Volume 533 Issue 7602, 12 May 2016

A European plan to commercialize quantum technologies needs a bold goal.

Scientists should unite over electronic-cigarette regulation, or big tobacco will step in.

Scientists must publish less, says Daniel Sarewitz, or good research will be swamped by the ever-increasing volume of poor work.

A request to christen the newborn animal kicks off a flurry of physics puns.

Mercury crosses the face of the Sun; effects of society on sleep; and the world’s longest insect.

A wave of user-friendly devices is making the technology an attractive research tool.

Huge study uncovers 74 genetic markers that influence the number of years spent in education.

Scholars excited by depiction of actual objects on the body of a 3,000-year-old woman.

Scientists fear that security-driven switch to X-ray irradiators will harm their research.

Thierry Mandon on cutting red tape, French researchers’ self-effacement and shaking up social science.

Document submitted to the Italian Senate criticizes institute that will oversee a €1.5-billion project.

The geneticist built a career studying aspects of sex that make some people uncomfortable. Now things are getting uncomfortable for him.

As cyberattacks grow ever more sophisticated, those who defend against them are embracing behavioural science and economics to understand both the perpetrators and their victims.

Studies of human development in vitro are on a collision course with an international policy that limits embryo research to the first two weeks of development, warn Insoo Hyun, Amy Wilkerson and Josephine Johnston.

Klaas-Douwe B. Dijkstra has named a new dragonfly after David Attenborough to mark the broadcaster's 90th birthday — and to honour the importance of knowing the natural world.

Mark Peplow parses a book on Humphry Davy's dazzling mix of personas.

Stuart Pimm extols Richard Fortey's scientific and historical portrait of a beechwood.

Matthew Cobb assesses Siddhartha Mukherjee's history of human genetics.

The early stages of human development are normally hidden within the womb, but improved techniques for culturing embryos from the blastocyst stage promise to make these steps easier to investigate. See Letter p.251

If organic molecules were trees, then the numerous carbon–hydrogen bonds within them would be leaves. A catalyst that targets one 'leaf' out of many similar other ones looks set to be a huge leap for synthetic chemistry. See Letter p.230

Ashes of ancient meteors recovered from a 2.7-billion-year-old lake bed imply that the upper atmosphere was rich in oxygen at a time when all other evidence implies that the atmosphere was oxygen-free. See Letter p.235

Emergent quanta of momentum and charge, called quasiparticles, govern many of the properties of materials. The development of a quasiparticle collider promises to reveal fundamental insights into these peculiar entities. See Letter p.225

Describing the motion of three or more bodies under the influence of gravity is one of the toughest problems in astronomy. The report of solutions to a large subclass of the four-body problem is truly remarkable.

Analysis of a sensory neural circuit in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans reveals that its wiring is sex-specific, and arises through the elimination of connections that are originally formed in both sexes. See Article p.206

Palaeoclimatic evidence of monsoon rainfall dynamics across different regions and timescales suggests that monsoon systems exhibit substantial regional variation; meridional temperature gradients are a major driver of monsoon variability, but these gradients are influenced by other, interacting forcing mechanisms, making predictions of future changes in monsoon rainfall highly uncertain.

The genome sequence is presented for the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), providing information about a rediploidization following a salmonid-specific whole-genome duplication event that resulted in an autotetraploidization.

How sex-specific neuronal circuits are generated during development is poorly understood; here, sensory neurons are identified in the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans, which initially connect in both male- and hermaphrodite-specific patterns, but a specific subset of these connections is pruned by each sex upon sexual maturation to produce sex-specific connectivity patterns and dimorphic behaviours.

An analysis of bacterial community structure and antibiotic resistance gene content of interconnected human faecal and environmental samples from two low-income communities in Latin America was carried out using a combination of functional metagenomics, 16S sequencing and shotgun sequencing; resistomes across habitats are generally structured along ecological gradients, but key resistance genes can cross these boundaries, and the authors assessed the usefulness of excreta management protocols in the prevention of resistance gene dissemination.

