Volume 503 Issue 7476, 21 November 2013

Changes to the international zoological code are to be welcomed, despite continuing dissent.

Nature doesn’t usually do film reviews, but Gravity is a true great.

In the film Gravity, Sandra Bullock plays Everywoman, and reminds Colin Macilwain how inspiring science and discovery still can be.

The week in science: Test flight for volcano-ash sensor, Japan scales back emissions goals, and rare mammal caught on film.

President aims to boost spending and reform research laws.

Incoming boss plans peer-review shake-up at Public Library of Science.

Scientist struggles to maintain long-standing carbon dioxide record and more recent atmospheric-oxygen monitor.

Some say enclosures offer protection, others maintain they are a menace.

Geologists, engineers and social scientists are poised to swoop in before reconstruction gets under way.

NASA explorer programme raises hopes of mapping directional light from pulsars and black holes.

Graphene's dazzling properties promise a technological revolution, but Europe may have to spend a billion euros to overcome some fundamental problems.

Human papillomavirus is causing a new form of head and neck cancer— leaving researchers scrambling to understand risk factors, tests and treatments.

The push to replicate findings could shelve promising research and unfairly damage the reputations of careful, meticulous scientists, says Mina Bissell.

This list will help non-scientists to interrogate advisers and to grasp the limitations of evidence, say William J. Sutherland, David Spiegelhalter and Mark A. Burgman.

Philip Ball reconsiders the mix of dystopian science fiction and satire 50 years after Aldous Huxley's death.

Tanguy Chouard rates a film probing the psyches of Indonesia's paramilitary killers.

Historian Peter Westwick and his colleague Peter Neushul thought up their scientific history of surfing, The World in the Curl (Crown, 2013), on boards off the coast of California. As the winter surfing season gets into full swing, Westwick talks about warfare, wetsuits, climate change and forecasting surf.

Orbiting less than two stellar radii above the visible surface of a Sun-like star, the Earth-sized exoplanet Kepler-78b is a hellish world. But its existence bodes well for the discovery and characterization of habitable planets. See Letters p.377 & p.381

Breaking waves place repeated loading on marine algae, which can lead to death by fatigue. But observations of one alga suggest that its joint structure, which lacks transverse connections, confers fatigue resistance.

Emissions of carbon dioxide from inland waters to the atmosphere are a crucial link in the global carbon cycle. A comprehensive analysis reveals that this connection is much stronger than was previously thought. See Article p.355

Antibiotic-tolerant, dormant variants of otherwise antibiotic-sensitive bacteria underlie many chronic and relapsing infections. A small molecule has been identified that can efficiently eradicate these persister cells. See Article p.365

An analysis of North American drought variability over the past millennium shows that it is not unusual for widespread drought to persist for years, prompting fresh thinking about our ability to deal with such climate conditions.

Many animals use culture, the ability to learn from others, but only humans create complex culture. A laboratory experiment tests which characteristics of our social networks give us this capacity. See Letter p.389

HIV avoids triggering the cell receptors that initiate the host's innate immune responses. It seems that the virus achieves this evasion by using its protein coat to hide its nucleic acids until they are beyond detection. See Letter p.402

An analysis of regional variations in global inland water surface area, dissolved CO₂ and gas transfer velocity yields a global CO₂ evasion rate of 2.1 × 10¹⁵ grams of carbon per year, which is higher than previous estimates owing to a larger contribution from streams and rivers.

This study investigates how zygotic transcription is initiated and the maternal transcripts cleared in the zebrafish embryo: using loss-of-function analyses, high-throughput transcriptome sequencing and ribosome footprinting, the important roles of pluripotency factors Nanog, Pou5f1 and SoxB1 during these processes are identified.

Dormant bacterial persister cells evade antibiotic destruction and their survival gives rise to some chronic infections; this study reveals that persister cells can be eradicated with a compound activating the bacterial protease ClpP, providing an effective biofilm treatment in vitro and in mouse chronic infection models.

RNAs are shown to interact with DNA methyltransferase 1 and prevent DNA methylation of genes at their specific locus, providing evidence that active transcription directly regulates DNA methylation levels.

Data from the Kepler spacecraft and the HARPS-N ground-based spectrograph indicate that the extrasolar planet Kepler-78b has a mean density similar to that of Earth and imply that it is composed of rock and iron.

Doppler spectroscopic measurements of the mass of the Earth-sized planet Kepler-78b reveal that its mean density is similar to Earth’s, suggesting a composition of rock and iron.

There are many uses for surfaces that can stay dry, self-clean or resist icing, and many applications benefit from minimizing the contact time between a surface and any drops that may come into contact with it; drops are now shown to bounce off faster when using a superhydrophobic surface with a morphology that redistributes the liquid mass so that the centre of the drop assists in the recoil.

A dual-task computer game played by groups of different sizes is used to show that cultural evolution (the maintenance or improvement of cultural knowledge) strongly depends on population size; in larger groups of players, higher cultural complexity and cultural trait diversity are maintained, and improvements to existing cultural traits are more frequent.

This study identifies a shift from canonical to non-canonical Wnt signalling in ageing haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs); elevated expression of Wnt5a in aged HSCs has a causal role in stem-cell ageing, and this is mediated by the small Rho GTPase Cdc42.

Staphylococcus aureus δ-toxin is an inducer of mast cell degranulation in mice and is important for promoting inflammatory skin disease.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 is shown here to depend on the recruitment to the HIV-1 capsid of specific cofactors involved in orchestrating nuclear entry and targeting; when these capsid–cofactor interactions are prevented either by virus mutation, cofactor depletion or pharmacological inhibition of cofactor recruitment, viral DNA can be detected by innate immune sensors.

Transnuclear mice are generated from B cells with a receptor specific for the haemagglutinin of influenza A virus; the authors show that influenza virus can infect and deplete haemagglutinin-specific B cells in the lung, which might confer a replicative advantage to the virus and allow it to evade an early neutralizing response.

The nuclear receptor Rev-erbα, a powerful repressor of transcription, is shown to link circadian and thermogenic networks by regulating the function of brown adipose tissue.

Temperature-dependent alternative splicing of FLOWERING LOCUS M (FLM) results in two protein products, FLM-β and FLM-δ, that regulate the onset of flowering in Arabidopsis; at cooler temperatures FLM-β represses flowering, whereas at higher temperatures, the plant preferentially produces FLM-δ, which promotes flowering.

A computationally designed enzyme that was evolved to accelerate a chemical reaction 6 × 10⁸-fold approaches the exceptional efficiency of highly optimized natural enzymes and provides valuable lessons for the creation of more sophisticated artificial catalysts.

The crystal structure of a complex between the catalytic core of the HOIP subunit of the E3 ligase LUBAC and ubiquitin is reported, yielding insight into the ubiquitin transfer reaction and explaining how HOIP is capable of synthesizing linear ubiquitin chains with high specificity.

Confronting hypothetical dilemmas can ease workplace problems, argue Caitlin Casey and Kartik Sheth.

Earth scientist tackles societal problems using an interdisciplinary approach.

Some retractions reduce citations of earlier papers, says study.

UK studentships attempt to bridge gap between academia and other sectors.

US researchers were affected by government closure.

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