Volume 570 Issue 7761, 20 June 2019

Don’t let academia’s initiatives to advance women become just another way to game the research system, urges Charikleia Tzanakou.

Diverse groups of animals rely on the same genes to ensure that limbs form as they should.

Changes in microbial populations are more closely associated with food type than the nutrient profile listed on the packet.

Microscopic particles give daguerreotypes a reddish cast when viewed from certain angles.

Despite their small size, some of the planet’s moons create clumps and ripples in its brilliant halo.

Rocky outposts are much older than previously supposed and might have served ritual purposes.

People in the United States could be taking in more than 100,000 plastic particles a year in food, drink and air.

Single-celled life forms display original movement style.

The week in science: 14–20 June 2019.

Outbreak worsens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as virus spreads into Uganda.

The goal is to create the continent’s first cross-disciplinary guidelines for collecting, storing and sharing data and specimens.

The modified scanner also requires less radioactive exposure, vastly broadening its applications.

Scientists hope that insects such as stink bugs could keep the fall armyworm in check.

Detailed analysis of misconduct investigations into huge research fraud suggests institutional probes aren’t rigorous enough.

Scientists are listening in on the ways viruses communicate and cooperate. Decoding what the microbes are saying could be a boon to human health.

Efforts to make heritable changes to the human genome are fraught with uncertainty. Here’s what it would take to make the technique safe and acceptable.

To cope with climate change and population growth, the continent urgently needs more home-grown researchers, argue Anagaw Atickem, Nils Chr. Stenseth and colleagues.

As the climate warms, we can’t restore waterways to pristine condition, but models can predict potential changes, argue Jonathan D. Tonkin, N. LeRoy Poff and colleagues.

Chris Turney applauds a book on carbon-14 and its key applications in archaeology, climatology and oceanography.

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

Theoretical physicist who won a Nobel for codifying fundamental particles.

Researcher-parents must balance their children’s needs with work priorities while in the field.

Rolling an atom-thick semiconductor layer into a nanoscale tube allows it to convert solar energy into electricity without the need for semiconductor junctions — prerequisite features of conventional solar cells.

Female mate choice in some species selects for traits that are harmful to males. A hypothesis to explain how such mating preferences might evolve puts the spotlight on sex chromosomes.

The formation of microscopic pores and fibrils in polymers under stress — a process called crazing — often preludes material failure. Controlled crazing has now been used to produce an array of colours in polymer films.

Potent microbial toxins found in shellfish are possible starting points for drug discovery, but analogues are needed for biological testing. Toxin-modification enzymes now suggest a new approach for producing these analogues.

Inflammasomes are protein complexes that fight infection by driving inflammation or cell death. It now seems that the protein NEK7 provides a ‘licence’ for the formation of inflammasomes containing the protein NLRP3.

Measurements collected during recent polynya events in the Southern Ocean reveal that these sea ice openings formed as a result of weakened stratification and severe storms and were sustained by deep overturning.

The CRISPR–Cas9-mediated generation of germline-transmissible mutations of SHANK3 in cynomolgus macaques (Macaca fascicularis) forms the basis of a non-human-primate model of autism spectrum disorder and Phelan–McDermid syndrome.

Single-cell transcriptomics from 48 individuals with varying degrees of Alzheimer’s disease pathology demonstrates that gene-expression changes in Alzheimer’s disease are both cell-type specific and shared, and that transcriptional responses show sexual dimorphism.

A cryo-electron microscopy structure of human NLRP3 in complex with the mitotic kinase NEK7 provides insights into the interactions that mediate the activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome.

Perfect transmission of electrons through a finite potential barrier between a normal metal and a topological superconducting state is demonstrated, as evidenced by an exact doubling of conductance in point contact measurements.

A bulk photovoltaic effect is observed in devices based on tungsten disulfide, and is enhanced if the devices take the form of polar nanotubes, showing the importance of reducing crystal symmetry to a polar structure in achieving higher efficiencies.

A tunable interlayer twist that evolves naturally during synthesis of van der Waals nanowires made from layered crystals of germanium sulfide could produce new electronic structure and correlation phenomena.

Experiments demonstrate a class of van der Waals nanowires, made from layered crystals of the semiconductor germanium sulfide, in which a tunable interlayer twist evolves naturally during synthesis.

Standing-wave optics can be used to control microfibril and cavity formation in polymer films and the resulting porous layered structures can produce tunable structural colour, enabling inkless ‘printing’ of images.

Numerical modelling of rotating turbulent convective flows shows that the length scale of convection in planetary cores is set by the flow speed and not by the fluid viscosity.

Seafloor-derived planktonic foraminifera communities of pre-industrial age are compared with communities from sediment-trap time series and show that Anthropocene communities of a globally distributed zooplankton group differ from their unperturbed pre-industrial state.

Population genetic modelling shows that mate preferences encoded on sex chromosomes can drive the evolution of extremely male-costly traits.

An in situ hybridization approach is used to visualize mitochondrial DNA germline selection in Drosophila, revealing the role of mitochondrial fragmentation in the selection against deleterious mutations.

Analyses of fragmentation patterns of cell-free DNA in the blood of patients with cancer and healthy individuals using a machine learning algorithm provide a proof-of principle approach for the early detection and screening of human cancer.

Proteins designed de novo by players of the online protein-folding game Foldit can be expressed in Escherichia coli and adopt the designed structure in solution.

Attractions between heterochromatic regions are essential for phase separation of the active and inactive genome in inverted and conventional nuclei, whereas chromatin–lamina interactions are necessary to build the conventional genomic architecture from these segregated phases.

A time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy approach is used to visualize, at near-atomic resolution and on a sub-second timescale, short-lived intermediate states of a fundamental biomolecular reaction.