Volume 532 Issue 7597, 7 April 2016

To boost nuclear security, research reactors must eliminate highly enriched uranium.

Mental illness is moving up the global agenda — but there is still much to do.

A professional body for UK social scientists can help to improve research practice — and not just in public engagement, says Andrew Webster.

Ebola emergency over; ice wall to contain Fukushima leak; and ET search begins.

Rhetoric in US presidential campaign concerns researchers — particularly Muslims.

Multiple teams finally have the material they need to repeat enigmatic experiment.

Fetal tissue may prove crucial to probing link between virus and birth defects.

Airborne experiments aim to fill in the blanks of global water resources as the climate changes.

Human Brain Project asks wider neuroscience community to start using its hardware and software.

Nations debate how to protect biodiversity in the high seas.

Smartphone apps claim to help conditions from addiction to schizophrenia, but few have been thoroughly tested.

As threats to populations transcend national boundaries, it is crucial that responses to mental-health problems do too, say Pamela Y. Collins and Shekhar Saxena.

Sheila Rowan ponders a chronicle of the long road to gravitational-wave detection.

Highlights of this season's releases

Alan Thorpe enjoys a hymn to some of the founders of the science and institutions of weather forecasting.

Gregor Macdonald applauds a biography of prescient geologist and energy theorist Marion King Hubbert.

Douwe Draaisma is intrigued by a study examining both 'the voice within' and verbal auditory hallucinations.

Jennifer Light savours the history of a doughty band of 'human computers'.

Lori Andrews assesses Henry Greely's treatise on how technology will oust reproductive intimacy.

Detailed measurements of radioisotopes in deep-sea deposits, plus modelling of how they reached Earth, indicate that many supernovae have occurred near enough to have potentially influenced evolution. See Letters p.69 & p.73

A protein fragment released by filaments of the fungus Candida albicans destroys host cells. This is the first demonstration that human fungal pathogens other than moulds can release toxic peptides. See Article p.64

An analysis of changes in island topography and climate that have occurred since the last glacial maximum 21,000 years ago shows how sea-level change has influenced the current biodiversity of oceanic islands. See Letter p.99

A reconstruction of 1,200 years of water's history in the Northern Hemisphere, based on proxy data, fuels the debate about whether anthropogenic climate change affected twentieth-century precipitation. See Letter p.94

A clever dissection of the roles of the Ptchd1 gene in the brains of mice demonstrates one way to untangle the complex relationships between the causes and symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders. See Article p.58

A high-throughput approach has found clusters of DNA double-strand breaks in neural cells. Most of the clusters are in large genes that are associated with neural function, which suggests that the breaks may have tissue-specific roles.

The potential of soils to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions has not been exploited; here we discuss and recommend research and technology developments to implement mitigation practices.

Increased activity of dopamine receptor type-2 (D2R)-expressing cells in the nucleus accumbens of rats during a ‘decision’ period reflects a ‘loss’ outcome of the previous decision, and predicts a subsequent safe choice; by artificially increasing the activity of D2R neurons during the decision period, risk-seeking rats could be converted to risk-avoiding rats.

This study identifies a cytolytic peptide toxin in the opportunistic human fungal pathogen Candida albicans—the peptide is both a crucial virulence factor that permeabilizes the host cell plasma membrane and a key signal that triggers a host danger response pathway.

Analysis of deep-ocean archives reveals that a few per cent of fresh ⁶⁰Fe has been captured in interstellar dust and deposited in Earth’s crust, indicating that many supernova events occurred over the past ten million years within a distance of up to 100 parsecs from Earth.

⁶⁰Fe in deep-ocean crusts indicates that two supernovae exploded in the solar neighbourhood, reheating the superbubble that harbours our Solar System; calculations of the trajectories and masses of the supernova progenitors gives their explosion times and sites, 90–100 parsecs away, with masses around nine times the solar mass, at 2.3 and 1.5 million years ago, respectively.

A feedback-control algorithm implemented using a solid-state spin qubit system associated with the nitrogen vacancy centre in diamond is demonstrated; the algorithm uses coherent feedback to overcome the limitations of measurement-based feedback and protects the qubit against intrinsic dephasing noise, making it stable for milliseconds.

Ab initio calculations are used to determine the contribution of quantum fluctuations to the crystal structure of the high-pressure superconducting phase of H₃S and D₃S; the quantum nature of the proton is found to fundamentally change the superconducting phase diagram of H₃S.

Insects are captured by the carnivorous plant Nepenthes alata when they ‘aquaplane’ on the wet rim, or ‘peristome’, of the plant’s pitcher organ; here it is shown that unidirectional water flow is crucial to the complete wetting of the peristome, and that the underlying mechanism involves multiscale structural features.

Enantiospecific total synthesis of (+)-phorbol in only 19 steps from the abundant monoterpene (+)-3-carene is demonstrated using a two-phase terpene synthesis strategy.

A very large set of proxy data is used to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate variability over the past twelve centuries, to benchmark climate model simulations of hydroclimate; the twentieth-century intensification of hydroclimate extremes seen in the model simulations is not supported by the proxy reconstruction.

Relatively rapid changes in island area, isolation and connectivity observed since the Last Glacial Maximum have had measurable effects on present-day biodiversity, with formerly larger and less well connected islands having a greater number of endemic species.

Exposure to predator scents triggers an instinctive fear response in mice, including a surge in blood levels of stress hormones; here, the amygdalo-piriform transition area is identified as provoking these hormonal responses.

Haploid human embryonic stem cells have been derived from haploid oocytes, the cells maintain a normal haploid karyotype as pluripotent cells and, unexpectedly, as differentiated cells — loss-of-function genetic screens previously performed with haploid embryonic stem cells in mice can now be performed in humans.

Uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1)-dependent thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue is supported by a burst of mitochondrial reactive oxygen species upon cold exposure.

Lypd8 protein derived from intestinal epithelial cells binds to flagellated bacteria to reduce their motility, which limits the entry of Gram-negative bacteria into the inner colonic mucus and prevents invasion of colonic epithelia.

Gain of MEKK3 signalling is shown to cause cerebral cavernous malformations (CCMs) via activation of the target genes Klf2 and Klf4; endothelial-specific loss of MEKK3, KLF2 or KLF4 prevents lesion formation and lethality in a mouse CCM model.

Thalidomide and its derivative lenalidomide bind the CRL4^CRBN E3 ubiquitin ligase and target protein substrates for degradation; structural and functional data determined here show that casein kinase 1α and the lymphoid transcription factor Ikaros, the efficacy targets of lenalidomide in two different blood cancers, interact with the CRBN–lenalidomide interface through a β-hairpin destruction motif.

The crystal structures of the protease domain of separase are reported, showing how separase recognizes cohesin, and how phosphorylation of the cleavage site enhances separase activity.

Neuroscientists hope to turn the delicate art of eavesdropping on brain cells into an automated technique.

Open Data Button launched to encourage public sharing of data sets.

An aisle too narrow, a lab bench too high: the scientific world is a complex place for researchers with disabilities. But many of them find ingenious ways to make it work.

Elite scientists generally agree on what character traits make for excellent science.

Into the unknown.