Volume 513 Issue 7519, 25 September 2014

German research organizations need to help their workers to defend animal research.

As the Scottish referendum showed, scientists’ views can influence political debate.

Scientists must ensure that the ambitious plan of Turkey’s president does not move forward without a thorough impact assessment, says Derin Orhon.

The week in science: NASA mission reaches Mars, Arctic sea-ice hits annual minimum, and extreme drought fuels California fires.

Activist Marina Silva is gaining ground in presidential polls.

Teamwork at centre of Chinese Academy of Sciences reform.

US and UN mobilizations are welcome but overdue.

Easy-to-make perovskite films rival silicon for efficiency.

Strategy lauded, but some fear it is lax on agricultural use.

FDA will continue to monitor safety from health records.

A hospital in Sierra Leone has struggled to continue its research amid the worst Ebola outbreak in history.

The United States has plenty of strong winds offshore, but it has struggled to harness them for energy.

Naivety about promiscuous, assay-duping molecules is polluting the literature and wasting resources, warn Jonathan Baell and Michael A. Walters.

Michael Brooke reappraises Julian Huxley's pioneering classic of animal behaviour on its centenary.

Lucy Fortson enjoys a slim primer on cosmology that uses a cleverly constrained lexicon.

Peter Ratcliff uses dendrochronology — tree-ring dating — to pin down the age and suggest the provenance of stringed instruments. As he prepares to speak at the Woodmusick instrument identification conference in Cremona, Italy, on 30 September, he talks about the science of spotting fakes, and the 14 Stradivarius instruments made from the same spruce tree.

A detailed survey of the Fraser River in Canada challenges preconceptions about how river water flows. The results call for a re-evaluation of how waterways carve through bedrock to form canyons. See Letter p.534

Proteins are synthesized in cells by the ribosome apparatus. A report of 16 yeast ribosome structures, each bound by a different inhibitor, broadens our understanding of how drugs affect ribosome activity. See Article p.517

The first definitive signs of water have been seen in the atmosphere of a Neptune-sized exoplanet, paving the way towards the search for water on smaller Earth-like planets. See Letter p.526

The development of stem-cell-based models of two diseases that cause dwarfism reveals that statins — drugs that are used to treat high levels of blood cholesterol — may also promote cartilage formation and bone growth. See Article p.507

Calcium is an essential component of the catalyst that forms oxygen from water during photosynthesis. It seems that part of calcium's job is to enable the release of oxygen from this catalyst.

The development of tobacco plants that are genetically engineered to produce a more efficient form of Rubisco, an enzyme involved in photosynthesis, marks a step towards increasing crop yields. See Letter p.547

The development of CellNet — network-biology software that determines how cell types generated in vitro relate to their naturally occurring counterparts — could improve our ability to produce desirable cells in culture.

Asian monsoons were strongly active 40 million years ago and were enhanced by high atmospheric CO₂ content. They were significantly weakened when CO₂ levels decreased 34 million years ago and then reinitiated several million years later.

This study reprograms fibroblasts from thanatophoric dysplasia type I (TD1) and achondroplasia (ACH) patients into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), finding that chondrogenic differentiation results in the formation of degraded cartilage; statin treatment led to significant recovery of bone growth in a mouse model of ACH.

Mutations that dysregulate Notch1 and Ras/PI3K signalling are common in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia; here, treatment with a PI3K inhibitor is shown to induce drug resistance that is associated with downregulation of activated Notch1 signalling, suggesting that inhibition of both Notch1 and PI3K could promote drug resistance.

Whereas previous structural investigation of ribosome inhibitors has been done using the prokaryotic ribosome, this work presents X-ray crystal structures of the yeast ribosome in complex with 16 inhibitors including eukaryotic-specific inhibitors; the inhibitors all bind the mRNA or tRNA binding sites, larger molecules appear to target specifically the first elongation cycle.

Simulations tracing the mixing of chemical elements as star-forming clouds assemble and collapse show that turbulent mixing during cloud assembly naturally produces a scatter of stellar abundance much smaller than that in the gas, explaining why stars in the same cluster appear to be nearly identical in their chemical abundances.

Space telescope observations of the transmission spectrum of the extrasolar planet HAT-P-11b, which is about the same size as Neptune, reveal water vapour absorption at a wavelength of 1.4 micrometres and indicate that the planetary atmosphere is predominantly clear down to an altitude corresponding to about 1 millibar.

The oxygen isotopic composition of seawater sulphate in oxygen-deficient waters records the degree of in situ sulphur cycling.

A survey along the Fraser Canyon in Canada reveals complex flow dynamics involving velocity inversions and upwelling, which suggests ways to improve flow and bedrock incision modelling.

An anomalocaridid from the Cambrian period of China is so well preserved that its anterior nervous system can be resolved.

A contemporary test of the theory of island biogeography, in which species richness is determined by an island’s area and isolation, shows that geographic area is still a good positive predictor of species richness, but that geographic isolation as a negative predictor has been replaced by economic isolation.

The plant enzyme Rubisco is the main enzyme converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into biological compounds, however, this enzymatic process is inefficient in vascular plants; this study demonstrates that tobacco plants can be engineered to fix carbon with a faster cyanobacterial Rubisco, thus potentially improving plant photosynthesis.

In the mouse, nerve-associated peripheral glial cells give rise to mesenchymal stem cells that contribute to the development and growth of adult teeth.

The human fungal pathogen Mucor circinelloides develops spontaneous resistance to an antifungal drug both through mutation and through a newly identified epigenetic RNA-mediated pathway; RNA interference is spontaneously triggered to silence the fkbA gene, giving rise to drug-resistant epimutants that revert to being drug-sensitive once again when grown in the absence of drug.

The growth of tumours is supported by tumour production of lactic acid, which polarizes tumour-associated macrophages to an M2 phenotype through a pathway dependent on hypoxia-inducible factor 1α.

The alarmin interleukin-33 is constitutively expressed at barrier sites and released in response to tissue damage; here, the IL-33 receptor ST2 is shown to be preferentially expressed on colonic regulatory T cells, where it promotes regulatory T-cell function and adaptation to the inflammatory tissue environment.

Crystal structure of the RNA-guided endonuclease Cas9 bound to a guide RNA and a target DNA duplex reveals how base-specific recognition of a short motif known as PAM in the DNA target results in localized strand separation in the DNA immediately upstream of the PAM, allowing the target DNA strand to hybridize to the guide RNA.

How to blend fieldwork and far-flung travel with raising little people.

Report confirms broad gender pay disparity in United States.

Institutions globally aim to support interdisciplinarity.

Foundation provides a roadmap back to the bench.

A trip to remember.