Volume 568 Issue 7751, 11 April 2019

Reports of a new-found snapshot of extinction highlights a mystery that scientists are still working to solve.

A protocol can help with the tricky conversations essential to responsible research conduct, says Mary A. Allen.

A technique combines light from several telescopes to probe an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

Well-used magnetic stirrers harbour metal atoms that could bias the results of chemical and biochemical reactions.

Artefacts found in Lake Titicaca include bones of a six-month-old llama killed in an ancient rite.

The dominant US crop plant has a voracious appetite for fertilizer, which leads to air pollution and health problems.

Seismic shivers documented in the Golden State after record-breaking snows in 2016 and 2017.

Activity radiates through a multitude of brain regions in parched mice presented with cues for water availability.

The burrows made by the rabbit-eared bilby serve as ‘outback oases’ for birds, reptiles and more.

University of Cape Town investigation prompted by violent protests rekindles debate about decolonizing the nation’s universities and curricula.

Modest investments in nuclear medicine and environment research are part of a lacklustre budget for science.

Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft did not find the gas in red planet’s atmosphere during its first months of operation.

Multi-million efforts are underway to fill long-standing gaps in genomic data from minority groups.

The decision could derail multi-million-dollar research projects such as the Sirius synchrotron.

Ship engines, underwater blasts, sonar and oil drilling are filling the seas with sound. Researchers are now trying to pin down the damage humanity’s growing acoustic footprint has on ocean life.

Policymakers should harness data to deliver public services that are responsive, efficient and fair, urge Helen Margetts and Cosmina Dorobantu.

Graham Farmelo parses Lee Smolin’s takedown of the most successful physics theory ever.

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

Alison Abbott applauds an illustrated treatment of the great Prussian naturalist’s scientific exploits in South America.

Tumour immunology has travelled a long and bumpy road. Gerard Evan examines an uneven treatment of it.

This year’s #ScientistAtWork contest attracted diverse entries from around the world.

After decades of clumsiness, robots are finally learning to walk, run and grasp with grace. Such progress spells the beginning of an age of physically adept artificial intelligence.

A person infected with HIV who was treated for blood cancer with a stem-cell transplant has gone into viral remission, with no trace of the virus in their blood. A similar outcome in 2009 hadn’t been replicated until now.

Excavations in southeast Asia have unearthed a previously unreported hominin species named Homo luzonensis. The discovery has implications for ideas about early hominin evolution and dispersal from Africa.

A vacuum as described by quantum mechanics is perhaps the most fundamental but mysterious state in physics. The discovery of correlations between electric-field fluctuations in such a vacuum represents a major advance.

Gene mutations that truncate the encoded protein can trigger the expression of related genes. The discovery of this compensatory response changes how we think about genetic studies in humans and model organisms.

Homo luzonensis, a new species of Homo from the Callao Cave in the Philippines from the Late Pleistocene epoch, is described.

CD22 inhibits microglial phagocytosis in the ageing brain, and treatment with a CD22-blocking antibody restores microglial homeostasis and cognitive function in ageing mice.

Transcriptional adaptation, a genetic compensation process by which organisms respond to mutations by upregulating related genes, is triggered by mRNA decay and involves a sequence-dependent mechanism.

Observations of an X-ray transient associated with a galaxy at redshift 0.738 suggest that the X-ray transient is powered by a millisecond magnetar and that it is the remnant of a merger between two neutron stars.

Electro-optic detection in a nonlinear crystal is used to measure coherence properties of vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field and deduce the spectrum of the ground state of electromagnetic radiation.

A Rydberg atom quantum simulator with programmable interactions is used to experimentally verify the quantum Kibble–Zurek mechanism through the growth of spatial correlations during quantum phase transitions.

Room-temperature modulation frequencies exceeding 200 GHz are demonstrated in birefringent semiconductor spin-lasers by coupling the spin of the charge carriers to the light polarization.

Phosphorene nanoribbons are produced in liquids through the intercalation of black phosphorous crystals with lithium ions, enabling the search for predicted exotic states and applications of these nanoribbons.

Measurements of the interhemispheric gradient of atmospheric carbon dioxide show that the Northern Hemisphere carbon land sink remained stable between the 1960s and the late 1980s, then increased during the 1990s and 2000s.

Belief in moralizing gods followed the expansion of human societies and may have been preceded by doctrinal rituals that contributed to the initial rise of social complexity.

Sleep deprivation in Drosophila elevates reactive oxygen species in sleep-promoting neurons, leading to changes in potassium currents and spiking activity and thereby connecting energy metabolism, oxidative stress, and sleep.

seqFISH+, an evolution of sequential fluorescence in situ hybridization with super-resolution imaging capabilities, is used to image mRNAs of 10,000 genes in cultured cells and mouse brain slices, demonstrating the ability to generate spatial atlases and to perform discovery-driven studies in situ.

In Arabidopsis thaliana, a newly identified auxin signalling pathway that involves TMK1 protein cleavage and IAA32 and IAA34 transcriptional repressors mediates complex developmental outcomes by allowing distinct interpretations of varying concentrations of cellular auxin.

An adult infected with HIV-1 who underwent allogeneic haematopoietic stem-cell transplantation for Hodgkin’s lymphoma using cells from a CCR5Δ32/Δ32 donor achieved full remission of HIV-1 for 18 months after transplantation and 16 months after cessation of antiretroviral therapy.

Non-canonical NF-κB is regulated by a negative feedback loop involving NIK-mediated activation of SIX1 and SIX2.

The transcription factor BACH1, which targets mitochondrial metabolism, is expressed at high levels in several types of cancer; reducing its expression in tumours makes them more susceptible to treatment with mitochondrial inhibitors.

mRNA that contains a premature termination codon (PTC) triggers a genetic compensation response that involves both transcription of its homologous genes and degradation of the mutated transcript by the nonsense-mediated decay pathway.