Volume 514 Issue 7523, 23 October 2014

Social-media fun for medical research bypasses animal sensitivities.

Europe must act to stop livestock drugs from wiping out its vulture populations.

The closure of a 40-year project to understand and protect seabirds shows the false priorities of funders, warns Tim Birkhead.

The week in science: Snail discovery revives publishing spat; proposed nuclear-waste site passes key US safety evaluation; and biopharmaceutical firm AbbVie cools on US$54-billion takeover deal.

Government to cease funding gain-of-function studies that make viruses more dangerous, pending a safety assessment.

November vote is unlikely to break a political stalemate that has squeezed research funding.

DNA shows a group of modern humans roamed across Asia.

Space telescope beats mechanical failures to begin a second mission that will trace new celestial targets.

Hybrid methods to solve structures of molecular machines create a storage headache.

Bioethicists are setting up consultancies for research — but some scientists question whether they are needed.

In 2004, researchers announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, a small relative of modern humans that lived as recently as 18,000 years ago. The ‘hobbit’ is now considered the most important hominin fossil in a generation. Here, the scientists behind the find tell its story.

Ten years after the publication of a remarkable find, Chris Stringer explains why the discovery of Homo floresiensis is still so challenging.

Scenario-based training for disasters is better than just drawing up a paper plan, say Jennifer K. Pullium and colleagues.

Richard Holmes finds Mary Somerville's breakthrough science best-seller thrillingly fresh, 180 years on.

Integrated assessment models show that, without new climate policies, abundant supplies of natural gas will have little impact on greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change. See Letter p.482

A high-resolution crystal structure of the HIV-1 Env trimer proteins, in their form before they fuse with target cells, will aid the design of vaccines that elicit protective immune responses to this protein complex. See Article p.455

Transplanting gene-corrected macrophage cells directly into the lungs of mice has been shown to effectively treat their pulmonary alveolar proteinosis, a hereditary lung disease also found in humans. See Article p.450

An analysis of hundreds of star-grazing comets in a young planetary system shows that they form two families: a group of old, dried-out comets and a younger group probably related to the break-up of a larger planetary body. See Letter p.462

During inflammation, lymph nodes swell with an influx of immune cells. New findings identify a signalling pathway that induces relaxation in the contractile cells that give structure to these organs. See Letter p.498

In a finding that highlights ways to optimize the efficacy of antibody-based therapeutics and vaccines, the activity of potent HIV-1-neutralizing antibodies has been confirmed to depend on cellular binding to the antibodies' Fc regions.

The high-quality genome sequence of a 45,000-year-old modern human from Siberia reveals that gene flow from Neanderthals into the ancestors of this individual had already occurred about 7,000 to 13,000 years earlier; genomic comparisons show that he belonged to a population that lived close in time to the separation of populations in east and west Eurasia and that may represent an early modern human radiation out of Africa that has no direct descendants today.

This study reports the correction of pulmonary alveolar proteinosis (PAP) in Csf2rb^–/– mice by a single transfer of either wild-type or gene-corrected macrophages directly to the lungs — the transplanted macrophages persisted for at least 1 year; this transplantation strategy obviated the need for myeloablation and immunosuppression and should be a feasible therapy for humans with hereditary PAP.

A crystal structure of the human immunodeficiency virus Env trimer, used by the virus to infect cells, is determined here; the new structure, which shows the pre-fusion form of Env, increases our understanding of the fusion mechanism and of how the conformation of Env allows the virus to evade the immune response.

Statistical analysis of over a thousand spectra of the star β Pictoris reveals that it has two kinds of exocomets circling it: old exhausted comets trapped in mean-motion resonance with a massive planet, and fragments of comets.

Modelling the solar magnetic field using observations of the photospheric field in the four-day period preceding a coronal mass ejection shows that the formation and later ejection of a twisted rope of magnetic flux provides the physical mechanism responsible for the ejection.

The two-dimensional semiconducting material molybdenum disulphide shows strong piezoelectricity in its single-layered form, suggesting possible applications in nanoscale electromechanical devices for sensing and energy harvesting.

The tetrahedral iridium tetroxide cation [IrO₄]⁺, which has an iridium 5d⁰ valence electron configuration and a formal oxidation state of IX, is generated in the gas phase, identified by infrared photodissociation spectroscopy, and predicted, by quantum chemical calculations, to be the most stable of all possible [IrO₄]⁺ isomers.

The abundance of key microbial lineages can be used to predict atmospherically relevant patterns in methane isotopes and the proportion of carbon metabolized to methane during permafrost thaw, suggesting that microbial ecology may be important in ecosystem-scale responses to global change.

It has been hoped that making abundant natural gas available by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) would reduce greenhouse gas emissions but now modelling shows that increased consumption will have limited effect on climate change.

In an experiment across China to test integrated soil–crop system management for rice, wheat and maize against current practice, improvements in grain yield are equivalent to high-input techniques, but nutrient use, nutrient loss and greenhouse gas emissions are lower than current practice.

Nested Hox expression domains are found in jawed vertebrates and in non-vertebrate chordates, but it is unclear whether there is a link between brain regionalization and Hox expression in jawless vertebrates; here, Hox expression is shown to be integrated with hindbrain segmentation in lampreys.

Three 1,000-year-old mycobacterial genomes from Peruvian human skeletons reveal that a member of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex derived from seals caused human disease before contact in the Americas.

During inflammation, the lymph node stromal compartment is shown to accommodate high numbers of infiltrating lymphocytes by relaxing the cytoskeleton of fibroblastic reticular cells, allowing the latter to stretch and the lymph node to expand.

An investigation of the influence of age on the generation of insulin-producing cells after β-cell loss in mice reveals that, whereas α-cells can reprogram to produce insulin from puberty to adulthood, efficient reconstitution in the very young is through δ-cell reprogramming, leading to complete diabetes recovery.

A high-fat diet promotes intestinal tumorigenesis independently of obesity in a mouse model with oncogene activation, by changing the composition of the gut microbiota and altering immune regulation.

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL) is a haematological malignancy with a poor prognosis and no available targeted therapies; now two histone H3 lysine 27 demethylases, JMJD3 and UTX, are shown to have contrasting roles in human T-ALL cells and a mouse model of the disease, and a small molecule demethylase inhibitor is found to inhibit the growth of T-ALL cell lines, introducing a potential therapeutic avenue for acute leukaemia.

The X-ray crystal structures of a zinc-ion-transporting P-type ATPase are solved in a zinc-free, phosphoenzyme ‘ground’ state and in a transition state of dephosphorylation, characterizing these transporters of an essential micronutrient that is needed for many biological processes but is cytotoxic when free.

A master's in business can offer scientists extra flexibility or whole new career paths.

Curiosity about catalysis leads to biomaterials career.

The drive of your life.