Volume 554 Issue 7693, 22 February 2018

Insights into windows of opportunity that will have strong positive impacts on the trajectories of health, education, social and economic success of adolescents are reviewed.

The recognition of adolescence as a distinctive period for biological embedding of culture, and mass education, are features of the globalization of cultures that are driven by transformations in labour, livelihood and lifestyle.

Investing in adolescents as the parents of the next generation is important for the wellbeing of current and future generations.

Single-cell transcriptomic analysis of the murine blood–brain barrier provides molecular definitions of the main vascular cell types, classifies perivascular cell types and sheds light on the organization of the arteriovenous axis.

The cryo-electron microscopy structure of full-length mouse Piezo1 reveals six Piezo repeats, and 26 transmembrane helices per protomer, and shows that a kinked helical beam and anchor domain link the Piezo repeats to the pore and control gating allosterically.

The electron cryo-microscopy structure of full-length mouse Piezo1 reveals unique topological features such as the repetitive transmembrane helical units that constitute the highly curved transmembrane region, and identifies regions and single residues that are crucial for the mechanical activation of the channel.

The halo of gas around a galaxy at redshift 1 is clumpy and anisotropic, with little variation in gas velocity, suggesting that it consists of entrained recycled material.

The discovery of a newly born type IIb supernova reveals a rapid brightening at optical wavelengths that corresponds to the shock-breakout phase of the explosion.

Polycrystalline monolayer molybdenum disulfide is used to fabricate a multi-terminal device combining a memristor and a transistor, which can mimic biological neurons with multiple synapses for neuromorphic computing applications.

‘Molecular anvil’ molecules consisting of a compressible mechanophore and incompressible ligands react under hydrostatic pressure to produce elemental metal via an unexplored mechanism.

An approach for the direct electrophilic C–H fluorination of arenes is reported, using a palladium catalyst and mild fluorinating reagents.

There has been about a forty per cent reduction in the transport of carbonate ions to the deep North Atlantic Ocean since preindustrial times, severely endangering cold-water corals.

Satellite data and modelling reveal that tropical forest fragments have similar size distributions across continents, and that forest fragmentation is close to a critical point, beyond which fragment numbers will strongly increase.

Stiffening of the mesoderm owing to an accumulation of cells triggers collective migration of neural crest cells during morphogenesis.

Single-cell fluorescence microscopy reveals that cytokinesis occurs in two stages in Staphylococcus aureus, an initial slow phase followed by a faster phase after MurJ protein recruitment to the midcell triggers peptidoglycan synthesis.

In mouse pancreas cells with only one copy of the Nr5a2 gene, the orphan nuclear receptor NR5A2 undergoes a marked transcriptional shift from differentiation-specific to inflammatory genes, which results in an epithelial-cell-autonomous basal pre-inflammatory state.

A combination of TGFβ inhibition and checkpoint-inhibition therapy provokes a potent cytotoxic response against metastatic tumours derived from colorectal cancers in mice.

In humans, TGFβ signalling is associated with lack of response to immunotherapy in immune-excluded tumours; in mouse models of this immune phenotype, robust tumour infiltration by T cells and tumour regression are observed only when checkpoint inhibition is combined with inhibition of TGFβ signalling.

KSR–MEK complexes allosterically activate BRAF through the action of N-terminal regulatory region and kinase domain contacts, thus challenging the accepted role of KSR as a scaffold for MEK recruitment to RAF.