Volume 513 Issue 7517, 11 September 2014

Governments and research organizations must mobilize to end the West African outbreak.

The space launch of a 3D printer does not herald a brave new era — but it is a good start.

Bottlenecks in testing samples for Ebola leave patients stranded for days in isolation wards and raise fears of seeking treatment, says J. Daniel Kelly.

The week in science: NIH finds forgotten ricin, scientists discover massive dinosaur, and greenhouse gases hit record highs.

Research could founder or flourish if Scotland leaves the United Kingdom.

Discovery buoys bid for mission to Jovian moon.

Seismic activity started to rise just as two giant reservoirs on upper Yangtze were being filled with water.

Machine will let astronauts create parts to order.

Using a wildlife version of fitness trackers, biologists can finally measure how much energy animals need to stay alive.

Technologies are allowing doctors to do what was once unheard of: restore blind people's sight. Now the real challenges begin.

Voluntary work alone cannot sustain the assessments carried out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Thomas F. Stocker and Gian-Kasper Plattner call for institutional support and a longer report cycle.

Countries should follow China's lead and boost markets for water, wind and solar power technologies to drive down costs, say John A. Mathews and Hao Tan.

Danièle Chatelain and George Slusser explore how French science fiction grapples with Cartesian duality.

Best-selling science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson's works cover everything from cryptography to Sumerian mythology. Ahead of next year's novel Seveneves, he talks about his influences, the stagnation in material technologies, and Hieroglyph, the forthcoming science-fiction anthology that he kick-started to stimulate the next generation of engineers.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

The first gibbon genome to be sequenced provides clues about how genomes can be shuffled in short evolutionary time frames, and about how gibbons adapted and diversified in the jungles of southeast Asia. See Article p.195

Infection by defective bacterial viruses that cannot replicate has now been found to be the key feature enabling bacteria to rapidly develop adaptive immunity against functional viruses.

A constraint on the global distribution of the elusive hydroxyl radical takes us a step closer towards understanding the complex, interdependent factors that control the levels of this atmospheric cleanser. See Letter p.219

A global map of the potential economic benefits of roads together with the environmental damage they can inflict provides a planning tool for sustainable development. See Letter p.229

A compilation of high-resolution measurements of ocean mixing collected over the past three decades reveals how deep ocean waters return to the surface — a process that helps to regulate Earth's climate.

Neurons linking the brain region that controls movement to the region involved in auditory control have been found to suppress auditory responses when mice move, but the reason for this inhibition is unclear. See Article p.189

An analysis of a sample comprising some 20,000 mass-accreting supermassive black holes, known as quasars, shows that most of the diverse properties of these cosmic beacons are explained by only two quantities. See Letter p.210

The iterative, reagent-controlled homologation of a boronic ester is used to create an ‘assembly line’ capable of synthesizing organic molecules that contain ten contiguous, stereochemically defined methyl groups and which have different shapes depending on the stereochemistry of those groups.

Here auditory cortex excitatory neurons are shown to decrease their activity during locomotion, grooming and vocalization, and this decrease was paralleled by increased activity in inhibitory interneurons; these findings provide a circuit basis for how self-motion and external sensory signals can be integrated to potentially facilitate hearing.

The genome of the gibbon, a tree-dwelling ape from Asia positioned between Old World monkeys and the great apes, is presented, providing insights into the evolutionary history of gibbon species and their accelerated karyotypes, as well as evidence for selection of genes such as those for forelimb development and connective tissue that may be important for locomotion through trees.

The Cancer Genome Atlas reports on molecular evaluation of 295 primary gastric adenocarcinomas and proposes a new classification of gastric cancers into 4 subtypes, which should help with clinical assessment and trials of targeted therapies.

Analysis of archival quasar data reveals that two quantities — the Eddington ratio and orientation — explain most of the diverse characteristics of quasars.

A series of long-lived excitons in a monolayer of tungsten disulphide are found to have strong binding energy and an energy dependence on orbital momentum that significantly deviates from conventional, three-dimensional, behaviour.

Observations of methyl chloroform combined with an atmospheric transport model predict a Northern to Southern Hemisphere hydroxyl ratio of slightly less than 1, whereas commonly used atmospheric chemistry models predict ratios 15–45% higher.

A moraine chronology determined by surface exposure dating shows that glaciers in the northern tropical Andes expanded to a larger extent during the Antarctic cold reversal (14,500 to 12,900 years ago) than during the Younger Dryas stadial (12,800 to 11,500 years ago), contrary to previous studies; as a result, previous chronologies and climate interpretations from tropical glaciers may need to be revisited.

A global zoning scheme is proposed to limit the environmental costs of road building while maximizing its benefits for human development, by discriminating among areas where road building would have high environmental costs but relatively low agricultural advantage, areas where strategic road improvements could promote agricultural production with relatively modest environmental costs, and ‘conflict areas’ where road building may have large agricultural benefits but also high environmental costs.

In poeciliid fish, the evolution of the placenta is associated with polyandry in females and correlates with a suite of phenotypic and behavioural traits in males.

The Pyrin inflammasome detects the presence of a pathogen not through recognition of a microbial molecule but by the activity of a bacterial toxin that modifies host Rho activity.

The metagenome of uncultured, Pacific Ocean viruses linked to a ubiquitous cyanobacteria is characterized using viral-tagging, revealing discrete populations in viral sequence space that includes previously cultivated populations and new populations missed in isolate-based studies.

The continuing rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations suppresses the development of stomatal pores, and thus gas exchange, in plant leaves on a global scale; now, a framework of mechanisms by which carbon dioxide represses development has been identified.

Fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase is shown to be depleted in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) and inhibits ccRCC progression by antagonizing glycolytic flux in renal tubular epithelial cells and by restraining cell proliferation, glycolysis, and the pentose phosphate pathway in von Hippel–Lindau-protein-deficient ccRCC cells by blocking hypoxia-inducible factor function.

Linear sequence elements within messenger RNAs are known to be targeted by regulatory factors such as microRNAs for degradation, a process that has been implicated in disease; now, non-linear regulatory structural elements within mRNAs are shown also to be targeted, with the resulting mRNA destabilization mediating breast cancer metastasis.

Femtosecond X-ray pulses were used to obtain diffraction data on photosystem II, revealing conformational changes as the complex transitions from the dark S₁ state to the double-pumped S₃ state; the time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography technique enables structural determination of protein conformations that are highly prone to traditional radiation damage.

Financial woes are marring researchers' enjoyment of their work.

Days of remembrance.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality. In some countries, incidence rates are dropping but survival rates for those with the disease remain low. By Eric Bender.

The costs of lung-cancer screening overshadow the benefits of swift diagnosis — but ingenious technologies could help.

Lung cancer kills more people than any other malignancy. Let's not delay in implementing a screening programme, says John K. Field.

Therapies targeted at the specific genetics of a patient's lung cancer have proved harder to realize than expected.

Lung cancer uses cunning mechanisms to evade the immune system. Can new antibody therapies outwit the disease?

Studies in never-smokers have revealed key lung-cancer mutations — but the cause of the disease is still a mystery.

Large-scale studies are confirming suspicions that air pollution significantly increases the risk of lung cancer.

An unusually high number of women from east Asia develop lung cancer. Few smoke, but that's only part of the mystery.

Lung cancer is the mortality king of malignancy, killing 1.6 million people yearly, with a five-year survival rate under 20%. With such grim statistics in mind, researchers are examining the causes of lung cancer with the aim of creating better treatments or even preventing it.