Volume 569 Issue 7758, 30 May 2019

Major project to reproduce controversial claims of bench-top nuclear fusion kindles debate about when high-risk research is worthwhile.

Retracting a manuscript can be an opportunity to revisit the topic afresh.

Why revisit long-discredited claims for a source of abundant energy, asks Philip Ball? Because we are still learning how to treat pathological science.

Ghostly galaxy could be result of enormous collision.

Chemistry of Central Asian minerals resembles that of deeply buried rocks that supply seafloor volcanic chains.

Surveillance system sweeps human samples for microbial genes that pathogens rely on to dodge drug treatment.

Super-high-speed camera produces a film consisting of 60 consecutive frames.

Youngsters yet to perfect their hunting skills may scavenge birds such as swallows.

Device exploits semiconductors to whisk heat away from a polymer skin patch.

Every life matters to one species of desert ant, despite its colonies numbering in the tens of thousands.

The week in science: 24–30 May 2019.

Delays and disagreements plague final stages of the world-leading, €875-million Extreme Light Infrastructure being built across Eastern Europe.

As President Jair Bolsonaro slashes support for science and education, academics open up a route to offer scientific advice to policymakers.

Data from the blaze in Utah could improve models of how wildfire smoke spreads.

Researchers tested mechanisms linked to nuclear fusion at room temperature — but found no evidence for the phenomenon.

Sanger’s decision prompts questions among some scientists, who fear the UK centre could fall behind.

Researchers have analysed anonymized phone records of tens of millions of people in low-income countries. Critics question whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

Standard efforts have failed to slow the pace of extinctions, so Conservation X Labs is trying a fresh approach.

We need a broader, more-transparent suite of metrics to improve science publishing, say Paul Wouters, colleagues and co-signatories.

The dream of microbiome-based medicine requires a fresh approach — an ecological and evolutionary understanding of host-microbe interactions — argues Lita Proctor.

An exploration of the science behind our morality from philosopher Patricia Churchland is illuminating and grounded, finds Nicholas A. Christakis.

How does statistics help us to understand the world? Andrew Gelman weighs up Ian Stewart’s analysis.

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

In the second part of a three-part series on science start-ups, Nature Careers explores how founders can learn from their failures in business to try again.

The Human Microbiome Project put the health-associated microbes found in humans on centre stage. The project’s second phase shows how microbial disturbance in disease is linked to host processes.

It is extremely difficult to observe the radiation that is thought to be emitted by black holes. The properties of this radiation have now been analysed using an analogue black hole comprising a system of ultracold atoms.

How Nature reported Apollo 10 in 1969, and the permanent establishment of the US National Research Council in 1919.

The protein-import systems of organelles can become clogged by proteins. A protein from one organelle, the endoplasmic reticulum, is found to also unclog such blockages in mitochondrial organelles.

Prostate cancer contains nerve cells that are linked to disease progression, but their source was unknown. A mouse study reveals that cells from the brain invade prostate tumours and give rise to this nerve-cell population.

Object manipulation using an innovative glove allows large databases of detailed pressure maps to be obtained. Such data could lead to advances in robotic sensing and in our understanding of the role of touch in manipulation.

Over ten years, the Human Microbiome Project has provided resources for studying the microbiome and its relationship to disease; this Perspective summarizes the key achievements and findings of the project and its relationship to the broader field.

Glaciers in the high mountains of Asia provide a uniquely drought-resilient source of water, supplying summer meltwater sufficient for the basic needs of around 200 million people.

The Inflammatory Bowel Disease Multi’omics Database includes longitudinal data encompassing a multitude of analyses of stool, blood and biopsies of more than 100 individuals, and provides a comprehensive description of host and microbial activities in inflammatory bowel diseases.

Deep profiling of transcriptomes, metabolomes, cytokines, and proteomes, alongside changes in the microbiome, in samples from individuals with and without prediabetes reveal insights into inter-individual variability and associations between changes in the microbiome and other factors.

In a mouse model of prostate cancer, neural progenitors from the central nervous system that express doublecortin infiltrate tumours and metastases, and can generate new adrenergic neurons in tumours.

In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Ubx2 promotes clearing trapped precursor proteins from the channel of the translocase of the outer membrane, in a translocation-associated degradation pathway that maintains the protein import capacity of mitochondria.

The merger of two white dwarfs created a massive, hot, luminous, rotating and magnetized star with a lifetime of several thousand years, which will collapse into a type Ic supernova.

The spectrum of Hawking radiation is measured in an analogue black hole composed of rubidium atoms, confirming Hawking’s prediction that Hawking radiation is thermal with a temperature given by the surface gravity.

An array of superconducting qubits in an open one-dimensional waveguide is precisely controlled to create an artificial quantum cavity–atom system that reaches the strong-coupling regime without substantial decoherence.

Tactile patterns obtained from a scalable sensor-embedded glove and deep convolutional neural networks help to explain how the human hand can identify and grasp individual objects and estimate their weights.

An approach in which quaternary centres are leveraged to improve synthetic planning can lead to shorter and optimized syntheses, demonstrated here on a series of polycyclic terpenes.

The authors identify a role for genome architecture reorganization in anterior dorsal cerebellar vermis granule neurons in learning a conditioned startle paradigm in mice.

Hypoxia in the shoot meristem of Arabidopsis links the regulation of metabolic activity to development by inhibiting proteolysis of a substrate of the N-degron pathway, which controls class-III homeodomain-leucine zipper transcription factors.

A molecular model of STING-mediated signalling is proposed, as structural analysis identifies a crucial motif for the binding of TBK1 to STING, and a separate model involved in IRF-3 binding.

The authors find that stromal methyltransferase nicotinamide N-methyltransferase (NNMT) regulates the transition of normal fibroblasts to cancer-associated fibroblasts through histone methylation and promotes ovarian cancer growth and metastasis.

Spatial genome organization into lamina-associated domains is first established in the mouse zygote immediately after fertilization without inheritance from the maternal germline—with the paternal and maternal pronucleus exhibiting different organization, which subsequently converges prior to implantation of the embryo.

MRG-1 indirectly promotes anchoring of chromatin in differentiated intestinal cells in Caenorhabditis elegans by sequestering the histone acetyltransferase CBP-1/p300.