Volume 547 Issue 7663, 20 July 2017

Physicists and mathematicians have bonded over their shared explorations of bizarre states of matter.

Arguments about the environmental benefits of petrol or diesel engines are outdated.

Mishandling of patient information shows how governments and companies must become more worthy of trust, says Hetan Shah.

The week in science: 14–20 July 2017.

Revised tallies confirm that the rate of sea-level rise is accelerating as the Earth warms and ice sheets thaw.

Two-fifths report feeling unsafe at work, and 18% have concerns about attending conferences.

Europe’s highest court will rule on Poland's policy that encourages tree-felling in biodiversity hotspot.

Legislation introduced in the House of Representatives also rejects a White House plan to cut 'indirect cost' payments to research institutions.

President said ‘Make Our Planet Great Again’ — and researchers signed up.

Treatment shows promise in young people with leukaemia, but safety risks abound.

Topological effects might be hiding inside perfectly ordinary materials, waiting to reveal bizarre new particles or bolster quantum computing.

John Turner and Josefino Comiso call for a coordinated push to crack the baffling rise and fall of sea ice around Antarctica.

Richard Thompson applauds a chronicle alerting the world to marine polymer pollution.

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

Daniel Cressey surveys the remains of John Franklin's fatal 1845 voyage.

A third gravitational-wave signal has been detected with confidence, produced again by the merger of two black holes. The combined data from these detections help to reveal the histories of the stars that left these black holes behind.

It emerges that people reached Australia earlier than was thought. This finding casts light on the technology used by the travellers, and their possible interactions with animal species that became extinct. See Article p.306

A major advance in the quantum theory of solids allows materials to be identified whose electronic states have a non-trivial topology. Such materials could have many computing and electronics applications. See Article p.298

Immune cells called T cells help immune-system B cells mature to produce antibodies. This entails signalling between cells using the molecule dopamine — a surprising immunological role for this neurotransmitter. See Article p.318

Complex nanoscale magnetization patterns have been resolved in 3D using advanced X-ray microscopy. This could spur the design of magnetic devices that have unique properties and functions. See Letter p.328

The results of in vitro and in vivo screens to identify genes that are essential for the survival of a type of brain cancer show almost no overlap, underlining the need for caution when interpreting in vitro studies. See Letter p355.

The large number of small, similarly sized proteins and the small number of heavy RNA molecules that make up a ribosome reduce the time required for reproduction.

A complete electronic band theory is presented that describes the global properties of all possible band structures and materials, and can be used to predict new topological insulators and semimetals.

Optical dating of sediments containing stone artefacts newly excavated at Madjedbebe, Australia, indicate that human occupation began around 65,000 years ago, thereby setting a new minimum age for the arrival of people in Australia.

Genomic analysis of 491 medulloblastoma samples, including methylation profiling of 1,256 cases, effectively assigns candidate drivers to most tumours across all molecular subgroups.

Human follicular helper T cells engaging in synaptic interactions with germinal centre B cells release dopamine stored in chromogranin B⁺ granules, causing rapid externalization of ICOS ligand, which in turn enhances CD40L delivery to the synaptic cleft and synaptic contact, and results in an accelerated response.

A positive magneto-thermoelectric conductance is observed in the Weyl semimetal niobium phosphide, suggesting the presence of the elusive mixed axial–gravitational anomaly.

Techniques exist for imaging the magnetization patterns of magnetic thin films and at the surfaces of magnets, but here hard-X-ray tomography is used to image the three-dimensional magnetic structure within a micrometre-sized magnet in the vicinity of Bloch points.

A complex containing two uranium ions and three potassium ions, held together by a nitride group and a flexible molecular framework, can reduce and functionalize N₂ under mild conditions.

A huge smartphone dataset of physical activity yields global insights, revealing that activity inequality predicts obesity better than does volume of activity and that much of the inequality is a result of reduced activity in females.

Monozygotic twins show high concordance in eye- and mouth-looking, and this behaviour is markedly reduced in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

The authors encode pixel values of a short motion picture into the DNA of a population of Escherichia coli.

Two independent systems impairing hepatocyte proliferation during liver injury cause physiologically significant levels of functional hepatocyte regeneration from biliary cells.

An in vivo RNA interference screening strategy in glioblastoma enabled the identification of a host of epigenetic targets required for glioblastoma cell survival that were not identified by parallel standard screening in cell culture, including the transcription pause–release factor JMJD6, and could be a powerful tool to uncover new therapeutic targets in cancer.

New high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy structures of the HIV-1 envelope protein provide a detailed description and understanding of how the HIV-1 fusion machinery functions and how it changes its structure over time to convert from the pre-fusion to the fusion-intermediate conformation.

Crystal structures of an activated two-pore potassium channel reveal a cryptic binding pocket that binds small-molecule activators that restrict the mobility of the selectivity filter and surrounding structure, stabilizing an active ‘leak-mode’ conformation.

Scientists are designing board, card and digital games to convey scientific concepts.

Career-building skills need not be hard to learn.

A unique insight into a remarkable game.