Volume 502 Issue 7470, 10 October 2013

The US shutdown is damaging science, and Congress must be called to account.

The cost of genome sequencing has fallen drastically, says George Church, so why are so few people opting to have their genetic secrets revealed?

The week in science: Displaced walruses crowd Alaskan shores, Braille code developer dies, and ALMA observatory finishes antenna construction.

Medicine prize goes to discoverers of vesicle system that shuttles biomolecules around cells.

François Englert and Peter Higgs rewarded with Nobel 50 years after hunt for boson began.

Democratic Republic of the Congo maps forest biomass to attract carbon credits.

Cryptographers condemn US National Security Agency’s tapping and tampering, but mathematicians shrug.

After years in the doldrums, research into neurological disorders is about to undergo a major change of direction.

Records of side effects seen in clinical tests are missing from publicly available documents.

Some brain researchers are increasingly using mice to study visual processing, but others fear the move is short-sighted.

Researchers are tracking just how much impact ancient peoples had on the Amazon.

A global, long-term programme of ecological monitoring is needed to track ocean health, say J. Anthony Koslow and Jennifer Couture.

L. Alan Winters weighs up a call for evidence-based debate on international migration.

A turbulent history of early naturalists and the maritime explorers who hosted them fascinates Andrew Robinson.

Ewen Callaway meets cognitive scientist David Kirsh, who works with choreographer Wayne McGregor.

Neurologist who showed formation and pruning of synapses in child development.

An innovative assessment of climate change calculates the year in which ongoing warming will surpass the limits of historical climate variability. Three experts explain this calculation's significance compared with conventional approaches, and its relevance to Earth's biodiversity. See Article p.183

The ancestors of modern jawed vertebrates are commonly portrayed as fishes with a shark-like appearance. But a stunning fossil discovery from China puts a new face on the original jawed vertebrate. See Article p.188

The continuous random path of a superconducting system's quantum state has been tracked as the state changes during measurement. The results open the possibility of steering quantum systems into a desired state. See Letter p.211

Some normally innocuous bacteria can turn into serious pathogens. It seems that one such species, Neisseria meningitidis, uses three RNA-based thermosensors to escape the immune response of its human host. See Letter p.237

The degradative process known as autophagy is a cellular quality-control mechanism that is associated with many clinical disorders. It emerges that autophagy and the cell's primary cilium regulate each other. See Article p.194 and Letter p.254

Fructose and glucose have the same caloric value, but the two sugars are metabolized differently. It emerges that mice that cannot metabolize fructose are healthier when placed on carbohydrate-rich diets.

An ensemble of simulations indicates that ongoing climate change will exceed the bounds of historical climate variability some time in the mid to late twenty-first century and that the burden of rapid climate adaption will occur earliest in highly biodiverse and often economically challenged tropical areas.

Although the origin of jaws is one of the key episodes in the evolution of vertebrates, the jaw bones of modern bony fishes and limbed vertebrates differ so much from those in any other groups that the individual evolutionary steps in the transition are still unknown; here Entelognathus is described, an early placoderm fish with full body armour, but with marginal jaw bones similar to those of modern bony fishes and limbed vertebrates.

The primary cilium is a microtubule-based organelle that functions in sensory and signal transduction; here the authors show that the primary cilium is required for activation of starvation-induced autophagy and that basal autophagy negatively regulates ciliogenesis.

X-ray crystal structures of Na⁺,K⁺-ATPase in a transition state that precedes the phosphorylated intermediate are described, showing how this ATPase functions as a Na⁺-specific pump.

A spectroscopic study highlights the ‘doubly magic’ nature of ⁵⁴Ca and provides direct experimental evidence for the onset of a sizable subshell closure at neutron number 34 in isotopes far from stability.

By monitoring the environment of a superconducting quantum bit in real time, the quantum bit can be maintained in a pure state and its time evolution, as described by its ‘quantum trajectory’, can be tracked.

The unusual ordering of quasicrystals can be induced in thin films of a regular crystalline material; here a two-dimensional quasicrystal has been achieved by growing thin films of the perovskite barium titanate on an appropriately oriented crystalline platinum substrate.

