Volume 567 Issue 7747, 14 March 2019

As mobility increases, so must investments in national public-health institutions and local leadership, says John N. Nkengasong.

Long hot spells have affected every ocean on Earth, and are likely to grow in severity.

Polished ‘skull cup’ and human bones bearing tooth marks point to cannibalism in Europe in around 5000 BC.

By-product of rubber tyres is transformed into valuable organic semiconductors.

Shifts in pressure system could increase flood damage as Earth’s climate warms.

One species’ silk can make almost a full revolution when exposed to sufficient humidity.

Lop off the heads of these ribbon worms, then watch.

Wind and wave action drive the build-up of microplastics at remote ocean sites.

The week in science: 8–14 March 2019.

Surging conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is hampering efforts to stamp out the virus.

Move is the latest in a series that the country has made aimed at dealing with stronger hurricanes, more intense droughts and rising sea levels.

Countries will discuss whether to commission a study of technologies to blunt the effects of climate change.

Emerging monitoring methods will allow scientists to keep an eye on many more volcanoes.

What virtual-reality animal experiments are revealing about the brain.

Organelles — the cell’s workhorses — mingle far more than scientists ever appreciated.

Eric Lander, Françoise Baylis, Feng Zhang, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Paul Berg and specialists from seven countries call for an international governance framework.

Incredibly thin transistors could deliver even more powerful computers if three research challenges can be solved, argue Ming-Yang Li and colleagues.

Thomas R. Insel lauds a call for artificial intelligence to give doctors back the freedom to focus on their patients.

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

A founder of modern oceanography.

Zehra Sayers won a science-diplomacy award for her role in setting up the region’s first synchrotron light source.

Bela Z. Schmidt’s quest to understand an all-too-familiar career setback can be distilled into eight pieces of advice.

Bone elongation requires the maintenance of a growth plate of cartilage. Two studies have now identified stem cells specific to this structure that give rise to both cartilage cells and bone-marrow stem cells.

Ordinary computers can perform machine learning by comparing mathematical representations of data. An experiment demonstrates how quantum computing could use quantum-mechanical representations instead.

How Nature reported the lack of women engineers in the United Kingdom in 1969, and the use of charcoal in gas masks in 1919.

Pancreatic cancer usually spreads to the liver. The identification of signals from cells adjacent to pancreatic tumours that boost liver colonization might suggest ways to block this deadly form of cancer invasion.

Ocean-floor hot springs teeming with animal life were reported 40 years ago. How has knowledge of life thriving in such extreme conditions grown since then, and what challenges remain for exploration and conservation down there?

The ability to attach a variety of chemical groups to one position in a molecule facilitates the search for compounds that have useful properties. Reactions have been reported that could transform how chemists do this.

Insecticides that kill mosquitoes have helped to fight malaria, but insecticide resistance is rising. Treating mosquitoes with drugs that target the disease-causing parasite offers another way of tackling malaria.

The integration of liver and plasma quantitative lipidomic and proteomic data from 107 distinct mouse strains provides important insights into regulators of mammalian lipid metabolism.

A bacterial family of cGAS/DncV-like nucleotidyltransferases synthesizes a diverse range of cyclic dinucleotide and trinucleotide compounds that are likely to modulate the interaction of both pathogens and commensal microbiota with their animal and plant hosts.

A new calibration of the surface brightness–colour relation of eclipsing binary stars gives a distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud that is precise to one per cent.

Agreement between two single-ion clocks is demonstrated experimentally at the 10⁻¹⁸ level over a six-month period, confirming a key postulate of Einstein’s theory of relativity with hundredfold-improved precision.

Two classification algorithms that use the quantum state space to produce feature maps are demonstrated on a superconducting processor, enabling the solution of problems when the feature space is large and the kernel functions are computationally expensive to estimate.

The pattern of electrical resistivity in an unconventional superconductor at high magnetic fields and low temperatures across the nematic quantum critical point reveals two classic signatures of quantum criticality.

Measurements of the specific heat of two cuprate materials at low temperature in magnetic fields large enough to suppress superconductivity and over a wide doping range reveal that the pseudogap phase of cuprates ends at a quantum critical point.

A highly site-selective aromatic C–H functionalization reaction that does not require a particular directing group or arene substitution pattern provides functionalized arenes that can participate in various transformations.

Even in the absence of external perturbations, waterfalls can gradually form from planar bedrock riverbeds as a result of unstable interactions between flow hydraulics, sediment transport and bedrock erosion.

Clonal genetic tracing is used to demonstrate that, in mice, longitudinal bone growth during fetal and neonatal periods relies on the gradual consumption of chondroprogenitors, whereas in adults, a stem cell niche is formed allowing renewing of chondroprogenitors and leading to formation of large, stable monoclonal columns of chondrocytes.

Treatment of female Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes with atovaquone causes arrest of the Plasmodium falciparum parasite in the midgut, and this holds promise for malaria eradication in areas with insecticide-resistant mosquito populations.

S-geranylgeranyl-l-glutathione (GGG) is identified as a cell signalling molecule that interacts with the receptor P2RY8 to mediate migration inhibition and growth regulation of germinal-centre B cells.

Pancreatic cancer activates IL-6–STAT3 signalling in hepatocytes to induce the formation of a pro-metastatic niche in the liver.

p53 regulates the metabolism of ammonia by repressing genes of the urea cycle that function to eliminate excess ammonia.

A subtype of early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma characterized by disrupted cholesterol homeostasis and associated with a poor prognosis responds to treatment with the SOAT1 inhibitor avasimibe in a patient-derived xenograft mouse model.

The authors report that the cGAS–STING pathway drives a form of autophagy that is independent of interferon induction and distinct from the conventional autophagy.

The E3 ubiquitin ligase TRAIP governs the choice between the NEIL3 or the Fanconi anaemia pathway for the repair of DNA interstrand crosslinks.