Volume 534 Issue 7607, 16 June 2016

If life in the oceans is to be preserved, people must get to know the wonders of the deep.

We need your views on an experiment to convey the latest research in digestible form.

Wildfires such as those that hit Canada last month are a growing worry, writes Marc-André Parisien, but risk-assessment models can limit future damage.

LIGO spots another gravitational wave; increasing light pollution on Earth obscures the Milky Way; and moose develop infectious prion disease in Norway.

Firms chase a new breed of advanced veterinary care, from antibodies to cell therapies.

Tracking space rocks that reach Earth will give insight into the early Solar System.

Economists, investors and medical insurers can’t figure out how to pay for cutting-edge drugs.

Nature examines five core ways that the European Union shapes the course of research.

Induced pluripotent stem cells were supposed to herald a medical revolution. But ten years after their discovery, they are transforming biological research instead.

Faced with skyrocketing costs for developing new drugs, researchers are looking at ways to repurpose older ones — and even some that failed in initial trials.

Christopher Golden and colleagues calculate that declining numbers of marine fish will spell more malnutrition in many developing nations.

Måns Nilsson, Dave Griggs and Martin Visbeck present a simple way of rating relationships between the targets to highlight priorities for integrated policy.

Graham Farmelo ponders Malcolm Longair's study of the Cavendish, a physics laboratory with few rivals.

Sally Frampton and Sally Shuttleworth explore a show on public involvement in the evolution of vaccination.

Biomechanist Adam Summers of the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories has spent much of his life working out how fish move. But he has another role that some would consider more prestigious. As Pixar's 'fabulous fish guy', he advised the animation company on ichthyology for its 2003 hit Finding Nemo and the long-awaited sequel Finding Dory. On the eve of the sequel's opening, Summers talks about the tension between entertainment and science, being corrected by kids and the wild drama of the piscine world.

The complete DNA sequences of the two wild parents of the garden petunia provide valuable genetic insights into this model plant, and will improve the optimization of other crop plants for agriculture.

An immunotherapy approach targets nanoparticles to dendritic cells of the immune system, leading to an antitumour immune response with antiviral-like features. Initial clinical tests of this approach show promise. See Letter p.396

A multiscale model has been implemented that provides accurate predictions of the behaviour of ferroelectric materials in electric fields, and might aid efforts to design devices such as sensors and digital memory. See Letter p.360

The mechanisms that underlie enforced transitions between mature cell lineages are poorly understood. Profiling single skin cells that are induced to become neurons reveals that, unexpectedly, they often become muscle. See Letter p.391

The protein translation rate is low in tissue stem cells and tumour-initiating cells, and genetically preventing cytosine-5 methylation on transfer RNA in skin tumours is shown to favour the maintenance of a state of translational inhibition in mice, with tumour-initiating cells in this state becoming more sensitive to cytotoxic stress.

Leukaemic stem cells (LSCs) are responsible for BCR–ABL-driven chronic myeloid leukaemia relapse; here, p53 and MYC signalling networks are shown to regulate LSCs concurrently, and targeting both these pathways has a synergistic effect in managing the disease.

Cryo-electron microscopy has undergone a resolution revolution—here, this method has been combined with lipid nanodisc technology to solve structures of TRPV1, the receptor for capsaicin, in a membrane bilayer, revealing mechanisms of lipid and ligand regulation.

A modelling study of the bilobate nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko reveals that it has spun much faster in the past, but that its chaotically changing spin rate has so far prevented it from splitting; eventually the two lobes will separate, but they will be unable to escape each other and will ultimately merge again—a situation that seems to be common among cometary nuclei.

An analytical method of determining the mean first-passage time (the time taken by a random walker in confinement to reach a target point) is presented for a Gaussian non-Markovian random walker, thus revealing the importance of memory effects in first-passage statistics.

Molecular dynamics simulations of 90° domain walls in PbTiO₃ are used to construct a nucleation-and-growth-based analytical model that quantifies the dynamics of many types of domain walls in various ferroelectrics, suggesting intrinsic domain-wall motion as a universal mechanism for ferroelectric switching.

The self-assembly of colloidal particles into hollow micrometre-scale capsules is achieved through the combination of anisotropic particle morphology, deformable surface ligands that re-distribute on binding and the mutual attraction between particles, suggesting a design strategy for colloidal self-assembly

Nucleophilic aromatic substitution (S_NAr) is the most commonly used method to generate arenes that contain ¹⁸F for use in PET imaging; here, an unusual concerted S_NAr reaction is presented that is not limited to electron-poor arenes.

Seafloor geodetic data from the Nankai Trough, off southwestern Japan, show that most offshore sites in this earthquake-prone region have high slip-deficit rates, revealing previously unknown locations that could be important for the mitigation of future earthquake- and tsunami-associated disasters.

Functional imaging techniques use changes in blood flow to infer neural activity, but how strongly the two are correlated is a subject of debate; here, vascular and neural responses to a range of visual stimuli are imaged in cat and rat primary visual cortex, revealing that vascular signals are partially decoupled from local neural signals.

Preclinical evaluation and optimization of mitochondrial replacement therapy reveals that a modified form of pronuclear transfer is likely to give rise to normal pregnancies with a reduced risk of mitochondrial DNA disease, but may need further modification to eradicate the disease in all cases.

A co-repressor protein, CBFA2T2, oligomerizes to stabilize its binding partner PRDM14 and the pluripotency factor OCT4 on chromatin, thus facilitating the transcriptional landscape underpinning the germline and pluripotent fate.

The transcriptome changes driving the conversion of fibroblasts to neurons at the single-cell level are reported, revealing that early neuronal reprogramming steps are homogenous, driven by the proneural pioneer factor Ascl1; the expression of myogenic genes then has a dampening effect on efficiency, which needs to be counteracted by the neuronal factors Myt1l and Brn2 for more efficient reprogramming.

The development of a nanoparticle RNA vaccine is reported that preferentially targets dendritic cells after systemic administration, and is shown to provide durable interferon-α-dependent antigen-specific immunity in mouse tumour models; initial results in advanced melanoma patients indicate potential efficacy in humans.

Structural variations disrupting the 3′ region of PD-L1 are shown to aid immune evasion in a number of human cancers, including adult T-cell leukaemia/lymphoma, and in a mouse tumour model, CRISPR/Cas9-mediated deletion of the 3'-UTR of Pd-l1 is also shown to result in immune escape, suggesting that PD-L1 3′-UTR disruption could provide a diagnostic marker to identify patients who will benefit from anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapy.

The stem cell determinant Musashi (Msi) is a key mediator of pancreatic cancer progression and therapy resistance.

The bacterial chromosome replication origin contains an indispensable element composed of a repeating trinucleotide motif, termed the DnaA-trio, that stabilizes DnaA binding on single-stranded DNA.

The X-ray structure of the drug/metabolite transporter (DMT) protein YddG from Starkeya novella reveals a new membrane transport topology, with ten transmembrane segments in an outward-facing state and two pseudo-symmetric inverted structural repeats.

Ways to directly convert one mature cell type into another may eventually offer a safer, faster strategy for regenerative medicine.

English is widely spoken in science, but mastering another language can open doors, especially when working abroad.

Sarah Parcak uses satellite imagery to find ancient sites, and to help world citizens to save them.

Time to say goodbye.