Volume 489 Issue 7416, 20 September 2012

Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming.

The bid to halt air transport of lab animals poses an imminent threat to biomedical research.

The classic economic approach of using incentives is not always the best way to change human behaviour, argues Paul Ormerod.

The week in science: Japan to phase out nuclear power by 2030s, BGI buys into Complete Genomics, and archaeologists claim to have found the skeleton of English king Richard III.

Revised estimates of mutation rates bring genetic accounts of human prehistory into line with archaeological data.

Two biggest cargo carriers affirm that they will not ship mammals and non-human primates, as activist pressure mounts to stop research-animal airlifts.

Anaesthesiology tries to move on after fraud investigations.

Government strategy to support industries of the future has little cash to back the vision.

Researchers probe possible link with kidney disease.

Exposure surveys and stronger regulations are required for the industry to thrive, researchers say.

European Union investment in high-energy-physics facility raises spirits in Romanian science community.

Forests in the American west are under attack from giant fires, climate change and insect outbreaks. Some ecosystems will never be the same.

Neuroscientists are trying to work out why the brain does so much when it seems to be doing nothing at all.

Integrating perennials with food crops could restore soil health and increase staple yields, say Jerry D. Glover, John P. Reganold and Cindy M. Cox.

Plans for the radio-telescope array must be firmed up to help Americans get back on board and ensure its success, say Anthony J. Beasley and Ethan J. Schreier.

Tim Trevan weighs up an authoritative take on the Soviet Union's vast, covert and costly bioweapons programme.

Julius von Bismarck is the first artist in residence at the particle-physics laboratory CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland. As he prepares to give the final lecture of his residency, he talks about whipping mountains, hacking photographs and digging into the history of invention.

Engineer, pilot, astronaut and the first human to walk on the Moon.

The Hubble Space Telescope, teaming up with a 'cosmic lens', has revealed a highly magnified galaxy thought to date back to 500 million years after the Big Bang. The find provides a glimpse of the first stages of galaxy formation. See Letter p.406

Our brains focus on important events and filter out distracting ones. An investigation in monkeys reveals a surprising dissociation between the neuronal and behavioural manifestations of attention. See Letter p.434

Liposomes are ubiquitous components of skin moisturizers and other personal-care products. Modified liposomes prepared from receptor-like molecules open up fresh opportunities for therapeutic and industrial applications.

Acting on a gut feeling can sometimes lead to poor decisions. But it will usually support the common good, according to a study showing that human intuition favours cooperative, rather than selfish, behaviour. See Letter p. 427

By tailoring the architecture of a bulk material at several different length scales, the ability of a semiconductor to convert heat into voltage has been optimized to a groundbreaking level of performance. See Letter p.414

In a remarkable example of convergent evolution, insect species spanning 300 million years of divergence have evolved identical single-amino-acid substitutions that confer resistance to plant cardenolide toxins.

Magnetic quasiparticles in a doped quantum magnet are shown to be well suited for realizing and exploring the ‘glassy’ states that are predicted to emerge for interacting bosons in the presence of disorder.

Haploinsufficiency of the gene SCN1A (SCN1A^+/−) causes Dravet’s syndrome in humans, a form of epilepsy with autistic features; this paper shows that Scn1a^+/− mice have the same symptoms, and that social behaviours can be improved by pharmacological treatment with clonazepam.

Laser microdissection and microarrays are used to assess 900 precise subdivisions of the brains from three healthy men with 60,000 gene expression probes; the resulting atlas allows comparisons between humans and other animals, and will facilitate studies of human neurological and psychiatric diseases.

Acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs) are voltage-independent ion channels that participate in a broad range of biological processes, including nociception and mechanosensation; here X-ray crystal structures of the complexes of chicken ASIC1a with psalmotoxin, a peptide toxin from tarantula, indicate that toxin binding triggers an expansion of the extracellular vestibule and stabilization of the open channel pore.

Gravitationally magnified images of a faint galaxy from only 500 million years after the Big Bang suggest that galaxies of that age may be the dominant source of the radiation responsible for the re-ionization of the intergalactic medium.

A free-electron laser is used to power a pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance spectrometer at 240 GHz, demonstrating a range of experimental possibilities such as the manipulation of spin-1/2 systems with 6-ns pulses and the measurement of ultrashort decoherence times.

Controlling the structure of thermoelectric materials on all length scales (atomic, nanoscale and mesoscale) relevant for phonon scattering makes it possible to increase the dimensionless figure of merit to more than two, which could allow for the recovery of a significant fraction of waste heat with which to produce electricity.

Here, the feedback between marine nitrogen fixation and denitrification is shown to yield an oceanic nitrate deficit more than double its observed value in a model with realistic ocean circulation; this discrepancy can be resolved by accounting for diversity in the metabolic N:P requirements of plankton.

Analysis of observations on six continents reveals a global preference for afternoon rain to fall on locally drier soils—contrary to the predictions of large-scale climate models, and suggesting that such models may exaggerate the occurrence of droughts.

Economic games are used to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying cooperative behaviour, and show that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, whereas reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.

Volatile scents of moss Ceratodon purpureus show sex-specific differences and are similar in chemical diversity to those of plant–insect pollination mutualisms; and moss-dwelling microarthropods, whose presence increases C. purpureus fertilization rates, prefer scents of reproductive female C. purpureus to reproductive males, indicating a scent-based ‘plant–pollinator-like’ relationship between mosses and microarthropods.

Transient inactivation of the superior colliculus in primates during a motion-change-detection task is shown to lead to large deficits in visual attention while the enhanced response of neurons in the visual cortex to attended stimuli remains unchanged; this shows that processes independent of those occurring in the visual cortex have key roles in visual attention.

Lrp4 acts bidirectionally and coordinates synapse formation by binding agrin, activating MuSK and stimulating postsynaptic differentiation, and functioning in turn as a muscle-derived retrograde signal that is necessary and sufficient for presynaptic differentiation.

A genome-wide association study in Ghana, West Africa, to identify genetic variants associated with malaria pathogenesis reveals two previously unknown loci on chromosomes 1 and 16.

Double-stranded RNA interference (RNAi) in Caenorhabditis elegans is heritable; here a genetic screen for factors required for RNAi inheritance identifies the nuclear-localized Argonaute gene hrde-1, which acts in the germ cells of progeny to promote multigenerational inheritance of silencing and, also, germline immortality.

In yeast, histone H3 lysine 36 methylation can suppress the incorporation of acetylated histones by inhibiting histone exchange in transcribed genes, thus preventing spurious cryptic transcripts from initiating within open reading frames.

This study reports the crystal structure of porcine haptoglobin in complex with haemoglobin at 2.9 Å resolution; this provides a structural basis of haptoglobin-mediated recognition of haemoglobin, and insight into the protective role of haptoglobin at the atomic level.

In its first ten years, the US National Postdoctoral Association has helped to raise the profile of postdocs. But championing their cause still presents challenges.

Earthquake researcher's open-minded approach brings high-level recognition.

A powerful letter.