Volume 567 Issue 7748, 21 March 2019

Florida’s efforts to combat citrus greening with widespread drugs could harm the environment and public health.

A court ruling on environmental damages is a wake-up call: agencies are slipping in their mission to help the global poor, says Vijaya Ramachandran.

Beer-brewing yeasts might have arisen from a Silk Road rendezvous between strains related to wine-making yeasts.

Microscope equipped with mirrors and a laser reveals the back of the retina in real time.

Drug candidate imitates a naturally occurring immune protein that binds to influenza virus.

Programme’s success shows that the country could end mortality from the disease.

A snowy blanket helps shield one of the world’s largest ice sheets from the Sun.

Armoured ‘footballs‘ can be coaxed into cylinder and dumbbell shapes.

In a solitary species of bee, males gain chances to mate with females when they help guard the little ones.

The week in science: 15–21 March 2019.

Students around the world are walking out of school to urge governments to do more about global warming.

Gene-edited ‘surrogate sires’ could help spread desirable traits rapidly in some livestock.

Researchers will monitor the environmental effects of an industrial test to extract valuable metals from the Pacific sea floor.

On the shores of Liverpool Bay, ‘WireWall’ device helps engineers mount a battle against the waves.

Abel-prize winner Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck built bridges between analysis, geometry and physics.

Researchers are hijacking the cell’s protein-disposal system in the fight against Alzheimer’s and intractable cancers.

A desperate plan to fight a citrus scourge has public-health advocates and scientists concerned.

Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, Blake McShane and more than 800 signatories call for an end to hyped claims and the dismissal of possibly crucial effects.

Agustín Fuentes compares three books on the origins, trajectory and implications of our group behaviour.

Robert P. Crease harks back to the shapers of our scientific infrastructure and what they can tell us about how to handle the threat we now face.

How I learnt to maximize the value of TV, radio and publication interviews to reach and help the people I most want to support.

A robotic system has been demonstrated in which the random motion of individual components leads to deterministic behaviour, much as occurs in living systems. Environmental and medical applications could follow.

In cystic fibrosis, ion-transport abnormalities cause problems in many organs. A small molecule that forms cell-membrane pores allowing ion transport shows therapeutic promise in human cells and a model of the disease.

Many enzymes cooperate with other proteins and small molecules to function. A strategy that mimics the confinement of such cooperative partners in cells might allow these enzymes to be used in applications outside biological systems.

X-ray observations of the Galactic Centre have uncovered chimney-like structures filled with hot plasma. The discovery might reveal how energy is transported from this central region to far-off locations.

How Nature reported Australian flooding in 1919, and the conservation of patches of grass in 1969.

The contribution of a single neuron to brain function might seem negligible. But a map of the influence of single neurons reveals a complex pattern that prevents redundancy and enables clear messaging.

The STING protein aids intracellular defences by triggering inflammation. Studies that uncover how STING is activated might lead to strategies for targeting this protein in the treatment of cancer or autoimmune diseases.

Recent advances and future directions in the use of van der Waals integration beyond two-dimensional materials are reviewed.

A combination of optogenetics and calcium imaging at the single-neuron level provides evidence for feature-specific competition among neurons in primary visual cortex.

Gboxin and its chemical derivatives inhibit the growth of primary human and mouse glioblastoma cells, but not of mouse embryonic fibroblasts or neonatal astrocytes, by targeting mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation complexes.

Huge X-ray structures, termed Galactic Centre ‘chimneys’, extending hundreds of parsecs above and below the Galactic plane, appear to be exhaust channels connecting the Galactic Centre region to the Fermi bubbles.

Coherent perfect absorption in a disordered medium is demonstrated experimentally in the microwave regime through the realization of a random anti-laser that absorbs engineered radiation with near-perfect efficiency.

A spatially oscillating two-dimensional waveguide array is used to realize a photonic topological insulator in synthetic dimensions with modal-space edge states, unidirectionality and robust topological protection.

A stochastic robotic system shows deterministic behaviour—such as locomotion, object transport and phototaxis—from the collective motion of many loosely coupled disk-shaped ‘particles’ that perform only volumetric oscillations.

A set of 355 self-assembling DNA ‘tiles’ can be reprogrammed to implement many different computer algorithms—including sorting, palindrome testing and divisibility by three—suggesting that molecular self-assembly could be a reliable algorithmic component in programmable chemical systems.

Aromatization-driven C–C bond activation through iridium/phosphine catalysis enables deacylative transformations in various ketone substrates.

An inversion model for the ultraslow-spreading Mohns Ridge, combining controlled source electromagnetic and magnetotelluric data, reveals passive mantle upwelling controlled by slow and asymmetric plate movements.

Responses to passive vibration of the forelimb in the mouse somatosensory cortex rely on a rate code that is selectively tuned to a combination of stimulus frequency and amplitude, and originate from deep mechanoreceptors close to the bones.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of full-length STING show that cyclic GMP–AMP induces a half-turn rotation of the ligand-binding domain relative to the transmembrane domain, forming a tetramer and higher-order oligomers for signalling.

The cryo-electron microscopy structure of human TBK1 in complex with cyclic GMP–AMP-bound chicken STING reveals a binding mode that suggests that STING phosphorylation by TBK1 requires oligomerization of both proteins.

A statistical framework for breast-cancer recurrence uses long-term follow-up data and a knowledge of molecular subcategories to model distinct disease stages and to predict the risk of relapse.

Amphotericin B forms nonselective transmembrane ion channels, and restores host defences of cystic fibrosis airway epithelia independently of the regulatory function of cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance.

Cryo-EM structures of yeast Snf2 bound to the nucleosome in the presence of ADP or an ATP analogue reveal that Snf2 binding leads to distortion of the DNA, and a two-step mechanism underlying chromatin remodelling by Snf2 is proposed.

METTL14 recognizes the trimethyl mark on lysine 36 of histone H3 that directs m⁶A modifications co-transcriptionally.

Microbial generation of a terminal-alkyne-containing amino acid can be encoded into E. coli and provides the potential for in vivo generation of proteins and natural products for click chemistry.