Volume 541 Issue 7637, 19 January 2017

They demonstrate the practice of science at its best.

The potential economic damage from global warming should not be influenced by politics.

Anita Makri argues that the form of science communicated in popular media leaves the public vulnerable to false certainty.

The week in science: 13–19 January 2017.

Scientists accused of deceiving the public about benefits of transgenic mustard.

An open-science effort to replicate dozens of cancer-biology studies is off to a confusing start.

Publications such as Nature and Science have policies that clash with the global health charity's open-access mandate.

Probe could give early warnings of catastrophic solar storms heading for Earth.

Revised scientific-integrity policy gives researchers more leeway to speak to the press and publish their findings.

Pavo Barišić says he won't step down after a parliamentary ethics committee found he copied another scholar's work.

NASA is now building the rover that it hopes will bring back signs of life on the red planet.

Where did it come from? How do organisms use it without self-destructing? And what else can it do?

Erica Ollmann Saphire and colleagues share lessons in finding treatments fast from the work on Ebola by the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Immunotherapeutic Consortium.

On Arthur C. Clarke's centenary, Andrew Robinson lauds a prescient, original writer.

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

US astronaut and senator.

'Squeezed' light exhibits smaller quantum fluctuations than no light at all. Localized squeezed regions have now been produced along an infrared light wave and probed with unprecedented time resolution. See Letter p.376

A molecular modification called m⁶A^m has been found to regulate the stability of messenger RNAs in mammalian cells. The mechanism casts fresh light on how reversibly modified RNA bases control the fate of mRNA. See Article p.371

Faced with ever-changing products, consumers can benefit from trying new items. But data collected over almost five years show that, the longer shoppers have been buying a favourite product, the more likely they are to stick with it.

An algorithm has been developed allowing the rational design of origami-inspired materials that can be rearranged to change their properties. This might open the way to strategies for making reconfigurable robots. See Article p.347

Eukaryotic cells, with complex features such as membrane-bound nuclei, evolved from prokaryotic cells that lack these components. A newly identified prokaryotic group reveals intermediate steps in eukaryotic-cell evolution. See Article p.353

Competition between the phospholipase enzyme PLA2G16 and the protein galectin-8 determines whether the RNA-based genomes of picornaviruses can be effectively delivered into host cells. See Letter p.412

A robust and scale-independent strategy for the design of reconfigurable architected materials (in which properties are adjusted by altering structure rather than composition) is described, based on space-filling assemblies of polyhedra.

This work describes the Asgard superphylum, an assemblage of diverse archaea that comprises Odinarchaeota, Heimdallarchaeota, Lokiarchaeota and Thorarchaeota, offering insights into the earliest days of eukaryotic cells and their complex features.

Genomic analyses of localized, non-indolent prostate cancer identify recurrent aberrations that can predict relapse, and also highlight differences between early prostate cancer and metastatic, castration-resistant disease.

Combinatorial inputs from temporal and spatial axes act together to promote medullary neural diversity in the optic lobes of Drosophila.

Fat mass and obesity-associated protein (FTO) preferentially demethylates m⁶A_m, a modified adenosine that, when present at the 5′ end of certain mRNAs, positively influences mRNA stability by preventing DCP2-mediated decapping.

Few-femtosecond laser pulses are used to generate squeezed mid-infrared light transients and to detect distorted quantum fluctuations of the electric field directly in the time domain.

Ring-closing metathesis is a widely used chemical transformation that can generate organic macrocycle compounds; here, an approach is described by which the E-stereoisomer of a macrocycle is generated selectively, exemplified by synthesizing the antibiotic recifeolide and the anti-cancer drug pacritinib.

Low phosphorus burial in shallow marine sedimentary rocks before about 750 million years ago implies a change in the global phosphorus cycle, coinciding with the end of what may have been a stable low-oxygen world.

In general, if there are fewer Atlantic hurricanes, those near the US coast are more likely to intensify, whereas if there are many hurricanes, then those near the coast are more likely to weaken because of high local wind shear and low sea surface temperatures.

Analysis of exceptionally preserved fossils of the Cambrian hyolith Haplophrentis leads to a proposed evolutionary relationship with Lophophorata, the group containing brachiopods and phoronids, on the basis of a newly described tentacular feeding apparatus.

Empirically validated mathematical models show that a combination of intraspecific competition between subterranean social-insect colonies and scale-dependent feedbacks between plants can explain the spatially periodic vegetation patterns observed in many landscapes, such as the Namib Desert ‘fairy circles’.

The effects of genetic variation on transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation are systematically mapped across multiple stages of embryogenesis in eighty inbred Drosophila lines, identifying thousands of quantitative trait loci affecting approximately 17% of expressed genes, often with heteroalleic interactions.

The authors present structures of nutrient transport complexes of the commensal bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron and the mechanism by which it imports glycans.

The phospholipase PLA2G16 is required for the entry of picornaviruses, and in its absence, virus infection is prevented by a galectin-8-mediated process.

During early-stage tumour growth in Drosphila, tumour cells acquire necessary nutrients by triggering autophagy in surrounding cells in the tumour microenvironment.

Membrane lipids such as cardiolipin act as molecular glue to preserve the oligomeric states of membrane proteins with low oligomeric stability.

How can scientists get through to a public that's seemingly indifferent to objective facts?

A social-media professional calls on researchers to speak out for their science.

Our word is your bond.