Volume 561 Issue 7723, 20 September 2018

A decade on from a major academic scandal, officials there have got their act together.

Update of century-old chemical reaction could produce kerosene from biomass.

Collaboration across institutes can train students in open, team science, which better prepares them for challenges to come, says Katherine Button.

A plant-rich diet has a smaller ‘water footprint’ than one based on meat feasts.

Microbe’s attack on the competition allows it to overrun the intestinal tract after antibiotic treatment.

Metal framework allows triple knot to be created in the lab.

Prehistoric genetic lineages have lasted to the present day, despite waves of conquerors and immigrants.

Protein–DNA bundles thwart enzymes in the widely used

CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing technology.

Beak and feather disease virus has appeared in eight countries where it had been unknown.

Ring-shaped invention channels waves to triple their height — a potential boon to wave energy.

The week in science: 14–20 September 2018.

Scientists say the country will now struggle to meet its commitments to the Paris agreement.

Machine learning supports 20-year-old theory of electron behaviour in high-temperature superconductor.

Analysis of thousands of submissions to eLife journal shows that these groups are also under-represented as senior authors and editors.

Super-sensitive devices capture bioluminescent displays and other behaviours long shrouded in darkness.

Experimental spacecraft will fling a net and shoot a spear at targets in space.

How voltage readings from individual neurons could power the next revolution in neuroscience.

Climate policy advice is being undermined by value-laden choices over risky mitigation strategies, warn Dominic Lenzi and colleagues.

Michael Gordin applauds a study tracing the tumultuous 70-year trajectory of condensed-matter physics.

Polish codebreakers paved the way for Alan Turing to decrypt German messages in the Second World War. Joanne Baker commends a gripping tale.

Six researchers offer tips for navigating through and beyond gender barriers.

The structures of anion-conducting channelrhodopsin proteins have been solved and used to develop a tool for optogenetics. Experts discuss what the structures tell us about ion conduction, and why the tool is needed.

Bird migration is influenced by weather, making it hard to predict when birds will pass through a particular place on their route. A model that forecasts bird migrations has been developed using radar data and weather information.

Photoemission, the ejection of an electron from a material on the absorption of a photon, is one of the fastest processes in nature. An experiment demonstrates how the dynamics of this process can be captured in real time.

Collections of cells in the tails of zebrafish embryos have now been found to transition between behaving as solids and fluids. This transition is responsible for the head-to-tail elongation of the embryo.

Spinal-cord injury can render intact neuronal circuits functionally dormant. Targeted reduction of neuronal inhibition in the injured region has now enabled reactivation of these circuits in mice, restoring basic locomotion.

Experiments show that short bunches of protons can produce electric fields that are strong enough to accelerate energetic electrons compactly. This discovery could lead to miniaturized high-energy particle accelerators.

What Nature was saying 50 and 100 years ago.

Immunotherapies activate T cells to destroy tumours, but the approach has failed in some brain cancers. A strategy to improve migration of T cells across the blood–brain barrier could overcome this limitation.

By analysing particle production in high-energy nuclear collisions, the phase boundary of strongly interacting matter is located and the phase structure of quantum chromodynamics is elucidated, implying quark–hadron duality.

Therapeutic T cells bearing ligands engineered to optimize adhesion and transmigration through the blood–brain barrier can be targeted to brain tumours.

Differential DNA methylation and the long-range effects of chromatin organization lead to pronounced differences in recombination landscape between males and females.

The crystal structure of anion channelrhodopsin-1 (ACR1) from the algae Guillardia theta provides insights into the basis of anion conductance.

Crystal structures and molecular simulations of the designed anion-conducting channelrhodopsin iC++ provide molecular insights that enable structure-based design of channelrhodopsins with desirable properties for use as optogenetic tools.

Emission from the radio counterpart of the gravitation-wave event GW170817 was powered by a wide-angle outflow at early times, but probably dominated by a narrowly collimated jet at later times.

An analysis of the motions of six million stars in the Milky Way disk reveals substructures such as snail shells and ridges, indicating that our Galaxy has been recently perturbed.

Electron acceleration to very high energies is achieved in a single step by injecting electrons into a ‘wake’ of charge created in a 10-metre-long plasma by speeding long proton bunches.

A teleported controlled-NOT gate is realized experimentally between two logical qubits implemented as superconducting cavity quantum memories, thus demonstrating an important tool for universal computation in a quantum modular architecture.

The absolute timing of the photoelectric effect has proved difficult to measure, but the delay between photon arrival at a tungsten surface and ejection of photoelectrons has now been determined.

Truncated tetrahedral nanocrystals can self-assemble into one-, two- and three-dimensional superstructures.

Studies of an Antarctic marine sediment core suggest that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated in the vicinity of the Wilkes Subglacial Basin during extended warm periods of the late Pleistocene, when temperatures were similar to those predicted to occur within this century.

Isotopic and sedimentary analyses of soils at Pastoral Neolithic archaeological sites in Kenya demonstrate the long-term influence of nutrient enrichment on savannah environments that has accompanied pastoralist settlement over the past three millennia.

Training of mice to associate a particular sound frequency with locomotion results in selective suppression of cortical responses to that frequency during movement, consistent with a motor-dependent form of auditory cortical plasticity.

Stimulating the intrinsic growth capacity of neurons and providing growth-supportive substrate and chemoattraction can allow axon regrowth across anatomically complete spinal cord injuries in adult rodents.

Cell collectives in embryonic tissues undergo a fluid-to-solid jamming transition, similar to those that occur in soft materials such as foams, emulsions and colloidal suspensions, to physically sculpt the vertebrate body axis.

Similarity of antibody responses in HIV-1 transmission pairs reveals a significant impact of the virus genome on imprinting antibody responses.

Quantitative live-cell imaging provides a dynamic protein atlas of mitosis.

A strategy developed to define off-target effects of gene-editing nucleases in whole organisms is validated and leveraged to show that CRISPR–Cas9 nucleases can be used effectively in vivo without inducing detectable off-target mutations.