Infrared interferometry imaging of the old, magnetically active star ζ Andromedae reveals an asymmetric distribution of starspots, unlike the north–south starspot symmetry observed on the Sun, meaning the underlying dynamo mechanisms must be different.

Three Earth-sized planets—receiving similar irradiation to Venus and Earth, and ideally suited for atmospheric study—have been found transiting a nearby ultracool dwarf star that has a mass of only eight per cent of that of the Sun.

A quasiparticle collider is developed that uses femtosecond optical pulses to create electron–hole pairs in the layered dichalcogenide tungsten diselenide, and a strong terahertz field to accelerate and collide the electrons with the holes.

The idea of carbon–hydrogen functionalization, in which C–H bonds are modified at will, represents a paradigm shift in the standard logic of organic synthesis; here, dirhodium catalysts are used to achieve highly site-selective, diastereoselective and enantioselective C–H functionalization of n-alkanes and terminally substituted n-alkyl compounds.

Evidence in support of low atmospheric oxygen concentrations on early Earth relates to the composition of the lower Archaean atmosphere; now the composition of fossil micrometeorites preserved in 2.7-billion-year-old rocks in Australia suggests that they were oxidized in an oxygen-rich Archaean upper atmosphere.

Models of thermochemical convection reveal flow patterns in the deep lower mantle under the north Pacific since 100 million years ago that explain how the enigmatic bend in the Hawaiian–Emperor hotspot track arose.

Here, 21-million-year-old fossils of a New World monkey from Panama are described, constituting the earliest known evidence for mammalian interchange between North and South America.

Signals recorded from motor cortex—through an intracortical implant—can be linked in real-time to activation of forearm muscles to restore movement in a paralysed human.

An in vitro model to study the early events that direct human embryo development after formation of the blastocyst and implantation in the uterine wall.

Little is known about cooperative behaviour among the gut microbiota; here, limited cooperation is demonstrated for Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, but Bacteroides ovatus is found to extracellularly digest a polysaccharide not for its own use, but to cooperatively feed other species such as Bacteroides vulgatus from which it receives return benefits.

Phosphorylation of the anaphase-promoting complex (APC/C) allows for its control by the co-activator Cdc20; a mechanism that has relevance to understanding the control of other large multimeric complexes by phosphorylation.

The adenosine A_2A receptor, a class A G-protein-coupled receptor, exists as an ensemble of two inactive and two active states in equilibrium and is activated by conformational selection rather than induced fit.

The structure of the core region of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter (MCU) is determined by NMR and electron microscopy, revealing that MCU is a homo-pentamer with a specific transmembrane helix forming a hydrophilic pore across the membrane, and representing one of the largest membrane protein structures characterized by NMR spectroscopy.

The X-ray crystal structure of the transmembrane portion of the human glucagon receptor, a class B G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR), is solved in the presence of the antagonist MK-0893, with potential implications for the development of therapeutics that target other class B GPCRs.

To improve your own papers, learn how to evaluate other scientists' work.

An ill child depends on computers for his education, and learns to make software that learns.

A tale of multiple cities.

A growing appreciation that cooperation and competition can coexist is transforming the life-sciences innovation landscape. Development was once shrouded in secrecy, but now organizations are coming together.

Drug discovery is time-consuming and full of blind alleys. Pharmaceutical rivals are cooperating in the early stages to accelerate and improve the efficiency of the process.

In 2006, pharmaceutical innovation consultant Bernard Munos helped to launch a lively public discussion about how open innovation can bring novel drugs to market with his paper 'Can opensource R&D reinvigorate drug research? He tells Nature how things have changed since then.

In a pioneering move, the compound JQ1 was released to the community for free. The impact that this has had on research and development is slowly coming into focus.

Open competitions bring new minds, skills and collaborations to problems in biomedical research.

In the search for novel therapies, drug developers have begun crowdsourcing molecules.

A more open approach to combating tropical diseases may help to overcome a pharmaceutical market failure.

Open initiatives are promising, but we have much further to go if research data are to be as publicly accessible as they should be, says Aled Edwards.

Advocates say that open science will be good for innovation. One neuroscience institute plans to put that to the test.