Volume 572 Issue 7769, 15 August 2019

The World Bank’s funding scheme for disease outbreaks drained potential resources from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, says Olga Jonas.

Data from the 1990s showed an accelerated pace of sea-level rise, but new analysis shows that the speed-up started far earlier.

The gassy exoplanet loses its hold over the heavy elements in its atmosphere.

Local hunters help scientists to understand a generally silent creature’s loud ‘sobs’.

Scientists identify more than 4,000 protein groups — most previously unknown.

Extinct bird lived in what is now New Zealand and stood roughly 1 metre tall.

Teamwork between neural networks and a swivelling robot churns out new compounds.

At rush hour, immobilizing a small fraction of Internet-connected cars would bring Manhattan to a halt.

The week in science: 9–15 August 2019.

The report on global land use and agriculture comes amid accelerating deforestation in the Amazon.

Protestors in Hawaii have prevented construction for more than three weeks, and there is no sign of a resolution in sight.

‘Lokiarchaea’, previously known only from DNA, is isolated and grown in culture.

Some researchers have turned to crowdfunding campaigns to pay for supplies and several scientific institutes are rationing electricity to save money.

A telescope in Arizona will conduct the largest spectroscopic survey of galaxies.

Radioastronomers look to hydrogen for insights into the Universe’s first billion years.

Teach people to think critically about claims and comparisons using these concepts, urge Andrew D. Oxman and an alliance of 24 researchers — they will make better decisions.

Eric J. Topol weighs up a book on a field sprinting to keep up with biotechnology.

Karen Masterson appraises the disease vector’s role in scientific and military history.

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

PhD students’ knowledge can and should be harnessed to help others who are beginning their postgraduate journey.

Ferroptosis is a form of cell death. The finding that cells that have certain mutations in the Hippo signalling pathway are susceptible to ferroptosis might offer a way to treat a cancer called mesothelioma.

Simulations suggest that Jupiter’s dilute core might be the result of a collision between the planet and a Uranus-mass planetary embryo. This finding indicates that giant impacts could be common during planet formation.

Analysis of hundreds of placentas provides convincing evidence that this organ does not harbour microorganisms that can enter the fetal gut — a key finding for research into how the human microbiota is established.

High salt levels in the soil harm plant growth and limit crop yields. A salt-binding membrane lipid has been identified as being essential for salt perception and for triggering calcium signals that lead to salt tolerance.

How Nature reported wartime advances in underwater microphones in 1919, and predictions of overcrowding in geostationary orbits in 1969.

Fast radio bursts are enigmatic astronomical signals that originate from deep in extragalactic space. Observations using an array of radio telescopes have identified a likely host galaxy for one of these signals.

Chemotherapy can halt cancer by causing cells to enter a non-dividing state called senescence, but sometimes it causes tumour cells to proliferate. It now seems that the dynamics of the protein p21 governs which of these fates occurs.

Exome-wide sequencing studies of populations in Finland identified 26 deleterious alleles associated with 64 quantitative traits that are clinically relevant to cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

The human placenta does not have a microbiota, suggesting that bacterial infection of the placenta is not a common cause of adverse pregnancy outcome, but group B Streptococcus is found in approximately 5% of placental samples.

A disease model using cardiomyocytes derived from induced pluripotent stem cells of patients with mutated LMNA-related dilated cardiomyopathy reveals that the abnormal activation of the PDGF pathway is associated with the arrhythmic phenotypes of patients.

The sphingolipid GIPC in the plant cell plasma membrane binds to sodium and triggers calcium influx, thereby triggering responses to excess salt such as efflux of sodium ions from cells.

The regulatory mechanism through which ryanodine receptor 2 is modulated by calmodulin is revealed through structural determination of ryanodine receptor 2 under eight conditions.

Use of a specially built radio interferometer shows that a non-repeating fast radio burst is localized to a few-arcsecond region containing a single massive galaxy, and is perhaps derived from an old stellar population.

An energetic head-on collision between a large impactor and the proto-Jupiter with a primordial compact core could have mixed the heavy elements within the deep interior, leading to a ‘diluted’ core for Jupiter.

Magnetic polarons are imaged with single-site spin and density resolution in the low-doping regime of the atomic Fermi–Hubbard model, showing that mobile delocalized doublons are necessary for polaron formation.

Multi-qubit entangling gates are realized by simultaneously driving multiple motional modes of a linear chain of trapped ions with modulated external fields, achieving a fidelity of about 93 per cent with four qubits.

Parallel two-qubit entangling gates are realized in an array of fully connected trapped-ion qubits, achieving a full-adder operation on a quantum processor with an average fidelity of 83.3 per cent.

A comprehensive assessment of ‘committed’ carbon dioxide emissions—from existing and proposed fossil-fuel-based infrastructure—finds that these emissions may exceed the level required to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Variability in Earth’s thermal gradients, recorded by metamorphic rocks through time, shows that Earth’s modern plate tectonics developed gradually since the Neoarchaean era, three billion years ago.

In cells infected with Legionella pneumophila, the pseudo kinase SidJ is activated upon forming a complex with human calmodulin and catalyses glutamylation of SidE ubiquitin ligases, which abolishes the activity of these enzymes.

In Legionella pneumophila, the effector SidJ induces the covalent attachment of glutamate moieties to SdeA in a calmodulin-dependent manner, inhibiting SidE-mediated ubiquitination and regulating pathogenicity.

CD24 interacts with the tumour-associated-macrophage receptor Siglec-10 to inhibit the macrophage-mediated clearance of cancer cells, revealing a new ‘don’t eat me’ signal as a potential target for cancer immunotherapy.

In two patient-derived xenograft models of colorectal cancer and a mouse model of autochthonous soft-tissue sarcoma, dietary restriction of methionine influences the outcome of cancer and interacts with antimetabolite and radiation therapies, through effects on one-carbon metabolism.

Ferroptosis in cancer cells can be regulated by cadherin-mediated intercellular contacts, NF2–Hippo signalling, and activity of the YAP transcription co-activator.