Volume 560 Issue 7720, 30 August 2018

Physicists are stripping uncertainty from the loosest fundamental constant — Big G.

Working conditions in academic labs encourage abusive supervision. It is time to improve monitoring of and penalties for abuse, says Sherry Moss.

The charged particles that cause a true aurora are uncommon during the dazzling display named STEVE.

Arrays of ‘protocells’ powered by gas bubbles can loft large items to the surface of a container of water.

Competition between strains might help to stave off drug resistance in Africa.

Satellite mission that ended 25 years ago helps astronomers to get a measure of an exoplanet.

A year or more after radiotherapy, kids recall fewer details of recent parties and trips.

An insect helped to save a nation’s harvest from an invasive pest — without causing environmental damage.

Extinct beasts’ testosterone levels reveal more than just differences between the sexes.

The week in science: 24–30 August 2018.

British Heart Foundation award is one of the largest single grants in medical research.

Meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier offered few clues to his views on the topic when grilled at a US Senate hearing.

But academics say government incentives to publish are part of the problem.

Health system lacks capacity to respond to attacks that use high-powered modern weapons.

How excitement over claims of a high-temperature superconductor reached fever-pitch — and then died away.

As projects to restore woodlands accelerate, researchers are looking for ways to avoid repeating past failures.

Jessica K. Polka and colleagues call on journals to sign a pledge to make reviewers’ anonymous comments part of the official scientific record.

Philip Ball revisits a book that crystallized key concepts in modern molecular biology.

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

Steven Aftergood assesses a warning about the future of the Internet.

Physicist who helped to discover the first particle containing a charm quark.

Decision-makers need input from researchers on issues involving science and society.

Top tips for principal investigators to help junior scientists navigate the travails of teamwork.

Understanding how earthquakes interact is key to reliable earthquake forecasting. A machine-learning study reveals how the stress change induced by earthquakes at geological faults affects these interactions.

Whole-genome sequencing reveals the duplication of a regulatory region, called an enhancer, of the AR gene in treatment-resistant human prostate cancers. The finding shows the importance of analysing non-protein-coding regions of DNA.

Monkeys genetically engineered to lack the gene SIRT6 die a few hours after birth, displaying severe growth defects. This finding reveals a previously unknown role for the SIRT6 protein in primate development.

The enzyme RNA polymerase II, which transcribes DNA, pauses early in transcription and awaits signals to continue. High-resolution structures reveal how it is stopped and efficiently restarted.

The gravitational constant, G, which governs the strength of gravitational interactions, is hard to measure accurately. Two independent determinations of G have been made that have the smallest uncertainties so far.

What Nature was saying 50 and 100 years ago.

Manipulation of the transcription factor OsGRF4 can improve the efficiency with which some high-yielding cereal crops use nitrogen. This discovery has implications for sustainable agriculture.

Subwavelength-grating metamaterial structures, their main operation principles and their implementation in integrated photonic devices are reviewed.

The rapid development of cell culture and animal models has facilitated a new understanding of ZIKV biology and made it possible to generate multiple ZIKV vaccine candidates, which are advancing through clinical trials.

The Newtonian gravitational constant is measured with two independent methods, yielding results with relative standard uncertainties of 11.6 parts per million—the lowest uncertainty reported until now.

Stimulating the release of serotonin (5-HT) in the nucleus accumbens in wild-type mice promotes sociability, and rescues deficits in social behaviours in a mouse model of autism.

The balance of DELLA and GRF4 proteins in plants ensures the co-regulation of growth with metabolism and tipping this balance towards GRF4 leads to higher efficiency of nitrogen use.

The cryo-electron microscopy structure of a paused transcription elongation complex of RNA polymerase II bound to DRB sensitivity-inducing factor and negative elongation factor is reported at 3.2 Å resolution.

The cryo-electron microscopy structure of an activated transcription elongation complex of RNA polymerase II bound to DRB sensitivity-inducing factor and the elongation factors PAF1 complex and SPT6 is reported at 3.1 Å resolution.

The molecular gas in the inner kiloparsec of a submillimetre-bright galaxy is clumpy and gravitationally unstable, collapsing to form stars at a rate that will deplete the gas in about 100 million years.

Electron-scattering experiments reveal that the fraction of high-momentum protons in medium-to-heavy nuclei increases considerably with neutron excess, whereas that of high-momentum neutrons decreases slightly, in contrast to shell-model predictions.

The domain-wall structure and dynamics are found to enhance, rather than inhibit, the high-frequency performance of an intrinsically tunable material, obtaining ultralow loss and exceptional frequency selectivity.

The growth rate of global atmospheric CO₂ concentration is faster in drier years, independently of temperature; this relationship is underestimated in current carbon cycle models.

Neural networks trained on data from about 130,000 aftershocks from around 100 large earthquakes improve predictions of the spatial distribution of aftershocks and suggest physical quantities that may control earthquake triggering.

Experimental data from, and mathematical modelling of, colonies of the clonal raider ant Ooceraea biroi demonstrate that increases in group size generate division of labour among similar individuals, increased homeostasis and higher colony fitness.

Satellite data for the period 1982–2016 reveal changes in land use and land cover at global and regional scales that reflect patterns of land change indicative of a human-dominated Earth system.

Integrated analyses of multiple cohorts are used to obtain a better understanding of the immune state of latent infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and factors that mediate and/or predict transitions from latent infection to active disease.

Single-cell RNA sequencing is used to characterize cell types in nasal tissues from human patients with chronic rhinosinusitis, revealing a role for tissue stem cells in allergic inflammatory memory.

The Ras-related GTPase RAP2 is a key intracellular signal transducer by which extracellular matrix rigidity controls mechanosensitive cellular activities through YAP and TAZ.

A cynomolgus monkey model deficient in SIRT6 protein exhibits severe retardation in prenatal development, in which neuronal differentiation is delayed by activation of the H19 long non-coding RNA.

The crystal structure of the Frizzled 4 receptor transmembrane domain is reported to a resolution of 2.4 Å in a ligand-free state.