Volume 567 Issue 7749, 28 March 2019

The surprise finding that neurogenesis drops in diseased brains could throw open a new route to therapies.

Academics and editors need to stop pretending that software always catches recycled text and start reading more carefully, says Debora Weber-Wulff.

Measurements also help to explain mysterious flashes of radiation inside thunderclouds.

Rhesus macaque, perhaps an elite gift, was interred with a type of pottery also found in human graves.

Tumours-on-a-chip could help to customize treatments for glioblastoma.

Manure, food waste and similar sources could be recycled to curb reliance on imported phosphate rock used for agriculture.

Deposit in China rivals Canada’s renowned Burgess Shale in its preservation of animals’ soft tissue.

Global shipping will have a bigger effect than climate change on the spread of non-native life forms.

Discovery could lead to a more stable supply of the compound artemisinin, which is used when other therapies fail.

The week in science: 22–28 March 2019.

The discoveries could guide a new era of lunar exploration.

International team plans to extract 1.5-million-year-old ice that holds secrets about the planet’s ancient climate.

Small spending bumps for genomics and physics stand in stark contrast to the funding windfall across basic research in last year's budget.

Advisory committee calls for a global registry of studies that involve editing the human genome.

White House policy will require universities to certify that they protect free speech to remain eligible for research funding.

After decades of assuming that pain processing is equivalent in all sexes, scientists are finding that different biological pathways can produce an ‘ouch!’.

An analysis of global soya-bean production forecasts massive deforestation in Brazil — stakeholders must act fast to prevent it, warn Richard Fuchs and colleagues.

Felicity Lawrence absorbs three books on the illogical route from farm to fork.

Evelyn Lamb enjoys a rich study on number-crunching and its ubiquitous fruit.

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

Tuskegee whistle-blower who drove social justice in biomedicine.

In the age of immunotherapy, cancer biologists are relying on a new generation of tools to learn how the interplay between tumours and immune cells shapes the course of disease.

Weighing up the costs and benefits can help when mulling an international move.

Isobel Williams has an autoimmune disease. The support network that she co-founded is helping to improve life in academia for people with long-term health conditions.

The function of histone proteins can be modified through addition or removal of certain chemical groups. The addition of a serotonin molecule is a newly found histone modification that could influence gene expression.

The commercialization of a promising class of solar cell has been hindered by issues associated with the components needed to construct it. A possible solution has now been reported.

The factors that contributed to the explosive nature of the 2015 Zika outbreak in the Americas are not well understood. A new analysis explores the link between prior dengue virus exposure and Zika virus infection.

Three studies have demonstrated the cooling and trapping of single strontium and ytterbium atoms in two-dimensional arrays. Such arrays could lead to advances in atomic-clock technology and in quantum simulation and computing.

How Nature reported improved decision-making rules for betting in 1969, and an experiment in international wireless telephony from 1919.

Materials called plastic crystals have been found to undergo huge temperature changes when subjected to small pressures near room temperature. Such materials could form the basis of future refrigeration technologies.

A protein complex that moves molecules called lipopolysaccharides between the two cell-wall membranes of certain bacteria is a target for antibiotics. Structures now reveal how this complex delivers its load irreversibly.

The characterization of missense histone mutations that occur across several cancer types provides insight into the potential role of these mutations in altering chromatin structure and potentially contributing to tumour development.

RNA sequencing data and tumour pathology observations of non-small-cell lung cancers indicate that the immune cell microenvironment exerts strong evolutionary selection pressures that shape the immune-evasion capacity of tumours.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of LptB₂FGC, in nucleotide-free and vanadate-trapped states, reveal the mechanism of lipopolysaccharide extraction from the inner membrane of Gram-negative bacteria and a role for LptC in efficient lipopolysaccharide transport.

The accuracy of computations on noisy, near-term quantum systems can be enhanced by extrapolating results from experiments with various noise levels, without requiring additional hardware modifications.

Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements in CoSi reveal the presence of unconventional chiral fermions near the Fermi level, with giant surface Fermi arcs and one pair of well separated chiral nodes.

Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements reveal that CoSi and RhSi are nearly ideal topological conductors, with structural chirality and surface helicoid arcs of topological charge ±2 arising from bulk multifold chiral states.

Colossal barocaloric effects are observed in the plastic crystal neopentylglycol and found to originate from the extensive molecular orientational disorder, giant compressibility and highly anharmonic lattice dynamics of the material.

A double-layered halide architecture for perovskite solar cells enables the use of dopant-free poly(3-hexylthiophene) as a hole-transport material, forming stable and scalable devices with a certified power conversion efficiency of 22.7 per cent.

Estimates of spatial patterns of nitrogen discharge into water bodies across China between 1955 and 2014 show that current discharge rates are almost three times the acceptable threshold, and ways to restore a clean water environment are suggested.

A proof-of-concept clinical trial of patients with histiocytoses with MAPK-pathway mutations showed durable responses to treatment with the MEK1 and MEK2 inhibitor cobimetinib, which indicates that histiocytic neoplasms are dependent on MAPK signalling.

Tolerant T cells display characteristic patterns of gene expression and epigenetics that are distinct from other types of T cells and are orchestrated by the transcription factor NR4A1.

Transfer of NR4A-deficient T cells expressing chimeric antigen receptors is shown to reduce tumour burden and increase survival by shifting T cell transcriptional programs away from exhaustion and towards increased effector function.

In serotonin-rich tissues, tissue transglutaminase 2 is able to attach serotonin to a glutamine residue in histone H3; this modification mediates permissive gene expression in these tissues.

In patient-derived xenograft models of breast cancer in mice, an increase in stress hormones during progression or treatment with their synthetic derivatives activates the glucocorticoid receptor, and results in increased metastatic colonization and reduced survival.

In human neuroblastoma tumours, MYCN is engaged in a USP11–BRCA1-dependent manner to suppress the accumulation of stalled RNAPII and induces both the activation and repression of genes.

Crystal structures of a five-protein complex comprising the inner-membrane components of the bacterial lipopolysaccharide transporter provide insight into the mechanism of extraction of lipopolysaccharide from the inner membrane and its transport to the outer membrane.