Volume 568 Issue 7753, 25 April 2019

Our 150th anniversary offers an opportunity to revel in the short, quirky and fun formats of our past.

Dorothy Bishop describes how threats to reproducibility, recognized but unaddressed for decades, might finally be brought under control.

A spongy form of graphene can also maintain its resilience when subjected to extreme heat.

Stellar baby boom added a slew of stars to the Galaxy’s disk.

Structures made of DNA are designed to target the bacteria that cause cholera.

Titan’s land of lakes includes bodies that were seen in winter but had disappeared by the onset of spring.

The advent of sex-selective abortion has ushered in changes in the sex ratio of newborns.

DNA analysis helps to resolve two cases of mistaken identity among Madagascan stick insects.

Entombed by debris nearly 40 years ago, a river in the northwestern United States runs again.

The week in science: 19–25 April 2019.

But the practical challenges of breeding and maintaining unconventional lab animals persist.

Researchers are narrowing down their measurements of how long the subatomic particle survives on its own.

Government-funded research, conference travel and visas are all touched by the situation.

Analysis of 20,000 genomes reveals that rare gene variants can help to explain how the trait is inherited.

The research examines once taboo questions about the impacts of gender transition.

Skyscrapers in cities rob people of sunlight and put human health, well-being and sustainability at risk, warn Karolina M. Zielinska-Dabkowska and Kyra Xavia.

Tilli Tansey extols a history of California’s chaotic early-twentieth-century epidemic.

The rise and fall of the medical-testing company features in a new documentary. Heidi Ledford sums up.

Philip Ball talks to Katie Paterson, whose artworks take on climate change, Moon dust and the death of stars.

Mischievous steward of molecular biology’s golden age.

Forensic anthropologist Ann Ross describes the techniques she uses to determine the age of human skeletons.

A new class of chemical instrumentation seeks to alleviate the tedium and complexity of organic syntheses.

Opportunities for moving between academia and business are expanding for scientists as companies step up recruitment.

A detector that was designed to probe dark matter, the ‘missing’ mass in the Universe, has seen an elusive nuclear decay called two-neutrino double electron capture — with implications for nuclear and particle physics.

Cancer cells often have mutations in anticancer genes that make their survival dependent on other genes. The gene-editing approach CRISPR–Cas9 offers a way to identify such vulnerabilities.

Ammonia is vital to society, but its manufacture is energy intensive, has a large carbon footprint and requires high initial capital outlays. An intriguing reaction now suggests that energy-efficient alternatives are possible.

A brain–computer interface device synthesizes speech using the neural signals that control lip, tongue, larynx and jaw movements, and could be a stepping stone to restoring speech function in individuals unable to speak.

Crosslinked polymer networks known as thermoset plastics have many applications, but can’t be reshaped or recycled. A thermoset with reorganizable crosslinks retains its useful properties, but has recyclability built in.

The history and advancements of gravitational-wave astronomy are reviewed and the future of the field is discussed.

Understanding the behaviour of the machines powered by artificial intelligence that increasingly mediate our social, cultural, economic and political interactions is essential to our ability to control the actions of these intelligent machines, reap their benefits and minimize their harms.

In the forearc regions of Costa Rica, helium and carbon isotope data reveal that about 20 per cent less carbon is being transported into the deep mantle than previously thought.

A neural decoder uses kinematic and sound representations encoded in human cortical activity to synthesize audible sentences, which are readily identified and transcribed by listeners.

The known species repertoire of the collective human gut microbiota is substantially expanded with the discovery of 1,952 uncultured bacterial species that greatly improve classification of understudied African and South American samples.

Draft prokaryotic genomes from faecal metagenomes of diverse human populations enrich our understanding of the human gut microbiome by identifying over two thousand new species-level taxa that have numerous disease associations.

In a screen of 324 human cancer cell lines and utilising a systematic target prioritization framework, the Werner syndrome ATP-dependent helicase is shown to be a synthetic lethal target in tumours from multiple cancer types with microsatellite instability, providing a new target for cancer drug development.

Highly sensitive measurements of the atmosphere of Mars with the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter do not detect any methane over a range of latitudes in both hemispheres, in contrast to previous local or remote detections.

High-resolution measurements of Martian atmospheric dust, water and semiheavy water, obtained by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter during a global dust storm on Mars, are reported.

Using data from plasma-based tokamak nuclear reactors in the US and Europe, a machine-learning approach based on deep neural networks is taught to forecast disruptions, even those in machines on which the algorithm was not trained.

Two-neutrino double electron capture is observed experimentally in ¹²⁴Xe with the XENON1T detector, yielding a half-life of 1.8 × 10²² years.

The molybdenum-catalysed reduction of nitrogen to ammonia is achieved under ambient conditions, using samarium(ii) diiodide in combination with either simple alcohols or water as the proton source.

Multinucleated osteoclasts required for normal bone development and tooth eruption in the mouse originate from embryonic erythro-myeloid progenitors and are maintained after birth by fusion with circulating monocytes.

Geometrically defined microenvironments are used to show that leukocytes migrate along chemokine gradients using the nucleus as a mechanical gauge to sample potential paths and identify the path of least resistance.

Depletion of the DNA helicase WRN induced double-stranded DNA breaks, and promoted apoptosis and cell cycle arrest selectively in cancers with microsatellite instability, indicating that WRN is a promising drug target for the treatment of these cancers.

The stress-activated kinase p38γ has a role in regulating entry into the cell cycle; in the liver, it can induce cellular proliferation during regeneration and promote the development of hepatocellular carcinoma.

Disease-causing microduplications can be corrected by harnessing an endogenous double-stranded break DNA repair pathway.

The structure of human ATP-citrate lyase, in complex with a newly developed small-molecule inhibitor, shows extensive conformational changes that reveal an allosteric site for the inhibitor to bind and indirectly compete with the citrate substrate.

Crystal structures of ATP citrate lyase from bacteria, archaea and humans unravel how the enzyme directs the formation of the central metabolite acetyl-CoA, and shed light onto the evolutionary origins of the Krebs cycle.