Volume 526 Issue 7574, 22 October 2015

Scientists, meeting organizers and the media must take care with preliminary findings.

Food regulators are right to place new forms of data on the safety menu.

To drive sustainable development, Dyna Rochmyaningsih argues, science must empower rural communities — not just serve industry and governments.

Scientists on social media grapple with the idea of posting preprints of provocative research presented at meetings.

Canada gets a new premier; Arctic drilling is cancelled; and two new Ebola cases identified in Guinea.

Community takes action in wake of Geoffrey Marcy case.

Tech firm’s ambitious goals and abundant resources attract life scientists.

Wish list also includes new particle collider.

Moscow biology department among the first to require that all manuscripts comply with law on state secrets.

Positive news buoys a beleaguered field, but treatment benefits may fade.

Improved diplomatic relations feed a budding environmental partnership.

As a massive El Niño warming builds in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, researchers hope to make the most of their chance to study this havoc-wreaking phenomenon.

Armed with 850,000 diaries, an Oxford centre is trying to find out why modern life seems so hectic.

Cleaning up city and indoor air will require a deeper understanding of the unprecedented chemical reactions between pollutants, says Markku Kulmala.

Andrew Robinson reflects on the most tantalizing of all the undeciphered scripts — that used in the civilization of the Indus valley in the third millennium bc.

Andrew Jermy travels with Hugh Pennington on the arc of humanity's long, troubled relationship with microorganisms.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Ali Yetisen's research includes using nanotechnology and biosensors to make environmentally responsive materials for clothes, tattoos, accessories and contact lenses — materials that could be the future of fashion. Here, Yetisen, who works at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital in Cambridge, talks about mimicking the diffraction in butterfly wings, transforming gowns, and what fashion designers and materials scientists can learn from each other.

A simple model captures the key features of the transition from smooth to turbulent flow for a fluid in a pipe. The findings pave the way for more-complex models and may have engineering ramifications. See Letter p.550

Acute infection of mice with an intestinal pathogen leads to long-lasting inflammation that is maintained by intestinal microorganisms. This observation reveals a path by which infection history can affect long-term immune function.

Models of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet predict substantial ice loss over the next few centuries — and that a glacier expected to contribute greatly to sea-level rise may already be unstable.

Engineered human cells that can give rise to every cell type have been induced to generate structures that resemble an embryonic kidney. This advance charts a course towards growing transplantable kidneys in culture. See Letter p.564

Physiological analyses, electron microscopy and single-cell chemical imaging suggest that direct electron transfer occurs between the members of methane-oxidizing microbial consortia. See Article p.531 and Letter p.587

Analysis of data from the Kepler space observatory and ground-based telescopes has led to the detection of one, and possibly several, minor planets that are in a state of disintegration in orbit around a white dwarf star. See Letter p.546

The genome sequences of 198 bird species provide an unprecedented combination of breadth and depth of data, and allow the most robust resolution so far of the early evolutionary relationships of modern birds. See Letter p.569

Genomic approaches in more than 500 patients are used to extend the number of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) driver alterations, and also identify novel recurrent mutations in non-coding regions, including an enhancer of PAX5 and the 3′ untranslated region of NOTCH1, which lead to aberrant splicing events, increased NOTCH1 protein stability and activity, and an adverse clinical outcome.

This study reports exome sequencing of samples from 538 individuals with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL), including 278 collected as part of a prospective clinical trial; recurrently mutated genes are identified and pathways involved in CLL are highlighted, as well as their evolution in progression and disease relapse.

The anaerobic oxidation of methane in marine sediments is performed by consortia of methane-oxidizing archaea and sulfate-reducing bacteria; an examination of the role of interspecies spatial positioning on single cell activity reveals that interspecies electron transfer may overcome the requirement for close spatial proximity, a proposition supported by large multi-haem cytochromes in ANME-2 genomes as well as redox-active electron microscopy staining.

Crystal structures are presented of Thermus thermophilus CarH, a photoreceptor that uses a vitamin B₁₂ derivative, in all three relevant states: in the dark, both free and bound to operator DNA, and after light exposure.

High-resolution X-ray spectra reveal highly ionized X-ray gas flows in a nearby tidal disruption event, ASASSN-14li, near to the black hole of the galaxy PGC 043234.

