Volume 501 Issue 7468, 26 September 2013

Angela Merkel needs to tackle the issue of Germany’s uneven university funding.

A dispute over the skull of an Italian cheese thief highlights the enduring debate over repatriation.

Governments should embrace the scientific approach and use controlled trials to test the impact of policies on people’s behaviour, says Olivier Oullier.

The week in science: Nobel-prizewinning neuroscientist dies, jailed Iranian physics student wins human-rights prize, and Russian Academy of Sciences moves towards major overhaul.

US funding for research vessel uncertain as international programme reorganizes.

Researcher baffled after his results appear in bogus paper.

Surfeit of unlicensed intellectual property pushes research institutions into unseemly partnerships.

Software experiment raises prospect of extra peer review.

Devices may be the ‘healthy’ future of smoking — or a menace.

Iron-based compound revives search for room-temperature superconductors.

Third Rock Ventures made its name by placing big bets on the biotechnology companies it launched. Now, everyone is waiting for the pay-off.

A mammoth undersea US project will soon start streaming data to researchers. But some wonder whether the system is worth its high price.

Physicists and engineers must do more than peddle ideas if their technologies are to translate effectively beyond the lab, says Hans Zappe.

It is time to weigh up the pros and cons of using genetic engineering to rescue species from extinction, say Michael A. Thomas and colleagues.

Jan Witkowski relishes the interwoven stories of Nobel laureates Jacques Monod and Albert Camus.

Richard Rhodes explores a history of Britain's little-known role in the race to develop an atomic bomb.

Ann Finkbeiner ponders a chronicle of airborne war.

Andrew Robinson savours a pair of lively studies on paper and punctuation.

The inclusion of abundance data in global surveys of reef fishes reveals new hotspots of functional biodiversity, not all of which show high species richness. The findings may influence conservation priorities. See Letter p.539

The most complex electronic device yet built from carbon nanotubes has been demonstrated. The system is a functional universal computer, and represents a significant advance in the field of emerging electronic materials. See Letter p.526

A model of early Earth, in which heat from the interior is carried to the surface through volcanic heat pipes, suggests that our planet 4 billion years ago had more in common with Jupiter's moon Io than with today's Earth. See Article p.501

The push to engineer and probe quantum many-body systems using ultracold gases has reached a milestone with the observation of controlled dynamics caused by interactions between distant molecules trapped in a lattice. See Letter p.521

Autophagy, the process of cellular self-cannibalism, comes in various forms. It now emerges that two of these — mitophagy and xenophagy — share a common initiator protein, Parkin. See Article p.512

A heat-pipe model of Earth, whereby interior heat is brought to the surface through localized channels, yields predictions that agree with craton data and the detrital zircon record, and offers a global geodynamic framework in which to explore Earth’s evolution before the onset of plate tectonics.

Sequencing and deep analysis of mRNA and miRNA from lymphoblastoid cell lines of 462 individuals from the 1000 Genomes Project reveal widespread genetic variation affecting the regulation of most genes, with transcript structure and expression level variation being equally common but genetically largely independent, and the analyses point to putative causal variants for dozens of disease-associated loci.

Mutations in the ubiquitin ligase parkin are associated with increased susceptibility to Parkinson’s disease; parkin is already known to have a role in mitophagy and this work identifies a new innate immunity role for parkin in ubiquitin-mediated autophagy of intracellular bacterial pathogens.

A neutron star with a low mass companion star was observed at different times as a millisecond pulsar powered either by the rotation of its magnetic field or by the accretion of mass, demonstrating the evolutionary link between these two classes of pulsars, and probing the short timescales on which the transitions between the two states may occur.

In a step towards developing a system in which to study quantum magnetism, the long-range dipolar interactions of polar molecules pinned in a three-dimensional optical lattice are used to realize a lattice spin model.

A computer built entirely using transistors based on carbon nanotubes, which is capable of multitasking and emulating instructions from the MIPS instruction set, is enabled by methods that overcome inherent challenges with this new technology.

