Volume 569 Issue 7756, 16 May 2019

Recognizing the benefits, we move from merely supporting the use of preprint servers to promoting it.

Poor children in relatively rich nations are being let down by immunization programmes, says Seth Berkley.

Bag containing traces of coca leaves and other mind-bending plants was buried with a South American shaman.

Some 29,000 years ago, the Campi Flegrei system near modern Naples buried an entire region in ash.

A receptor on cells has two forms, each associated with a different type of messaging.

An eddy in an attack-plagued stretch of the Arabian Sea extends farther than expected.

Giant pandas were once far more widespread — and more genetically diverse — than they are today.

Method produces ultra-bright bursts of uniform X-rays that could help researchers to peer inside living cells.

Redondoviruses are associated with certain ailments, but whether they cause disease is unclear.

The week in science: 10–16 May 2019.

The Environmental Protection Agency's decision leaves fate of more than a dozen decades-long projects in doubt.

The country's major funding agency says the tool reduces the time it takes to find referees.

Researchers are troubled by a flat budget, and a rise in extremism and pseudoscience.

Researchers at more than 60 Brazilian labs will assess the replicability of research by their country’s scientists.

A US$1.7-billion programme aims to develop 30 gene-edited plant and animal varieties in the next decade.

Mysterious groups of archaea — named after Loki and other Norse myths — are stirring debate about the origin of complex creatures, including humans.

Africa has emerged as a major partner in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and that is paying dividends for science.

Focusing on the bottom few per cent, not averages, is the best way to tackle poverty, argue Mark Pelling and Matthias Garschagen.

A strategic mix of solar, wind and storage technologies around river basins would be safer and cheaper than building large dams, argue Rafael J. P. Schmitt, Noah Kittner and colleagues.

Natalie Kofler is engrossed by a book that examines what cutting-edge biotechnology means for our sense of self.

Does a board game with an avian theme deliver on the biology? Stuart West and his team of testers think so.

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

Open science can lead to greater collaboration, increased confidence in findings and goodwill between researchers.

An in situ investigation on the far side of the Moon has identified materials that might have originated from the lunar mantle. The results could lead to improved models of how the Moon formed and evolved.

It is difficult to carry out and verify digital quantum simulations that use many quantum bits. A hybrid device based on a digital classical computer and an analog quantum processor suggests a way forward.

A natural protein has been engineered to self-associate into an architecture previously unknown among biological molecules: a cage structure based on one of the classic polyhedra identified by Archimedes.

How Nature reported restrictions on the use of DDT in 1969, and dubious evidence of life on Mars in 1919.

The use of stem-cell-derived β-cells to replace those destroyed in pancreatic islets has the potential to cure diabetes. A new analysis provides a deep mechanistic understanding of islet-cell differentiation from stem cells.

Tumours often become resistant to treatment, but how this occurs is poorly understood. An analysis of how the protein Rb affects tumour growth and the response to therapy might cast light on the problem.

Three-dimensional genome architecture has important roles in the regulation of gene expression and is therefore a key determinant of cell identity in normal development and in disease states.

Quantum-classical variational techniques are combined with a programmable analogue quantum simulator based on a one-dimensional array of up to 20 trapped calcium ions to simulate the ground state of the lattice Schwinger model.

The developing mouse gut endoderm, mapped at single-cell resolution, reveals trajectories of cell differentiation before and during gastrulation and the emergence of regionalized cell identities along the anterior–posterior axis of the gut tube.

Single-cell transcriptional profiling of in vitro human pancreatic β-cell differentiation reveals progenitor and terminal fates, produces a detailed time course of endocrine induction and underpins a lineage model.

The relativistic jets associated with the black-hole X-ray binary system V404 Cygni change their orientation on time scales of minutes to hours, implying that the direction of the jets is being affected by the dynamics of the surrounding accretion flow that powers them.

Initial spectral observations by China’s Chang’E-4 far-side lunar rover suggest the presence of materials that may originate from the Moon’s mantle.

Antenna-enhanced terahertz pulses ballistically switch spins in antiferromagnetic TmFeO₃ with minimal energy dissipation between metastable minima of the anisotropy potential, as characterized by unique temporal and spectral fingerprints.

Mott materials feature scale-less relaxation dynamics after the insulator-to-metal transition that make its electric triggering dependent on recent switching events.

The mechanical behaviour of gold nanojunctions is investigated at the atomic scale using tuning-fork atomic-force microscopy, revealing a fluidic state at high strains with signatures of viscous-like dissipation and capillary-like adhesion.

The formation of Bermuda sampled a previously unknown mantle reservoir that is characterized by silica-undersaturated melts enriched in volatiles and by a unique lead isotopic signature, which suggests that the source is young.

A spatially explicit global map of tree symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi reveals that climate variables are the primary drivers of the distribution of different types of symbiosis.

Fossil evidence indicates that Denisovans occupied the Tibetan Plateau in the Middle Pleistocene epoch and successfully adapted to this high-altitude hypoxic environments long before the regional arrival of modern Homo sapiens.

A combination of improved near-infrared voltage indicators, high-speed microscopes and targeted gene expression schemes enabled simultaneous in vivo optogenetic control and recording of voltage dynamics in multiple neurons in the hippocampus of behaving mice.

MicroRNAs delivered by adeno-associated viral vectors improve global and regional contractility, increase muscle mass and reduce scar size in a porcine model of myocardial infarction.

Loss of RB promotes both malignant progression and the development of metastatic disease; however, whereas reactivation of the RB pathway can revert metastatic tumour cell states to non-metastatic cell states, malignant cell proliferation is supported by MAPK–CDK2-dependent suppression of RB.

In mice, prophylactic administration of TNF inhibitors mitigates some of the immune-related adverse effects of immune checkpoint blockade treatment, and also improves to some extent the anti-tumour effect of this immunotherapy.

CRISPR DNA base editors induce transcriptome-wide off-target RNA editing, which can be reduced by using engineered variants that retain on-target DNA editing activities.

An artificial protein cage is readily assembled by metal ion coordination and disassembled by reducing agents, and displays excellent chemical and thermal stability.