Volume 528 Issue 7580, 3 December 2015

Research has a part to play in identifying the factors that breed terrorism.

Scientific innovation is being smothered by a culture of conformity.

But the science alone will not be enough to build public and political confidence, says Heidi Larson.

The prickly topic of how to assign credit to scientists flares up on social media.

Carbon emissions slow; anthrax vaccine gets go-ahead; and rocket gets to space and back.

Senate assigns a clinical trial €3 million — but researchers want an open competition.

Indian Ocean expedition resumes a six-decade campaign to bore right through the planet’s crust.

Algorithms could aid discovery at Large Hadron Collider, but raise transparency concerns.

A clinical trial will look at the neurological structure and function of people who have attempted suicide.

Science budget will rise with inflation amid cuts elsewhere, following government spending review.

Terrorism is tough to study, but researchers have gleaned insights from the current generation of Islamist extremists.

There are too many PhD students for too few academic jobs — but with imagination, the problem could be solved.

Researchers want to wire the human body with sensors that could harvest reams of data — and transform health care.

Extracting carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater could generate resources and save energy, say Wen-Wei Li, Han-Qing Yu and Bruce E. Rittmann.

Luca Montanarella calls for a voluntary international agreement to protect the ground beneath our feet from erosion and degradation.

Andrew Robinson examines three books that see seismicity as both grimly destructive and, in some contexts, culturally energizing.

Anthony King reviews an exhibition on the horror, and hope, posed by trauma.

Historian of science who chaired pioneering embryology regulator.

Breakthrough calculations of collisions between two helium nuclei pave the way to a quantitative understanding of how the elements carbon and oxygen were made in stars — and to improved models of stellar evolution. See Letter p.111

Analysis of the temperature ranges occupied by marine species finds that the vulnerability of ecological communities to global warming may depend more on organismal physiology than on the magnitude of change. See Article p.88

Immune cells called regulatory T cells accumulate in fat during ageing. The anti-inflammatory activity of these cells worsens age-associated defects in metabolism, in contrast to its effect in obesity. See Letter p.137

One hundred years after the first description of viruses that infect bacterial cells, the contribution of these bacteriophages to fundamental biology, biotechnology and human health continues unabated and deserves celebration.

A property called entanglement entropy helps to describe the quantum states of interacting particles, and it has at last been measured. The findings open the door to a deeper understanding of quantum systems. See Article p.77

The discovery of microtube structures that link tumour cells in some invasive brain tumours reveals how these cancers spread, and how they resist treatment. See Article p.93

Careful management of nitrogen fertilizer usage is required to ensure world food security while limiting environmental degradation; an analysis of historical nitrogen use efficiency reveals socio-economic factors and technological innovations that have influenced a range of past national trends and that suggest ways to improve global food production and environmental stewardship by 2050.

Instead of containing stable and chemically unique ‘humic substances’, as has been widely accepted, soil organic matter is a mixture of progressively decomposing organic compounds; this has broad implications for soil science and its applications.

Soil biodiversity sustains human health and its loss can be mitigated by sustainable management.

Entanglement, which describes non-local correlations between quantum objects, is very difficult to measure, especially in systems of itinerant particles; here spatial entanglement is measured for ultracold bosonic atoms in optical lattices.

In panels of cancer cell lines analysed for their response to drug libraries, some studies have proposed distinct pharmacological sensitivities for some cell lines while other studies have not seen the same trends; here the data in the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia and the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer are reassessed, and the authors report a stronger degree of concordance between the two data sets than that in a previous study.

How marine communities will respond to climate change depends on the thermal sensitivities of existing communities; existing reef communities do not show a perfect fit between current temperatures and the thermal niches of the species within them and this thermal bias is a major contributor to projected local species loss.

Brain tumours are difficult to treat because of their propensity to infiltrate brain tissue; here long processes, or tumour microtubes, extended by astrocytomas are shown to promote brain infiltration and to create an interconnected network that enables multicellular communication and that protects the tumours from radiotherapy-induced cell death, suggesting that disruption of the network could be a new therapeutic approach.

Using experimental proteomics and modelling in E. coli, the amount of protein needed to run respiration (per ATP produced) is shown to be twice as much as that needed to run fermentation; results demonstrate that overflow metabolism (known as the Warburg effect in cancer cells) is a necessary outcome of optimal bacterial growth, governed by a global resource allocation program, and that the methodology is directly applicable to synthetic biology and cancer research.

In the local Universe, the census of all observed baryons falls short of the estimated number by a factor of two, and simulations have indicated that the missing baryons reside throughout the filaments of the cosmic web; X-ray observations of filamentary structures associated with the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 now find that 5 to 10 per cent of the filament mass is in the form of baryonic gas.

Persistent low-velocity baryonic jets have been detected from a supersoft X-ray source; the low velocity suggests that these jets have not been launched from a white dwarf, and the persistence speaks against the origin being a canonical black hole or neutron star, indicating that a different type of source must be implicated.

An ab initio calculation of alpha–alpha scattering is described for which the number of computational operations scales approximately quadratically with particle number and which uses lattice Monte Carlo simulations and lattice effective field theory, combined with the adiabatic projection method to reduce the eight-body system to a two-cluster system.

Recent work has suggested that sections of the West Antarctic ice sheet are already rapidly retreating, raising concerns about increased sea-level rise; now, an ice-sheet model is used to simulate the mass loss from the entire Antarctic ice sheet to 2200, suggesting that it could contribute up to 30 cm of sea-level rise by 2100 and 72 cm by 2200, but is unlikely to contribute more.

It has been suggested that carbon starvation, owing to reduced availability of non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs), is an important contributor to tree mortality during drought in tropical rainforests; however, data from the world’s longest-running experimental drought study presented here show no evidence of carbon starvation, and instead the researchers conclude that impaired water hydraulic processes (involving the transport of water from soil to leaf) have a more important role in triggering tree death from long-term drought.

Genetic correction of MeCP2 levels largely reversed the behavioural, molecular and physiological deficits associated with MECP2 duplication syndrome in a transgenic mouse model; similarly, reduction of MeCP2 levels using an antisense oligonucleotide strategy resulted in phenotypic rescue in adult transgenic mice, and dose-dependently corrected MeCP2 levels in cells from patients with MECP2 duplication.

Inhibitory antibodies to two specific human and mouse Notch ligands, Jagged1 and Jagged2, are generated and shown to have beneficial effects in a goblet cell metaplasia asthma model; systemic Jagged1 inhibition transdifferentiates secretory cells into ciliated cells in the mouse, demonstrating that Jagged1 from ciliated cells normally holds back secretory cells to adopt the ciliated fate.

Regulatory T cells need to express a diverse T-cell-receptor repertoire to control pathogenic self-reactive T cells; here it is shown that repertoire diversification depends on the intronic Foxp3 enhancer CNS3 acting at the regulatory T-cell-precursor stage to induce T-cell-receptor responsiveness to low-strength signals.

Fat-resident regulatory T cells (fT_reg cells) accumulate in adipose tissue of mice as a function of age, but not obesity; mice without fT_reg cells are protected against age-associated insulin resistance, but remain susceptible to obesity-associated insulin resistance and metabolic disease, indicating different aetiologies of age-associated versus obesity-associated insulin resistance.

A DNase sequencing method termed scDNase-seq detects DNase I hypersensitive sites genome-wide in single cells and pools of cells dissected from cancer biopsies.

A large-scale enhancer complementation assay assessing the activating or repressing contributions of over 800 Drosophila transcription factors and cofactors to combinatorial enhancer control reveals a more complex picture than expected, with many factors having diverse regulatory functions that depend on the enhancer context.

Scientific publishers are forging links with an organization that wants scientists to scribble comments over online research papers.

Postdocs need a level of autonomy to get the best out of their position, say Viviane Callier and Jessica Polka.

Career development a priority in university contract.

The joys of planet-spotting.

Genome editing uses enzymes that are targeted to sequences of DNA to make cuts. These cuts are then repaired by the cell's machinery. This technology allows scientists to disrupt or modify genes with unprecedented precision. By Amy Maxmen, infographic by Denis Mallet.

Scientists now have several tools to edit the genomes of living organisms. One of the most recent is revolutionizing research and has thrust two of its creators into the limelight.

Genome-editing presents many opportunities. But the advent of human-germline editing brings urgency to ethical discussions, says Jennifer Doudna.

Rather than emphasize risks that are not entirely new, talks about germline editing should focus more on the benefits, argues George Church.

Although yet to complete clinical trials, genome editing has already shown promise against a globally important disease.

The first therapeutics based on genome-editing tools will treat diseases caused by single genes, but many other factors dictate what is currently possible.

Epigeneticists are harnessing genome-editing technologies to tackle a central question hanging over the community — does their field matter?

Tim Lu's synthetic-biology research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge combines biological engineering with electronics and computer science to create bacteria that make structural proteins containing tiny semi-conductors called quantum dots. He explains how genome-editing techniques are furthering his research and their role in treating disease.

Genome editing allows much smaller changes to be made to DNA compared with conventional genetic engineering. In terms of agriculture, this might win over public and regulator opinion.

Despite the popularity of genome-editing techniques, researchers are still grappling with the known unknowns of the technologies. Here are four of their most pressing questions.

The term genetic engineering has been around since the 1970s, but it is only in the past few years that researchers have developed the tools to allow them to engineer the genome with the precision that they had originally envisaged. As scientists come together this December to discuss editing the human germ line, this Nature Outlooklooks at the risks and benefits of genome editing.

Diagnostic technologies play a pivotal part in understanding and addressing the burden of infectious diseases. The Diagnostics Modelling Consortium was established in 2013 to facilitate the integration of diagnostic data into models of disease transmission dynamics. In this supplement, the Consortium and its partners report on the latest research outcomes across several major diseases. The outputs demonstrate that improved, well-considered diagnostics could support the elimination of multiple diseases in the field.