they are exclusively first-generation stars.

The spin Hall effect, whereby flowing particles experience orthogonally directed, spin-dependent Lorentz-like forces, is observed in a quantum-degenerate gas and used to produce a cold-atom spin transistor.

The ‘time cloak’ experiment is extended here using a time analogue of the Talbot effect in optics — in which a plane wave incident on a diffraction grating produces repeated images of the grating at regular distances — to show that almost half of the time axis can be concealed.

An innovative technique based on scanning tunnelling probes with integrated thermocouples is developed and used to measure heat dissipation in the electrodes of atomic and molecular junctions.

Measurements of the silicon self-diffusion coefficients in olivine at high temperature show that the effect of water content on rock deformation is actually very small, not large as was previously thought.

The patterning of barium in tooth enamel is shown to be a reliable marker of lactation in humans and macaques; furthermore, the study of a tooth from a Neanderthal child reveals the weaning process in this extinct species.

Exome sequencing of patients with congenital heart disease (CHD) and their unaffected parents reveals an excess of strong-effect, protein-altering de novo mutations in genes expressed in the developing heart, many of which regulate chromatin modification in key developmental genes; collectively, these mutations are predicted to account for approximately 10% of severe CHD cases.

This study defines a novel RIP1-kinase- and IL-1α-dependent autoinflammatory pathway that depends on NF-κB and is controlled by the tyrosine phosphatase SHP-1.

Serial passage of the malaria parasite through rodents, primates or human hosts increases parasite virulence, suggesting that vector transmission regulates virulence, although direct evidence for this has been lacking; mosquito transmission is shown here to intrinsically modify asexual blood-stage Plasmodium chabaudi chabaudi, which elicits altered host immune responses that, in turn, modify disease severity.

A search for variants in coding exons of 25 genome-wide association study risk genes in a large cohort of autoimmune patients finds that rare coding-region variants at known loci have a negligible role in common autoimmune disease susceptibility, arguing against the previously proposed rare-variant synthetic genome-wide association hypothesis.

Single-cell RNA sequencing is used to investigate the transcriptional response of 18 mouse bone-marrow-derived dendritic cells after lipopolysaccharide stimulation; many highly expressed genes, such as key immune genes and cytokines, show bimodal variation in both transcript abundance and splicing patterns. This variation reflects differences in both cell state and usage of an interferon-driven pathway involving Stat2 and Irf7.

This study identifies MBNL proteins as negative regulators of alternative splicing events that are differentially regulated between ES cells and other cell types; several lines of evidence show that these proteins repress an ES cell alternative splicing program and the reprogramming of somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem cells.

Isoform B of the chromatin-binding protein Brd4 acts to suppress DNA damage response signalling.

Using a CO-FISH method with single-chromosome resolution, sister chromatids of the sex chromosomes, but not autosomes, are shown to segregate nonrandomly during asymmetric cell divisions of Drosophila male germline stem cells; this suggests that it is unlikely that nonrandom sister chromatid segregation serves to protect the ‘immortal strand’ to avoid replication-induced mutations as proposed previously.

As they grapple with increasingly large data sets, biologists and computer scientists uncork new bottlenecks.

Zoos provide an opportunity to work on crucial issues of biodiversity while reaching out to the public.

Graduate-degree holders have higher pay and lower unemployment than bachelor's-degree holders.

Survey finds high levels of burnout among oncologists.

US awards programme aims to encourage innovation among early-career researchers.

The art of remembering.