The pattern of geomagnetic secular variation observed on the Earth’s surface is shown to be reproduced by two mechanisms relying on the inner core; this bottom-up heterogeneous driving of outer-core convection dominates top-down driving from mantle thermal heterogeneities.

In tropical moist forests, nitrogen-fixing tree species can supply a large proportion of the nitrogen required for net forest growth in the first 12 years of recovery after human or natural perturbation, with nitrogen-fixing trees accumulating carbon up to nine times faster per individual than non-fixing trees, and species-specific differences in the amount and timing of fixation.

By analysing genomic sequences in echolocating mammals it is shown that convergence is not a rare process restricted to a handful of loci but is instead widespread, continuously distributed and commonly driven by natural selection acting on a small number of sites per locus; analyses involved sequence comparisons across 22 mammals, including 4 new bat genomes, and found signatures consistent with convergence in genes linked to hearing or deafness, but surprisingly also to vision.

The identification of a functionally distinct subset of haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that is primed for platelet-specific gene expression is described; the cells frequently have long-term myeloid lineage bias, can self-renew and give rise to lymphoid-biased HSCs, and may enable the design of therapies for enhancing platelet reconstitution.

Three Neisseria meningitidis RNA thermosensors important for resistance against complement-mediated immune killing are identified, located in the 5′ untranslated regions of genes necessary for capsule biosynthesis, expression of factor H binding protein and sialyation of lipolysaccharide; increased temperature may act as a warning signal for the bacterium, prompting it to enhance mechanisms of immune evasion.

Evolutionary analyses show that H7 influenza viruses probably transferred from ducks to chickens in China on at least two independent occasions, and that reassortment with H9N2 viruses generated the H7N9 outbreak lineage that recently emerged in humans in China, and a related previously unrecognized H7N7 lineage; these H7N7 viruses are shown to have the ability to infect ferrets, and the current pandemic threat could extend beyond H7N9 viruses.

Eosinophil recruitment to the lung and intestine is regulated by type-2-innate-lymphoid-cell-derived IL-5 and IL-13; IL-5 is shown to be induced by the neuropeptide vasoactive intestinal peptide, which is known to coordinate pancreatic secretion with smooth muscle relaxation in response to feeding.

The RING finger domain protein Uhrf1 is known to have an important role in DNA methylation pattern maintenance through the recruitment of the methyltransferase Dnmt1 to hemimethylated DNA sites: here, Uhrf1 is shown to act as a ubiquitin ligase for H3, an essential step in Dnmt1 recruitment.

The primary cilium is a microtubule-based organelle that functions in sensory and signal transduction; the authors demonstrate here that autophagic degradation of the oral-facial-digital syndrome 1 (OFD1) protein at centriolar satellites promotes primary cilium biogenesis, and that autophagy modulation might provide a novel means of ciliopathy treatment.

Understanding how visualizations can communicate research will help scientists to make the most of the technology, says Quintin Anderson.

Early-career genomicist excels in Spain despite difficult funding climate.

The course of true love.

Tuberculosis is one of the world's most lethal infectious diseases. Further progress in consigning it to the past is a massive challenge. By Tom Paulson.

Combinations of anti-TB drugs are difficult to overcome because they attack Mycobacterium tuberculosis in different ways.

Universities should forego profits from tuberculosis, say David G. Russell and Carl F. Nathan.

Researchers are on the hunt for a better alternative to the BCG vaccine.

There are several new tests for tuberculosis in the pipeline, but they must be shown to be effective in areas with limited resources and a heavy burden of HIV.

A narrow definition of risk is hampering the search for new methods of tuberculosis control, say Christopher Dye and Mario Raviglione.

Most people infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis never get the disease, but predicting who will is turning out to be a complex problem.

Once tuberculosis takes hold in a population it can be hard to control, but scientists are finding new ways to understand and stop its spread.

Drug resistance and the HIV pandemic have thwarted efforts to rid the world of humanity's biggest killer Mycobacterium tuberculosis. We need new types of safe drug, a practical point-of-care diagnostic and ultimately an effective vaccine if we are ever to eliminate tuberculosis. But first we need a better understanding of the underlying biology.