Volume 564 Issue 7734, 6 December 2018

Genome of legendary Galapagos giant tortoise reveals some clues about longevity.

The annual United Nations climate talks have to kick the Paris agreement up a gear.

Any scientist publishing a claim should quantify their confidence in it with a probability, argues Steven N. Goodman.

Woodland birds flee, leaving only a handful of species that thrive in degraded habitat.

An optical signal triggers mechanical motion thanks to a nerve junction constructed in the laboratory.

A double whammy of heat and aridity is now more likely to strike regions around the globe.

Cells infected with the versatile pathogen churn out viral particles with many different shapes.

Climate shifts may explain the extinction of grass-loving giant rhinoceros.

A frenzy of drilling may have caused quakes in the first half of the twentieth century.

Pottery fragments hint at how ancient cooks prepared the fishy delicacy.

The week in science: 30 November – 6 December 2018.

He Jiankui gives talk about controversial claim of genome editing babies, but ethical questions remain.

Chang’e-4 mission will test plant growth on the Moon, and listen for radio emissions normally blocked by Earth's atmosphere.

Instead, researchers suggest injecting fluid cement or water below ground to lift the entire city.

Parts of Iran’s capital city, home to 13 million people, are subsiding by 25 centimetres each year.

The ultimate goal is to inform efforts to conserve or repair heritage sites.

Astronomers peer inside planetary nurseries for clues about how our Solar System and others came to be.

Viral hepatitis is on the rise. Tackling hepatitis B in Africa is key to fighting back.

With sources of renewable energy spreading fast, all sectors can do more to decarbonize the world, argue Christiana Figueres and colleagues.

Three trends will combine to hasten it, warn Yangyang Xu, Veerabhadran Ramanathan and David G. Victor.

Take these eight steps to make soils more resilient to drought, produce more food and store emissions, urge Cornelia Rumpel and colleagues.

Kendall Powell probes a study claiming that swanky buildings spark discovery.

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

Techniques that render tissues as clear as glass and swell them to several times their original size are giving unprecedented access to the inner workings of biological systems.

Knowing when to hand-hold and when to step back is crucial for helping early-career researchers.

A natural chemical reaction that occurs below the sea floor makes the amino acid tryptophan without biological input. This finding reveals a process that might have helped life on Earth to begin.

Magnetic materials can host a range of structures called spin textures. Two such textures — a meron and an antimeron — have been observed experimentally for the first time, in a material known as a chiral magnet.

Chloroplast organelles in plant cells are thought to have evolved from bacterial cells. It emerges that the protein-import system in chloroplasts arose from components that export proteins out of bacteria.

Measurements of the strength of interactions between the Higgs boson and other particles test the current model of particle physics. A key part of this model has been confirmed by observing the most common decay of the Higgs boson.

Low oxygen levels are a hallmark of expanding fat tissue in obesity, and can lead to type 2 diabetes. In addition to a lack of adequate blood supply, increased oxygen demand in fat cells now emerges as being key to this harmful state.

Ammonia emissions harm humans and the environment. An analysis shows that satellites can locate sources precisely, and could thus help to monitor compliance with international agreements to limit such emissions.

Intrinsic and extrinsic cues drive dynamic processes that control cell fate during organ development. A study of mouse and human cells reveals how these inputs affect cells that make the essential hormone insulin.

Accounting for meltwater from the Antarctic Ice Sheet in simulations of global climate leads to substantial changes in future climate projections and identifies a potential feedback mechanism that exacerbates melting.

High-resolution imaging techniques show that aromatic amino acids such as tryptophan formed abiotically and were subsequently preserved at depth beneath the Atlantis Massif of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, supporting the hydrothermal theory for the origin of life.

Genomic, epigenomic and transcriptomic data derived from the Mediterranean amphioxus (Branchiostoma lanceolatum) provide insights into the evolution of the genomic regulatory landscape of chordates.

Recruitment of NLRP3 to the dispersed trans-Golgi network via binding to PtdIns4P is required for activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome by diverse stimuli.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the protein-conducting translocon of the type 9 secretion system reveal its architecture and mechanism of translocation.

Early results from the COSINE-100 experiment—designed to test a much-debated claim of the detection of a dark-matter signal—show no indications of dark matter, providing evidence against the previous claim.

Improved techniques allow the measurement of a frequency difference with an uncertainty of the order of 10^–19 between two independent atomic optical lattice clocks, suggesting that they may be able to improve state-of-the-art geodetic techniques.

A refractive lens and a refractive prism for extreme-ultraviolet radiation have been developed that use the deflection of the radiation in an inhomogeneous jet of atoms.

A magnetically induced two-dimensional square lattice of merons and antimerons is observed in real space, along with its transformation into a hexagonal lattice of skyrmions at room temperature.

Satellite observations reveal over 200 ammonia hotspots associated with agricultural and industrial point sources, which emit much larger quantities of ammonia to the atmosphere than previously thought.

Ice-core-derived melt records reveal that atmospheric warming has recently intensified Greenland ice-sheet surface melt and runoff to levels that are exceptional over at least the last 350 years.

Hippocampal activity during a period of sleep after memory encoding is crucial for forming long-term memories in rats, even for types of memory considered not to be hippocampus-dependent.

Single-cell analysis reveals that interactions with the extracellular matrix via integrin α5 and mechanotransducer YAP1 determine whether pancreatic progenitors develop along the duct or endocrine lineages.

In zebrafish embryogenesis, nascent haematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs), homing to a vascular niche for retention, are ushered by patrolling and guiding macrophages through integrin-mediated cell-cell recognition.

TIC236 is an inner-membrane protein that binds to the outer-membrane channel TOC75 to create a long, stable bridge that enables the transport of proteins into chloroplasts.

PD-1 undergoes internalization, FBXO38-mediated ubiquitination and proteasome degradation in activated T cells, and inhibition of this pathway dampens anti-tumour immunity of T cells.

Stella, a factor essential for female fertility, protects the oocyte methylome in mice by suppressing de novo DNA methylation mediated by the DNA methyltransferase DNMT1.

The kinase CDK12 suppresses usage of intronic polyadenylation sites and thereby promotes the expression of genes involved in homologous recombination DNA repair.