Volume 568 Issue 7752, 18 April 2019

All those in the research enterprise must support efforts to conduct just, equitable and inclusive research.

Forty years on from a foundational report on how to protect people participating in research, cracks are showing, warns Nathaniel Raymond.

Climate warming is raising the risk of rainfall intense enough to strain dams and other infrastructure.

Paracatenula worms store their energy in a peculiar ‘battery’: bacteria that dwell in the worms themselves.

Adjustment to photons’ wavelengths could make their transmission through conventional fibre-optic cables more reliable.

Finding confirms historic reports that the rodents were killed en masse at South American ceremonies.

Over longer distances, a single-passenger flying car produces fewer emissions than does a petrol-powered vehicle on the roads.

A strain of cholera bacterium collected during the First World War is sequenced after decades in storage.

Variation on nuclear magnetic resonance allows chemists to assess complex mixtures without destroying them.

The week in science: 12–18 April 2019.

Revival of disembodied organs raises slew of ethical and legal questions about the nature of death and consciousness.

The Event Horizon Telescope’s global network of radio dishes has produced the first-ever direct image of a black hole and its event horizon.

US$100-million lander had sought to become the first privately funded craft to touch down on the lunar surface.

President Joko Widodo wants to create a single agency to control most research and its funding.

Waters surrounding Isla María Madre host vibrant coral reefs that have stayed relatively untouched for over 100 years.

Researchers from under-represented groups are making genomics more inclusive by working with communities that have been overlooked or abused.

Local communities and geneticists are working together to sequence DNA from remains that were taken from their homelands decades ago.

Researchers need guidance on animal use and the many issues opened up by a new study on whole-brain restoration, argue Nita A. Farahany, Henry T. Greely and Charles M. Giattino.

The restoration of some structures and cellular functions in pig brains hours after death could intensify debates about when human organs should be removed for transplantation, warn Stuart Youngner and Insoo Hyun.

Peter Coles weighs up three books on the momentous expedition that proved the general theory of relativity.

Jan Witkowski lauds a book highlighting half-obscured researchers whose work led to the structure of DNA.

Highlights of this season’s releases.

A riposte to the view that mathematics has led physics astray beguiles Jon Butterworth.

The formidable Tudor mathematician never published his work. Georgina Ferry relishes a fresh biography.

Jared Diamond’s latest explores national resilience in the face of catastrophe. Richard Rhodes critiques it.

Alison Abbott probes a history on the fraught nexus of mental illness and biology.

By forming a network of experienced peers, says Ruth Gotian, you can gain crucial career guidance and inspiration.

Cell competition in the skin promotes tissue youthfulness, but the same process later leads to skin ageing. This finding helps to explain how skin is maintained, and uncovers potential anti-ageing therapeutic targets.

Structural features have been identified on positively charged lightning channels that are not present on negatively charged ones. The discovery could explain why these two types of channel have different behaviours.

The HIV-1 envelope protein is the target of antibodies that neutralize the virus. A fresh look into the conformational states of this protein relaunches the quest to identify those relevant for vaccine design.

An electrical analogue of the magnetic-skyrmion bubble — a swirling arrangement of magnetic moments — has been unveiled in an artificially layered oxide material, raising prospects of new physics and applications.

How Nature reported the working conditions of deep-sea fishers in 1969, and the calorific content of German and British diets during the First World War.

A mouse model that replicates the clinical features of the most common form of heart failure opens a window on the mechanisms underlying this disease, and could help scientists to explore future therapies.

Highly reliable methods for predicting battery lives are needed to develop safe, long-lasting battery systems. Accurate predictive models have been developed using data collected from batteries early in their lifetime.

This Review discusses particle injection pumps, which inject suspended and sinking particles to different ocean depths and may sequester as much carbon as the biological gravitational pump.

A specialized technology can restore and preserve microcirculation and cellular functions hours post-mortem in an isolated pig brain.

COL17A1-driven stem cell competition and symmetric cell divisions initially govern skin homeostasis, but the same mechanisms result in skin ageing later in life.

iNOS-driven dysregulation of the IRE1α–XBP1 pathway leads to cardiomyocyte dysfunction in mice and recapitulates the systemic and cardiovascular features of human heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.

Studies of the planetary nebula NGC 7027, using an upgraded spectrometer onboard a high-altitude observatory, have identified the rotational ground-state transition of the helium hydride ion—the first molecule to form after the Big Bang and an essential precursor to molecular hydrogen.

Radio interferometric observations of lightning over the Netherlands reveal small needle-shaped plasma structures associated with the positive leader channels, explaining why cloud-to-ground lightning connects to the ground multiple times.

Future gravitational-wave detectors are expected to be limited by quantum back action, which is now found in the audio band in a low-loss optomechanical system.

Chiral polar-skyrmion bubbles are observed in superlattices of titanium-based perovskite oxides at room temperature.

Using a thin-film lithium niobate photonic platform, an electro-optic frequency comb generator is realized that is capable of producing wide and stable spectra, spanning more frequencies than the entire telecommunications L-band.

A low-power, fixed microwave signal in combination with an optical-pump signal generates an optical frequency comb that spans the whole wavelength range of the telecommunications C-band, with possible applications ranging from spectroscopy to optical communications.

The largest collection so far of glaciological and geodetic observations suggests that glaciers contributed about 27 millimetres to sea-level rise from 1961 to 2016, at rates of ice loss that could see the disappearance of many glaciers this century.

A regional-scale shift in the relationships between adult stock and recruitment of corals occurred along the Great Barrier Reef, following mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 caused by global warming.

The prevalence of improved housing (with improved drinking water and sanitation, sufficient living area and durable construction) in urban and rural sub-Saharan Africa doubled between 2000 and 2015.

In the red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) and fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), spatiotemporally coordinated integrin-dependent attachments between the blastoderm and vitelline envelope counteract tissue-intrinsic contractile forces to create asymmetric movements of embryonic tissue.

Cells in the mouse medial entorhinal cortex that fire when mice are at a specific distance and direction from a stationary object suggest that vector coding is important for rodent navigation.

A microbiota- and IL-1β-dependent axis of IL-2 production by group-3 innate lymphoid cells is shown in a mouse model to be necessary to maintain immunological homeostasis and regulatory T cells in the small intestine.

In an inducible mouse model of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, the signalling defect that underlies 90% of these tumours causes increased cell-surface expression of syndecan 1, leading to misregulation of macropinocytosis, and linking the defective signalling with nutrient-salvage pathways.

Single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer imaging of conformational states of HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein trimers on intact virus and of trimers used in previous structural studies reveal the latter as downstream—rather than pre-triggered—conformations.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of tau filaments from the brains of three individuals with chronic traumatic encephalopathy reveal distinct assembled tau conformers, with a novel protofilament fold enclosing hydrophobic molecules.