Volume 490 Issue 7418, 4 October 2012

China’s slumping renewable-energy industry should be learnt from, not dismissed.

Survivors of the 2010 University of Alabama shooting chose not to push for the death penalty.

As with other medicines, the approval of gene therapies should hinge on a risk–benefit analysis for the patient, argues Fulvio Mavilio.

The week in science: French research escapes cuts; fusion facility fails to ignite; and habitat for great apes is under threat.

Lack of data and donor uncertainty leave public-health experiment on the rocks.

Researchers to re-examine compounds shelved by industry.

Twin spy telescopes could drive US space astronomy forward, but at what cost?

Howard Hughes Medical Institute sets up shop at ground zero for tuberculosis: South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal.

Genome sequence of new virus speeds up testing.

Opaque announcements in journals can hide fraud, study finds.

Once king of eastern forests, the American chestnut was wiped out by blight. Now it is poised to rise again.

A fresh look at our Galaxy points to a chaotic past and a violent end.

Matthew L. Jockers, Matthew Sag and Jason Schultz explain why humanities scholars have pitched in to the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit.

William Bynum reflects on the factors that have brought nine Nobel prizes to the UK Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

Nathan Wolfe applauds a tome on interspecies disease transmission that mixes research with human stories.

It is people who drive Curiosity and other robot missions on Mars, reminds Jim Bell.

Carl Bergstrom assesses the power of scientometrics in predicting the shifts and shelf-life of knowledge.

Anthropogenic aerosols in the atmosphere undoubtedly influence climate. But do the approaches taken in climate models to account for the effects of aerosols provide meaningful estimates of those effects? Two climate scientists offer their opinions.

Our immune system usually ignores 'friendly' gut bacteria. But when infection with a pathogen damages the intestine's mucosal lining, the resident microbes can invade the body, inducing immune responses directed at themselves.

Continuous feedback control — monitoring a system and adjusting its dynamics — is widely used to keep systems 'on track'. This approach has now been used to maintain the cycling of a quantum bit almost indefinitely. See Letter p.77

An innovative method for probing the genomes of the vast community of microorganisms that inhabit the human gut provides an alternative approach to identifying risk factors for type 2 diabetes. See Letter p.55

The detection of two candidate black holes in a dense system of stars in the Milky Way suggests that a larger population of such objects might be lurking in this system. See Letter p.71

The activity of specific suppressive immune cells, some of which persist to aid subsequent pregnancies, helps to explain how a pregnant female's immune system tolerates fetal antigens inherited from the father. See Letter p.102

The sequencing and assembly of the highly polymorphic oyster genome through a combination of short reads and fosmid pooling, complemented with extensive transcriptome analysis of development and stress response and proteome analysis of the shell, provides new insight into oyster biology and adaptation to a highly changeable environment.

The authors have developed a new method, metagenome-wide association study (MGWAS), to compare the combined genetic content of the faecal microbiota of healthy people versus patients with type 2 diabetes; they identify multiple microbial species and metabolic pathways that are associated with either cohort and show that some of these may be used as biomarkers.

The Cancer Genome Atlas Network describe their multifaceted analyses of primary breast cancers, shedding light on breast cancer heterogeneity; although only three genes (TP53, PIK3CA and GATA3) are mutated at a frequency greater than 10% across all breast cancers, numerous subtype-associated and novel mutations were identified.

Two flat-spectrum radio sources in the Milky Way globular cluster M22 are thought to be accreting stellar-mass black holes; the identification of two black holes in one cluster shows that the ejection of black holes from clusters is not as efficient as predicted by most models.

Analysis of the 69-micrometre spectral band of olivine crystals in the β Pictoris planetary system shows that they can be associated with an extrasolar proto-Kuiper belt, are rich in magnesium and make up about 3.6 per cent of the dust mass in the system — properties remarkably similar to those of olivine crystals from primitive comets in the Solar System.

Real-time quantum feedback based on weak measurement of the quantum state is used to stabilize the oscillation phase of a driven quantum bit.

Profiles of sulphate fluxes over the past 300,000 years from an Antarctic ice core show that, whereas the flux of sulphate-adhered dust has remained almost constant, that of sulphate salts correlates inversely with temperature, suggesting a coupling between particulate sulphur and temperature.

Centennial-scale variations in methane carbon isotope ratios are attributed to changes in pyrogenic and biogenic sources that can be correlated with anthropogenic activities, such as varying levels of biomass burning during the period of the Roman empire and the Han dynasty, and changes in natural climate variability.

Volcanic records of the reversals of the geomagnetic field can be well matched under the assumption of a common reversal duration, and imply that the reversal process comprises three phases—a precursor, a fast polarity switch and a rebound—the properties of which have remained unchanged for about 180 million years.

A fossil of an aplacophoran from the Silurian of Herefordshire, England, is shown to have armour plating, supporting recent studies that have allied the worm-like, shell-less Aplacophora with the multi-shelled Polyplacophora, or chitons.

As it develops from a single-celled zygote to a mature plant embryo, the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana passes through a stage during which phylogenetically very ancient genes are preferentially expressed, showing that animals and plants have independently acquired the developmental hourglass as a similar way of managing gene expression as they pass through embryogenesis, even though their morphological development is very different.

Successful pregnancy requires immune tolerance against paternal antigens expressed by the fetus; here pregnancy is shown to stimulate the selective accumulation of maternal immune-suppressive regulatory T cells with fetal specificity that are retained post-partum, which may explain the protective benefits of prior pregnancy against pre-eclampsia and other complications in subsequent pregnancy.

Induction of an eicosanoid storm is shown to be an unexpected consequence of inflammasome activation in peritoneal macrophages, leading to vascular leakage and rapid death in mice.

A paramutation occurs between two alleles in the same locus, when one allele induces a heritable mutation in another allele without modifying the DNA sequence; now, in Drosophila, a paramutation is shown to be transmissible over generations.

RNA sequencing of Burkitt lymphoma tumours allows identification of mutations affecting the transcription factor TCF3, its negative regulator ID3 and the cell cycle regulator CCND3; these pathways reveal new targets for potential therapeutic intervention.

Analysis of the yeast DEAD-box nucleic acid helicase Mss116p provides a structural model for how DEAD-box proteins recognize and unwind RNA duplexes.

The crystal structure of the osmotically regulated symporter BetP is reported in four new conformations, providing information about the key conformational changes that take place during the transport cycle.

Veterinary expertise is an advantage for researchers hoping to stem disease outbreaks and bolster food safety.

Evolutionary pharmacologist reaches out online.

Crowd-funding gains traction as a way to support research.

Report proposes guidelines for navigating academic-industrial partnerships.

Animal instincts.