Volume 527 Issue 7579, 26 November 2015

Written agreements between parties in research collaborations are not a sign of a lack of faith.

Controversy in Brazil over access to a purported cancer cure could set a harmful precedent.

Success at the latest climate talks will be a recognition by the world’s nations that incremental change will not do the job, says Johan Rockström.

A statistician says a major scientific publisher is hindering his research.

Rare rhino dies; Ebola re-emerges in Liberia; and Pfizer–Allergan in mega-merger.

Long-awaited decision by US government authorizes the first genetically engineered animal to be sold as food.

Emission pledges raise hopes for an international treaty.

First tranche of aid projects prompts concern over operations of fund for developing nations.

Patients demand access to compound despite lack of clinical testing.

Some want to scrap adjustment that keeps atomic time in sync with Earth's rotation.

NIH to fund a cache of brain tissue and online data in place of live-animal experimentation.

After 25 years of negotiations, all countries are finally set to take steps to limit global warming. A special issue examines the path to the Paris climate summit, and the road beyond.

A Nature comic examines the 25-year quest for a climate treaty. Can nations unite to save Earth’s climate?

Countries have pledged to limit global warming to 2 °C, and climate models say that is still possible. But only with heroic — and unlikely — efforts.

The real business of decarbonization begins after an agreement is signed at the Paris climate conference, argue David G. Victor and James P. Leape.

To prevent disasters, Xiaogang Li and colleagues call for open data infrastructures to collate information on materials failures.

Adam Rome revisits five prescient classics that first made sustainability a public issue in the 1960s and 1970s.

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

The genome sequences of two members of the hemichordate group of marine invertebrates bring the evolution of their relatives, including vertebrates, into sharper focus. See Article p.459

The protein IR25a is best known for its role as an odour receptor in flies, but an analysis reveals that it also acts to synchronize the circadian clock by sensing small temperature fluctuations. See Letter p.516

By infusing blood vessels with gas-filled microbubbles and using rapid ultrasound imaging to detect the bubbles, super-resolution imaging of an entire vessel system has been achieved in a rat brain. See Letter p.499

Two studies provide evidence that epithelial tumour cells do not need to transition to a mesenchymal-cell state to form metastases, but that this process does contribute to drug resistance. See Article p.472 & Letter p.525

West Africa's Ebola epidemic continues to reveal surprises. Although the animal species that originally passed the virus to people remains a mystery, a virus reservoir and persistent disease have been identified in some human survivors.

The Moon's current orbit is at odds with theories predicting that its early orbit was in Earth's equatorial plane. Simulations now suggest that its orbit was tilted by gravitational interactions with a few large bodies. See Letter p.492

A molecular cascade involving the transcription factor SIX6 and its target gene p16INK4a causes the death of neurons that link the eye to the brain. This discovery deepens our understanding of a common form of blindness, glaucoma.

Sequencing the genomes of two enteropneusts reveals complex genomic organization and developmental innovation in the ancestor of deuterostomes, a group of animals including echinoderms (starfish and their relatives) and chordates (which includes humans).

Haematopoietic stem cells normally reside in a bone marrow niche but they are recruited to the spleen after physiological stresses; here, endothelial cells and stromal cells around sinusoidal blood vessels of the spleen are shown to secrete key niche factors to support this process.

An epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) lineage-tracing system in a mouse model of breast-to-lung metastasis reveals that although some cells undergo EMT in a primary epithelial tumour, the lung metastases mainly arise from cells that have not undergone EMT; in addition, cells that have undergone EMT appear more resistant to chemotherapy.

Yeast-based screening identifies the benzodiazepine drug lorazepam as a non-selective positive allosteric modulator of the G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) GPR68; homology modelling and molecular docking of 3.1 million molecules found a new compound, ‘ogerin’, as a potent GPR68 modulator, which suppressed recall in fear conditioning in wild-type mice, and the general method of combining physical and structure-based screening may lead to the discovery of selective ligands for other GPCRs.

The first stars and their immediate successors should be found today in the central regions (bulges) of galaxies; old, metal-poor stars have now been found in the Milky Way bulge, including one star with an iron abundance about 10,000 times lower than that of the Sun without noticeable carbon enhancement, making it possibly the oldest known star in the Galaxy.

