Volume 533 Issue 7601, 5 May 2016

China is vigorously promoting nuclear energy, but its pursuit of reprocessing is misguided.

Humans’ exceptional ability to burn through calories fuels our evolution.

The problem of bias in published research must be tackled in a consistent and comprehensive fashion, says Adam G. Dunn.

New Mars missions shape up; Nobel laureate passes away; and a marten stops the world’s biggest science experiment.

Embryos cultured for up to 13 days after fertilization open a window into early development.

New research centre at national science agency CSIRO adds 40 jobs, amid hundreds of redundancies.

Space agency declares the astronomy satellite a loss.

Space-based detector draws interest, but regulatory hurdles might complicate a partnership.

Ambitious effort depends on transformation of rhino tissue into sperm and egg cells.

Some researchers believe that machine-learning techniques can revolutionize how materials science is done.

Canadian scientists are now allowed to speak out about their work — and the government policy that had restricted communications.

Tadataka Yamada, V. Ayano Ogawa and Maria Freire call for research and development funding and coordination to counter global infectious-disease threats.

Mark L. Winston reviews a study of Karl von Frisch, the ethologist who unravelled bee communication.

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

Robert P. Crease assesses Sean Carroll's attempt to construct morality out of quantum field theory.

Design rules for exotic materials known as polar metals have been put into practice in thin films. The findings will motivate studies of how a phenomenon called screening can be manipulated to generate new phases in metals. See Letter p.68

Insects readily evolve resistance to insecticidal proteins that are introduced into genetically modified crop plants. Continuous directed evolution has now been used to engineer a toxin that overcomes insect resistance. See Article p.58

Certain sequence variants of the α-synuclein gene are linked to the risk of Parkinson's disease. An analysis of these variants using gene-editing technology provides a possible explanation for this increased risk. See Letter p.95

The microorganisms that colonize pregnant mice have been shown to prime the innate immune system in newborn offspring, preparing them for life in association with microbes.

A protein in the pathogenic bacterium Legionella pneumophila has been found to attach the modifying molecule ubiquitin to human proteins, using a mechanism that, surprisingly, does not involve cellular E1 and E2 enzymes. See Letter p.120

The highly precise atomic clocks used in science and technology are based on electronic transitions in atoms. The discovery of a nuclear transition in thorium-229 raises hopes of making nuclear clocks a reality. See Article p.47

Direct detection of the ²²⁹Th nuclear clock transition has been achieved, placing direct constraints on transition energy and half-life; these results are a step towards a nuclear clock, nuclear quantum optics and a nuclear laser.

Recordings from cat visual cortex show that the cortical maps for stimulus orientation, direction and retinal disparity depend on an organization in which thalamic axons with similar retinotopy and light/dark responses are clustered together in the cortex.

Phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE) rapidly evolves Bacillus thuringiensis toxins through more than 500 generations of mutation, selection, and replication to bind a receptor expressed on the surface of insect-pest midgut cells.

Ultraluminous X-ray sources are thought to be powered by accretion onto a compact object; now the discovery of X-ray emission lines and blueshifted absorption lines in the high-resolution spectra of ultraluminous X-ray sources NGC 1313 X-1 and NGC 5408 X-1 shows that in each case the compact object is surrounded by powerful winds with an outflow velocity of about 0.2 times that of light.

Ab initio calculations are used to identify the structural conditions under which a polar state in metals might be stabilized; this information is used to guide the experimental realization of new room-temperature polar metals.

Failed chemical reactions are rarely reported, even though they could still provide information about the bounds on the reaction conditions needed for product formation; here data from such reactions are used to train a machine-learning algorithm, which is subsequently able to predict reaction outcomes with greater accuracy than human intuition.

An electrochemical C–H oxidation strategy that exhibits broad substrate scope, operational simplicity and high chemoselectivity is described; it uses inexpensive and readily available materials and represents a scalable allylic C–H oxidation that could be adopted in large-scale industrial settings without substantial environmental impact.