The atmospheres of white dwarfs often contain elements heavier than helium, even though these elements would be expected to settle into the stars’ interiors; observations of the white dwarf WD 1145+017 suggest that disintegrating rocky bodies are orbiting the star, perhaps contributing heavy elements to its atmosphere.

Experiments, asymptotic theory and computer simulations of wall-bounded shear flow uncover a bifurcation scenario that explains the transition from localized turbulent patches to fully turbulent flow.

In non-Hermitian systems, spectral degeneracies can arise that can cause unusual, counter-intuitive effects; here exciton-polaritons—hybrid light–matter particles—within a semiconductor microcavity are found to display non-trivial topological modal structure exclusive to such systems.

Assessment of mangrove forest surface elevation changes across the Indo-Pacific coastal region finds that almost 70 per cent of the sites studied do not have enough sediment availability to offset predicted sea-level rise; modelling indicates that such sites could be submerged as early as 2070.

The kidney arises from two types of progenitors; here, the signalling conditions that induce the production of collecting ducts and functional nephrons from human pluripotent stem cells are determined, and organoids that recapitulate the functional regionalization of the kidney are produced.

A phylogeny of birds is presented from targeted genomic sequencing of 198 species of living birds representing all major avian lineages; the results find five major clades forming successive sister taxa to the rest of Neoaves and do not support the recently proposed Neoavian clades of Columbea and Passerea.

Data from experiments that manipulated grassland biodiversity across Europe and North America show that biodiversity increases an ecosystem’s resistance to, although not resilience after, climate extremes.

It is generally thought that the quiescence of tissue is not actively maintained, but rather a state reflecting the absence of proliferative signal; here the authors find that quiescence is actively maintained by paracrine hedgehog signalling provided by the epithelium in the mouse adult lung, and that hedgehog is dynamically regulated during injury repair and resolution for proper restoration of tissue homeostasis after injury.

Next-generation RAF inhibitors that inhibit oncogenic BRAF without inducing paradoxical pathway activation in cells with mutant RAS might yield improved safety and more durable efficacy.

Marine anaerobic methanotrophic archaea and sulfate-reducing bacteria connect by pili-like nanowires, suggesting that direct interspecies exchange of electrons could be a fundamental mechanism in the anaerobic oxidation of methane.

Under stress, such as heat shock, the N⁶-methyladenosine (m⁶A) modification is shown to accumulate primarily in the 5′ untranslated region of induced mRNAs owing to the translocation of an m⁶A interacting protein, YTHDF2, into the nucleus, resulting in increased cap-independent translation of these mRNAs, indicating one possible mechanism by which stress-responsive genes can be preferentially expressed.

Graduate students dream of academia but are keeping their career options open, according to a 2015 Nature survey.

Parental control.

Powerful super-resolution microscopes that allow researchers to explore the world at the nanoscale are set to transform our understanding of the cell.

Susumu Tonegawa unlocked the genetic secrets behind antibodies' diverse structures, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1987. Having since moved fields, he tells Keikantse Matlhagela about his latest work on the neuroscience of happy and sad memories.

Elizabeth Blackburn shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their work on telomeres — the protective caps at the end of chromosomes — and for identifying the enzyme telomerase, which maintains telomere length. Now at the University of California, San Francisco, she offers Elena Tucker an insight into her life inside and outside academia.

Richard Roberts shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Sharp for their discoveries of split genes, which contain parts that encode protein, called exons, and gaps between them, called introns. Now chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs based in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Roberts talks to Gijsbert Werner about microbes, genetically modified food and the problem with Nobel prizes.

Bruce Beutler is director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. He shared one half of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jules Hoffmann for their work on the activation of innate immunity; the other half of the prize was awarded to Ralph Steinman. Here, Beutler talks to Christoph Thaiss about biological puzzles and intuition.

François Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Peter Higgs for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that gives mass to subatomic particles. For this work, he collaborated with Robert Brout, who died in 2011. He looks back on his contribution to science with Thifhelimbilu Daphney Bucher.

The annual meeting between Nobel laureates and young researchers in Lindau, Germany, provides a unique opportunity to glean gems of advice for a successful career in science. The 2015 meeting cast a spotlight on super-resolution microscopy, as discussed in depth in this Nature Outlook, as well as fields as diverse as memory formation and the Higgs boson.