The number of long-period variable stars in a stellar population is directly related to their lifetime, which is difficult to predict from first principles; here a time-dependent stellar population model is constructed that includes the effects of long-period variable stars, and is applied to the galaxy M87.

Gravitational interactions after the Moon-forming event suggest that the current lunar inclination is the result of collisionless encounters of planetesimals with the early Moon–Earth system.

A new type of topological semimetal is described, which contains so-called type-II Weyl fermions and has very different properties to standard Weyl semimetals, owing to the existence of an open Fermi surface rather than a point-like one in the vicinity of Weyl points; WTe₂ is predicted to be one such semimetal.

Conventional clinical ultrasound imaging has, at best, sub-millimetre-scale resolution, but now a new ultrasound technique is demonstrated that is based on fast tracking of transient signals from a sub-wavelength contrast agent and has sufficiently high resolution to map the microvasculature deep into organs.

Metal-organic frameworks have a porous structure that has useful applications in gas adsorption; here, small-angle X-ray scattering is used to visualize the process of adsorption as gas pressure increases, revealing that adsorbate molecules interact across pore walls in a way that allows extra adsorbate domains to be created in the framework and to form superlattices, before the adsorbate settles down into a more uniform distribution.

Oropetium thomaeum is a resurrection plant that can survive extreme water stress through desiccation to complete dryness, providing a model for drought tolerance; here, whole-genome sequencing and assembly of the Oropetium genome using single-molecule real-time sequencing is reported.

Activation of the sweet and bitter cortical fields in awake mice evokes predetermined behavioural programs, independent of learning and experience, illustrating the hardwired and innate nature of the sense of taste.

A Drosophila chemosensory receptor, expressed in leg sensory neurons, is necessary for behavioural and molecular synchronization of the fly’s circadian clock to low-amplitude temperature cycles; this temperature-sensing pathway functions independently from the known temperature sensors of the fly’s antennae.

Fungal pathogens reorient hyphal growth towards their plant hosts in response to chemical signals; here, directed growth of the plant pathogen Fusarium oxysporum towards the roots of the tomato plant is shown to be triggered by class III peroxidases secreted by the tomato plant, with the fungal response requiring a sex pheromone receptor.

Deletion of Twist or Snail, two key transcription factors that induce epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in a mouse model of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma leads to an increase in cell proliferation, and a greater sensitivity to the chemotherapeutic agent gemcitabine, with no effect on invasion or metastasis.

This study visualizes the interior of a dsRNA virus using cryo-electron microscopy, revealing the organization of the genome of cytoplasmic polyhedrosis virus together with its transcriptional enzyme complex in both quiescent and transcribing states.

The structure of the Cas1–Cas2 complex bound to a protospacer sequence illustrates how foreign DNA is captured and measured by bacterial proteins in preparation for integration into CRISPR loci.

The X-ray crystal structures of FtmOx1, the first known α-ketoglutarate-dependent mononuclear non-haem iron enzyme that can catalyse an endoperoxide formation reaction, are presented, along with further biochemical analyses which reveal the catalytic versatility of mononuclear non-haem iron enzymes, and help to unravel the mechanisms of endoperoxide biosyntheses.

Antibodies used in research often give murky results. Broader awareness and advanced technologies promise clarity.

The art of mindfulness offers benefits not only for scientists' mental health, but also for their work performance.

A researcher who studies autism-like behaviour in mice takes inspiration from his own condition.

First contact.

Successfully treating the cancer requires overcoming the almost inevitable development of resistance to standard platinum-based therapy.

Ovarian cancer is difficult to treat, largely because tumours are often found late and develop resistance to initial treatment: platinum-based therapy. New approaches promise to break through the platinum barrier.

Ovarian cancer is the seventh most common cancer worldwide and one of the hardest to treat. As this Nature Outlineand animation show, this is largely because many tumours develop resistance to first-line treatment: platinum-based chemotherapy. The good news is that experimental therapies in development could help to deliver a knockout blow to the deadly tumours.