High-precision analysis of magmatic gas from the Eifel volcanic area in Germany suggests that the light xenon isotopes reflect a chondritic primordial component that differs from the precursor of atmospheric xenon, consistent with an asteroidal origin for the volatile elements in the Earth’s mantle.

Vertebrate and invertebrate cartilage share structural and biochemical properties, and their development is controlled by a highly conserved genetic circuit, suggesting that a deeply homologous mechanism underlies the parallel evolution of cartilage in Bilateria.

Two-photon imaging of calcium signals in the tree shrew visual cortex shows that light-responsive and dark-responsive inputs have distinct arrangements that allow the cortex to map the orientation, visual location and spatial phase of visual stimuli.

A CRISPR/Cas9 system is used to dissect the role of allelic risk variants on the expression of the α-synuclein gene SNCA, which has been linked to Parkinson’s disease development.

Fatal Ebola virus disease is characterized by a high proportion of CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T cells expressing the inhibitory molecules CTLA-4 and PD-1, correlating with high virus load; individuals who survive the infection exhibit lower expression of these inhibitory molecules and generate Ebola-specific CD8⁺ T cells, suggesting that dysregulation of the T cell response is a key component of Ebola virus disease pathophysiology.

A single injection of four anti-HIV-1-neutralizing monoclonal antibodies blocks repeated weekly low-dose virus challenges of simian/human immunodeficiency virus.

The differentiation of T follicular helper cells requires the G-protein-coupled receptor Ebi2 as well as the interaction with CD25-producing dendritic cells that quench T-cell-derived interleukin-2.

Defects in LC3-associated phagocytosis in mice are shown to result in systemic lupus erythematosus-like disease; dying cells are engulfed but not degraded in LAP-deficient mice, resulting in increased serum levels of autoantibodies and inflammatory cytokines, and evidence of kidney disease.

An unprecedented mechanism of ubiquitination that is independent of E1 and E2 enzymes, instead relying on activation of ubiquitin by ADP-ribosylation, and which is mediated by members of the SidE effector family encoded by the bacterial pathogen Legionella pneumophila, establishes that ubiquitination can be carried out by a single enzyme.

A CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing framework has been developed that allows controlled introduction of mono- and bi-allelic sequence changes, and is used to generate induced human pluripotent stem cells with heterozygous and homozygous dominant mutations in amyloid precursor protein and presenilin 1 that have been associated with early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Experiments that generate millions of images have forced scientists to find new ways to store and share terabytes of experimental data.

Relatives in the same career bring advantages — and challenges — for junior researchers.

Academia is moving towards more part-time positions, and fewer tenured ones.

Women are underrepresented in memberships of academic science societies.

But is it art?

University research powers innovation and economic development. Countries with intensive research and development (R&D) programmes differ in their approach to turning lab studies into commercial enterprises. By Alla Katsnelson, infographic by Mohamed Ashour.

Universities aid entrepreneurs by helping them to turn their research into companies. In return, universities can reap financial benefits.

The science done in university laboratories can change the world, but only when discoveries can be transformed into innovations.

A broader understanding of 'impact' could help governments to measure the diverse benefits of their investment in research.

The value that Australia places on publication quality over quantity has elevated it into the top echelon of science. Can it now improve its flagging track record in commercialization?

After starting one of Germany's first biotech companies, biochemist Horst Domdey co-founded BioM, a non-profit organization that has managed and developed Munich's biotechnology cluster since 1997. He talks to Nature about nurturing the entrepreneurial spirit in “a country of competitions”.

When it comes to translating its own research into practical applications, China falls short. A forum in Shanghai put the spotlight on ambitious plans to accelerate the process.

Despite the ubiquity of the Internet, innovation still happens mainly in hubs, where face-to-face contact matters more than ever.

For the past decade, venture philanthropists have been working to propel promising therapies and vaccines into the clinic, with some success.

Austrian social scientist Helga Nowotny was president of the European Research Council between 2010 and 2013. Now a professor emerita of ETH Zurich and author of The Cunning of Uncertainty (Polity, 2015), Nowotny discusses the growing pressure to capitalize on academic research, and how countries can get it right in the absence of a universal recipe.