Volume 536 Issue 7616, 18 August 2016

Modern gene-editing tools are being used to understand the mechanisms of evolution.

Researchers must consider human impacts on entire Earth systems and not get trapped in discipline-specific definitions, says Clive Hamilton.

China launches quantum satellite; Polio re-emerges in Nigeria; and study reveals how a solar flare almost started a war.

It is one of the last Caribbean countries to get hit.

Result could be closest thing yet to an observation of the bizarre phenomenon.

Cash-strapped Zewail City of Science and Technology is the legacy of Arab chemist Ahmed Zewail.

Ecologists fear plan to seal off the United States from Mexico would put wildlife at risk.

Excitement rises over chance of new physics from particle-du-jour.

Scientists know that there is a colossal amount of plastic in the oceans. But they don’t know where it all is, what it looks like or what damage it does.

Polymers have infiltrated almost every aspect of modern life. Now researchers are working on next-generation forms.

John C. Warner and Jennifer K. Ludwig propose three approaches that would help inventors to produce safer chemicals and products.

Steven Aftergood weighs up a study that gauges the gap between oversight and the onward rush of innovation.

For many, plastic is a dirty word — a pollutant that can't degrade soon enough. But for polymer scientist Brenda Keneghan, it's a precious material that looms large in design history. A conservator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, Keneghan spends her days saving plastic items from furniture to toys from the ravages of time. Here she talks about the war against the warping, yellowing, crumbling and stickiness that plague polymers.

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

In the 1950s, the discovery of a class of 'living' polymerization reaction revolutionized the field of polymer science by providing a way of controlling the molecular-weight distribution of polymers. The effects reverberate to this day.

The exome is the portion of the genome that encodes proteins. Aggregation of 60,706 human exome sequences from 14 studies provides in-depth insight into genetic variation in humans. See Article p.285

Inactivation of a group of sleep-promoting neurons through dopamine signalling can cause acute or chronic wakefulness in flies, depending on changes in three different potassium-channel proteins. See Letter p.333

The identification of the active site of an iron-containing catalyst raises hopes of designing practically useful catalysts for the room-temperature conversion of methane to methanol, a potential fuel for vehicles. See Letter p.317

Several hypotheses have been formulated to explain how cells make the first lineage decision during mammalian embryonic development. An overarching mechanism now unifies these disparate models. See Letter p.344

'Overdoped' high-temperature superconductors, which have a high density of charge carriers, were thought to be well understood. An experiment challenges what we know about quantum physics in such systems. See Letter p.309

Exome sequencing data from 60,706 people of diverse geographic ancestry is presented, providing insight into genetic variation across populations, and illuminating the relationship between DNA variants and human disease.

A subset of dorsal clock neurons are identified in Drosophila as sleep-promoting cells, which participate in a feedback loop with pacemaker neurons to drive both midday siesta and night-time sleep.

Skin stem cells, but not their progenitors, are able to form tumours owing to the ability of oncogene-targeted stem cells to increase symmetric self-renewing division and a higher p53-dependent resistance to apoptosis.

A new method based on protein engineering to trap an intact complex between Siz1, SUMO-bound E2, and PCNA for structure determination.

The scaling law for the critical temperature and zero-temperature stiffness in an overdoped copper oxide semiconductor does not conform to the standard Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer description.

Thin-film solar cells were fabricated using layered two-dimensional perovskites with near-single-crystalline out-of-plane alignment, which facilitates efficient charge transport leading to greatly improved power conversion efficiency with technologically relevant stability to light exposure, humidity and heat stress.

Iron-containing zeolites have an exceptional ability to convert methane into methanol, but their active site have been hard to study; now, magnetic circular dichroism has been used to explore the reactive species, providing a technique that should be generally applicable, and revealing the value of constraining active sites within a lattice to improve catalyst functionality.

The long-sought direct formation of a bond between two sp³-hybridized carbon atoms is achieved by the merger of photoredox and nickel catalysis using only simple carboxylic acids and alkyl halides as starting materials.

Experiments show that magnesium oxide can dissolve in core-forming metallic melts at very high temperatures; core formation models suggest that a giant impact during Earth’s accretion could have contributed large amounts of magnesium to the early core, the subsequent exsolution of which would have generated enough gravitational energy to power an early geodynamo and produce an ancient magnetic field.

Natural variation in the courtship song of Drosophila is mapped to the intronic insertion of a retroelement at the slowpoke locus, which encodes an ion channel.

Sleep-promoting neurons in Drosophila are shown to switch between electrical activity and silence as a function of sleep need; the switch is operated by dopamine and involves the antagonistic regulation of two potassium channels.

A human neurodevelopmental model fills the current knowledge gap in the cellular biology of Williams syndrome and could lead to further insights into the molecular mechanism underlying the disorder and the human social brain.

Here, a combination of biophysical measurement, modelling, and genetic and experimental manipulation of cell contractile components is used to analyse the formation of the inner cell mass in the early mouse embryo.

Size-selective pores in the HIV-1 capsid hexamer recruit nucleotides, thereby allowing reverse transcription to take place inside the capsid.

Electron cryomicroscopy structures are provided for all core and supernumerary protein subunits of mammalian complex I, a 45-subunit enzyme that powers eukaryotic respiration.

Structural biologists are at last living the dream of visualizing macromolecules to uncover their function. But it means integrating different technologies, and that's no easy feat.

Researchers working outside their home country should be careful to brush up on local customs.

A degree of uncertainty.