Volume 557 Issue 7703, 3 May 2018

To improve health care, researchers need to study diseases as they occur: in combination.

Nature journals formalize ethics standards for human-embryo and stem-cell papers.

Clinical research needs to investigate not simply drugs, but the psychology of why and how individuals experience pain, says Beth Darnall.

Children can surpass competitive athletes on assessments of exercise-induced fatigue.

Many of the microplastic particles in northern sea ice originated thousands of kilometres to the south.

Engineered cells offer greater precision and safety than previous versions.

The dead lay where they fell in their houses and the streets.

Species preserved in amber is the first known to evolve elaborate structures to improve its look.

Well-nourished microbiome can shut out potentially lethal bacteria.

Kagu brothers have surprisingly close bonds, with each other and their parents.

A combination of telescope data and 87,000 simulated galaxies helps scientists to size up the Galaxy.

Swings from baking drought to extreme downpours will grow more common, scientists warn.

The week in science: 27 April–3 May 2018.

NASA’s Mars InSight mission will listen for seismic activity to uncover details of red planet’s mysterious core.

Clinical trial in Africa helps kids, but raises fears about drug resistance.

Teams rush to capture faint radiation from Universe’s first stars, while theorists seek to explain puzzling observations.

With funding still scarce, GP-write project shifts focus to making virus-resistant human cells.

Legislation includes proposals to open up the Amazon rainforest to agriculture.

European Gaia spacecraft’s first major data dump — the most detailed 3D chart yet of our Galaxy — will keep researchers busy for decades.

Peace efforts in the country have ended 50 years of intense conflict. Now, scientists are studying former fighters and victims as they attempt to heal.

Analysis shows that extending the age limit for grants boosts the number awarded to women, but more must be done to achieve parity, say Ying Ma and colleagues.

Elizabeth Yale relishes a biography of Francis Willughby, a seventeenth-century polymath with a gift for collaboration.

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

As the physicist’s collected papers reach volume 15, Andrew Robinson sifts through the quotes attributed to him.

Virtual- and augmented-reality tools allow researchers to view and share data as never before. But so far, they remain largely the tools of early adopters.

Five researchers share their stories and advice on how to maintain good mental health in the hyper-competitive environment of science.

US ‘national drama’ drives theoretical chemist to move to Canada.

Inappropriate cellular inflammation can cause disease. It emerges that the protein SAMHD1 prevents the release of newly replicated DNA from the nucleus, blocking an undesirable pro-inflammatory response.

As the exoplanet WASP-107b orbits its host star, its atmosphere escapes to form a comet-like tail. Helium atoms detected in the escaping gases give astronomers a powerful tool for investigating exoplanetary atmospheres.

Ichthyornis dispar is a key extinct bird species from when birds were shedding characteristics of their dinosaur ancestors and evolving their current features. A reconstructed skull of I. dispar now illuminates this transition.

An absorbent gel has been integrated into the void space of a protein crystal to yield a remarkable self-healing material — it recovers its molecular order after several cycles of expansion and contraction.

A chemical system has been made in which two rings on an axle can switch places by allowing a smaller ring to slip through the cavity of a larger one. The advance opens up potential applications in molecular data storage.

People waiting for a liver transplant can die before an organ is found, or, if one is available but of poor quality, there is a risk of transplant failure. A machine that preserves livers might offer a way forward.

Analyses of genetic variation and population structure based on over 3,000 cultivated rice (Oryza sativa) genomes reveal subpopulations that correlate with geographic location and patterns of introgression consistent with multiple rice domestication events.

Normothermic machine perfusion of the liver improved early graft function, demonstrated by reduced peak serum aspartate transaminase levels and early allograft dysfunction rates, and improved organ utilization and preservation times, although no differences were seen in graft or patient survival.

SAMHD1 has an essential role in the replication stress response and prevents inflammation by activating the MRE11 nuclease to degrade nascent DNA strands at stalled replication forks, thus enabling replication.

High-resolution cryo-electron microscopy structures of the membrane-pore-forming domain of the mouse gasdermin GSDMA3 show that it forms pores with 26-, 27- or 28-fold symmetry and indicate that it may also form a parallel, soluble, pre-pore ring structure.

A detection of helium absorption at 10,833 Å on the exoplanet WASP-107b reveals that its atmosphere is extended and eroding, and demonstrates a new way to study upper exoplanetary atmospheres.

The shape of the spectral line and the resonance frequency of the 1S–2S transition in antihydrogen agree very well with those of hydrogen.

A strong lightwave in a monolayer of tungsten diselenide drives changes in the valley pseudospin, making valley pseudospin an information carrier that is switchable faster than a single light cycle.

An optical-frequency synthesizer based on stabilized frequency combs has been developed utilizing chip-scale devices as key components, in a move towards using integrated photonics technology for ultrafast science and metrology.

The integration of macromolecular ferritin protein crystals with hydrogel polymers gives a composite material that expands isotropically and reversibly to twice its size while maintaining periodicity, resists fragmentation and self-heals efficiently.

An aluminium compound is synthesized in which the aluminium is formally anionic; reactions with various substrates suggest that this compound acts as the nucleophilic partner in both metal–carbon and metal–metal bond-forming reactions.

High-resolution computed tomography of three-dimensionally preserved specimens of Ichthyornis dispar clarifies the mosaic evolution of the avian head, revealing a kinetic feeding apparatus reminiscent of modern birds, a transitional beak and a dinosaurian temporal region.

Genome data for thirteen alphaproteobacteria-related clades expand the coverage of alphaproteobacterial diversity and suggest that mitochondria diverged from Alphaproteobacteria before the diversification of all currently known alphaproteobacterial lineages.

Trophoblast and embryonic stem cells interact in vitro to form structures that resemble early blastocysts, and the embryo provides signals that drive early trophectoderm development and implantation.

The HOIL-1 component of the LUBAC ubiquitin ligase complex is required for LUBAC activity, which prevents lethality during embryogenesis by preventing aberrant TNFR1-mediated endothelial cell death and RIPK1-mediated defects in haematopoiesis.

A cryo-EM structure of an initiation complex of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase sheds light on the initiation of reverse transcription of viral RNA.

The structure of alternative complex III, a key enzyme in the bacterial electron transport chain, is reported both alone and as a supercomplex with an aa₃-type cytochrome c oxidase.