Benzynes are capable of concerted removal of two vicinal hydrogen atoms from a hydrocarbon, a discovery enabled by the thermal generation of reactive benzyne intermediates through the hexadehydro-Diels–Alder cycloisomerization reaction of triyne substrates.

The distribution of chromium isotopes and redox-sensitive metals in the Nsuze palaeosol and in the Ijzermyn iron formation from the Pongola Supergroup, in South Africa, suggests that there were appreciable levels of atmospheric oxygen about three billion years ago, some 300–400 million years earlier than previous indications for Earth surface oxygenation.

Global reef fish diversity is studied with metrics incorporating species abundances and functional traits; these identify diversity hotspots corresponding to the diversity of functional traits amongst individuals in the community, and greater evenness in the abundance of reef fishes at higher latitudes, findings that contrast with patterns reported previously using traditional richness-based methods.

The role of parvalbumin (PV)-positive interneurons in ocular dominance plasticity (ODP) has been a point of contention; here PV-positive cells are shown to initiate competitive periods of plasticity during the critical periods of eye development when ODP occurs, and transient reductions in inhibitory firing from PV-positive cells provides a return to normal firing rates in excitatory neurons, a key step in ODP progression.

The crystal structure of the complex formed by the B and C toxin complex proteins is reported, revealing how toxin complexes are processed and protected; the proteins assemble to form a large hollow structure that sequesters the cytotoxic portion of the C protein, and a β-propeller domain mediates attachment to the A protein in the native ABC complex.

Here, biological attributes of two early human isolates of the newly emerged H7N9 influenza viruses are characterized: the potential of these viruses to infect and/or transmit within various animal models is discussed, as is their relative sensitivity to neuraminidase inhibitors and experimental polymerase inhibitors compared to an H1N1 pandemic strain.

The new H7N9 influenza virus, recently emerged in China, can replicate in human airway cells and in the respiratory tract of ferrets to a higher level than can seasonal H3N2 virus and shows higher lethality in mice than genetically related H7N9 and H9N2 viruses, but shows limited transmission in ferrets by respiratory droplets.

An investigation into the transmissibility of the H7N9 influenza A virus in ferrets finds that although the virus has some determinants associated with human adaptation and transmissibility between mammals, the airborne transmission between ferrets is limited.

Depletion of the cohesin-associated protein Wapl in mice is shown to increase the residence time of cohesin on DNA, which leads to clustering of cohesin in axial structures, and causes chromatin condensation in interphase chromosomes; the findings suggest that cohesin could have an architectural role in interphase chromosome organization.

Stalling of replication forks in sequences that have non-allelic repeats can lead to genomic rearrangements; here two pathways consistent with homologous recombination and error-free post-replication repair fuse identical and mismatched repeats, respectively, thus inducing chromosomal rearrangements in mouse embryonic stem cells.

The X-ray crystal structure of NapA, a Na⁺/H⁺ antiporter from Thermus thermophilus, in an active, outward-facing state is reported; comparisons to the structure of a related transporter in a low pH/inactivated, inward-facing state show the conformational changes that occur when the membrane protein moves from an inward-facing to an outward-facing state, suggesting that Na⁺/H⁺ antiporters operate by a two-domain rocking bundle model.

Graduate students face big decisions about money. They can benefit from wise counsel and careful forethought.

The right move.

Drought has wreaked havoc throughout history, destroying crops and causing famine and conflict. And it could be getting worse.

Farmers must develop new approaches if they are to keep producing crops as water supplies dwindle.

Improved crops have helped farmers maintain yields in times of drought. But as climate change looms, will the gains keep coming?

Farmers would benefit from better long-range weather forecasts. What else can science provide to help them decide what to plant?

What should governments do to enhance sustainable agriculture and mitigate droughts?

The threat of insects to agriculture is set to increase as the planet warms. What action can we take to safeguard our crops?

Plants may be getting a little help with their tolerance of drought and heat.

Climate change means the coming decades are likely to bring more frequent episodes of severe drought, with potentially devastating impact on the world's ability to feed a growing population. We therefore need a sustainable agricultural system that makes the most efficient use of water and reduces expensive and environmentally challenging inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides.