Volume 529 Issue 7586, 21 January 2016

Coastal wetlands can have a crucial role in the fight against climate change.

Strict guidelines to improve the reproducibility of experiments are a welcome move.

A female scientist who was harassed by a senior male colleague feels let down by the system that is supposed to protect her.

A Harvard professor reveals how his hiring committee whittles down the pile of job applications.

Ebola returns; a rocket falls; and a scientist becomes Taiwan’s next vice-president.

Knowledge about the drug's structure would help researchers understand what happened.

Unusual battle among academic institutions holds key to gene-editing tool’s future use.

Gravitational signature hints at massive object that orbits the Sun every 20,000 years.

Unprecedented Pacific Ocean campaign aims to improve forecasts for strong storms.

Work that describes harm from crops was cited in Italian Senate hearing.

The feral chickens of Kauai provide a unique opportunity to study what happens when domesticated animals escape and evolve.

The United States has invested in a grand ecological observatory, but the project has been dogged by budget overruns and delays.

Engineers, chemists and others taking inspiration from biological systems for human applications must team up with biologists, writes Emilie Snell-Rood.

Fatimah L. C. Jackson weighs up a study on the cultural politics of genetic testing among African Americans.

Rick Rylance applauds a study on the lean new model for research teamwork.

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

Pharmacologist who won a Nobel prize for his discovery of G proteins.

Which phylum first branched off from the animal phylogenetic tree is a contested issue. A new analysis challenges the proposal that comb jellies are the sister group to all other animals, and emphasizes a 'sponges-first' view. Three evolutionary biologists weigh up the evidence.

Magnesium is not usually considered to be a constituent of Earth's core, but its presence there has now been proposed to explain an ongoing enigma — the identity of the energy sources that drive our planet's magnetic field. See Letter p.387

Inhibitors of the BET bromodomain proteins are promising cancer therapeutics, but tumour cells are likely to become resistant to these drugs. Anticipated mechanisms of resistance have now been described. See Letter p.413

Comprehensive mapping and modelling have estimated global deaths from the bacterial disease melioidosis to be comparable to deaths from measles and substantially greater than those from dengue or leptospirosis.

The sequential action of enzymes has been shown to modify members of a class of membrane lipid called phosphoinositides to direct integral membrane proteins for recycling. See Letter p.408

A systems-level analysis of grasslands across the planet provides stimulating insight into the interlaced pathways that connect species diversity and biological productivity in ecological communities. See Letter p.390

The charge neutrality of the antimatter atom antihydrogen has been confirmed with unprecedented accuracy, paving the way for experiments that could simultaneously solve several of physics' biggest mysteries. See Letter p.373

Two-photon calcium imaging reveals that the mouse retina contains more than 30 functionally distinct retinal ganglion cells, including some that have not been described before, exceeding current estimates and suggesting that the functional diversity of retinal ganglion cells may be much larger than previously thought.

To address the question of whether a recurrent tumour is genetically similar to the tumour at diagnosis, the evolution of medulloblastoma has been studied in both an in vivo mouse model of clinical tumour therapy as well as in humans with recurrent disease; targeted tumour therapies are usually based on targets present in the tumour at diagnosis but the results from this study indicate that post-treatment recurring tumours (compared with the tumour at diagnosis) have undergone substantial clonal divergence of the initial dominant tumour clone.

In-depth analyses of protein expression studies are used to derive a new codon-influence metric that correlates with global protein levels, mRNA levels and mRNA lifetimes in vivo, indicating tight coupling between translation efficiency and mRNA stability; genes redesigned based on these analyses consistently yield high protein expression levels both in vivo and in vitro.

Suppression of dipolar oscillation modes by strong magnetic fields in the cores of intermediate-mass red giant stars reveals that powerful magnetic dynamos were very common in the previously convective cores of these stars.

Using infrared wavelengths, micrometre-sized water-ice grains have been identified on the nucleus (which is mostly coated in a dark material) of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

Stochastic acceleration applied to 1,000 trapped antihydrogen atoms yields a 20-fold reduction of the experimental upper bound on the magnitude of the charge of antihydrogen, which is expected to be charge neutral.

Lithium–oxygen batteries allow oxygen to be reduced at the battery’s cathode when a current is drawn; in present-day batteries, this results in formation of Li₂O₂, but it is now shown that another high energy density material, namely LiO₂, with better electronic conduction can be used instead as the discharge product, if the electrode is decorated with iridium nanoparticles.

Data-based projections suggest that the natural CO₂ cycle could be amplified by up to ten times by 2100 in some oceanic regions if atmospheric CO₂ concentrations continue to increase, which could detrimentally affect major fisheries.

The thermal conductivity of iron is now known to be much larger than had been thought, implying that thermal convection and radiogenic heating would not have been enough to sustain the Earth’s geodynamo; here it is shown that the precipitation of magnesium-bearing minerals from the core could have served as the required power source.

Data from grasslands across five continents show clear signals of numerous underlying mechanisms linking ecosystem productivity and species richness.

A case of inter-group violence among hunter-gatherers on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya 10,000 years ago.

WebMotor neurons in zebrafish are shown to be more than simply output neurons, since they are able to influence, through gap junctions, the strength of the input they receive from V2a interneurons and, thereby, the frequency and duration of locomotor activity.

In mouse embryonic stem cells converted to an epiblast fate in vitro—a state in which the cells can also gain germ cell fate if exposed to the signalling molecule BMP4—the sole expression of the transcription factor NANOG is shown to be sufficient to induce germ cell fate, in the absence of BMP4.

A mechanism for phosphoinositide conversion at endosomes to enable exit from the endosomal system, suggesting that defective phosphoinositide conversion at endosomes underlies X-linked centronuclear myopathy.

BET inhibitors that target bromodomain chromatin readers such as BRD4 are being explored as potential therapeutics in cancer; here triple-negative breast cancer cell lines are shown to respond to BET inhibitors and resistance seems to be associated with transcriptional changes rather than drug efflux and mutations, opening potential avenues to improve clinical responses to BET inhibitors.

Using super-resolution imaging to directly observe the three-dimensional organization of Drosophila chromatin at a scale spanning sizes from individual genes to entire gene regulatory domains, the authors find that transcriptionally active, inactive and Polycomb-repressed chromatin states each have a distinct spatial organisation.

Little is known about the function of most long non-coding RNAs. But a suite of new tools might change that.

Consensus with co-authors is vital when writing up research, say Dmitry Budker and Derek Jackson Kimball.

Writing together bridges disciplines, says Eli Lazarus.

Working as a consultant demands scientific thinking, says Gautham Venugopalan.

One-way traffic.