Volume 543 Issue 7644, 9 March 2017

Science is already losing out in the Netherlands. 

A ranking of the best science-news outlets misjudges the relationship between research and reporting.

To help scientists build a career, Panayiota Poirazi says funders must earmark cash, reduce emphasis on collaboration and improve the application process.

The week in science: 3–9 March 2017.

Researchers are cutting short travel, ending collaborations and rethinking their US ties.

Company plans a bigger, better system aimed at creating a market for the still-immature technology.

Artificial-intelligence programs harness game-theory strategies and deep learning to defeat human professionals in two-player hold 'em.

Editor asked to resign from journal for saying he’ll review only papers whose data he can see.

Diamond-based imaging system uses magnetic resonance of electrons to detect charged atoms and peer at chemical reactions in real time.

Analysis paints picture of diets, medicine and possible intimacy with humans.

Bizarre forms of matter called time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they’re not.

Research on collective recall takes on new importance in a post-fact world.

Masoud Mohseni, Peter Read, Hartmut Neven and colleagues at Google's Quantum AI Laboratory set out investment opportunities on the road to the ultimate quantum machines.

Regulation makes economic sense, argue Douglas Sipp, Christopher McCabe and John E. J. Rasko.

David Kaiser appraises a chronicle of the US agency that spawned technologies from drones to the Internet.

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

Herbert Sauro delves into a history of attempts to engineer life.

Physicist who developed MRI, revolutionizing medicine.

Wolbachia bacteria infect insects and can cause mating incompatibilities, an outcome that is used to fight insect-transmitted disease. The proposed genes responsible illuminate this process and the disease-control mechanisms. See Letter p.243

It emerges that nascent non-coding RNAs transcribed from regulatory DNA sequences called enhancers bind to the enzyme CBP to promote its activity locally. In turn, the activities of CBP stimulate further enhancer transcription.

Periodic oscillations are common in nature but they generally decay or fall out of phase. Two experiments have found evidence for a Floquet time crystal, which is characterized by persistent in-phase oscillations. See Letters p.217 & p. 221

The identification of the regulatory protein ENL as essential to an aggressive form of leukaemia provides insight into transcriptional regulation and highlights potential avenues for therapy. See Letters p.265 & p.270

How did the relationship between human societies and their surrounding terrain shape the formation of long-distance trade networks such as the Silk Road? Digital mapping and computer modelling offer insights. See Article p.193

The ultimate limit of classical data storage is a single-atom magnetic bit. Researchers have now achieved the writing and reading of individual atoms whose magnetic information can be retained for several hours. See Letter p.226

T cells of the immune system often fail to target cancer cells because they enter a dysfunctional state known as exhaustion. Molecular analysis of T-cell exhaustion provides insights into the clinical use of these cells.

The authors use modelling to show that the network of trading routes known as the Silk Road emerged from hundreds of years of interactions between pastoralists as they moved their herds and flocks between higher and lower elevations in generally mountainous regions.

A catalogue of human long non-coding RNA genes and their expression profiles across samples from major human primary cell types, tissues and cell lines.

Loss of autophagy increases the accumulation of mitochondria and the respiration status of haematopoietic stem cells, which perturbs their self-renewal and regeneration activities, and promotes cellular aging.

A new protein, Tudor interacting repair regulator (TIRR), affects DNA repair by masking the chromatin interaction domain of 53BP1, thereby preventing its recruitment to double-strand breaks.

A time crystal is a state of matter that shows robust oscillations in time, and although forbidden in equilibrium, a discrete time crystal has now been observed in a periodically driven quantum system.

Discrete time-crystalline order is observed in a driven, disordered ensemble of about one million dipolar spin impurities in diamond at room temperature, and is shown to be very stable to perturbations.

A two-bit magnetic memory is demonstrated, based on the magnetic states of individual holmium atoms, which are read and written in a scanning tunnelling microscope set-up and are stable over many hours.

Super-resolution optical microscopy based on stimulated emission depletion effects can now be performed at much lower light intensities than before by using bright upconversion emission from thulium-doped nanoparticles.

Horizontal arrays of metallic or semiconducting carbon nanotubes with controlled chirality are grown from specially designed solid carbide catalysts.

Phase equilibria modelling of rocks from Western Australia confirms that the ancient continental crust could have formed by multistage melting of basaltic ‘parents’ along high geothermal gradients—a process incompatible with modern-style subduction.

The discovery of two genes encoded by prophage WO from Wolbachia that functionally recapitulate and enhance cytoplasmic incompatibility in arthropods is the first inroad in solving the genetic basis of reproductive parasitism.

A single, low-dose intradermal immunization with lipid-nanoparticle-encapsulated nucleoside-modified mRNA encoding the pre-membrane and envelope glycoproteins of Zika virus protects both mice and rhesus macaques against infection and elicits rapid and long-lasting neutralizing antibody responses.

FABP4 and FABP5 are important for the maintenance, longevity and function of CD8⁺ tissue-resident memory T cells, which use oxidative metabolism of exogenous free fatty acids to persist in tissues and to mediate protective immunity.

In the presence of GTP, a tubular endoplasmic reticulum network can be reconstituted with only two purified membrane proteins.

Cryo-electron tomography reveals a detailed view of the structural organization of the lamin meshwork within the lamina of the mammalian cell nucleus.

The chromatin-reader protein ENL regulates oncogenic programs in acute myeloid leukaemia by binding via its YEATS domain to acetylated histones on the promoters of actively transcribed genes and recruiting the transcriptional machinery.

ENL, identified in a genome-scale loss-of-function screen as a crucial requirement for proliferation of acute leukaemia, is required for leukaemic gene expression, and its YEATS chromatin-reader domain is essential for leukaemic growth.

Twitter and other social media help researchers to connect and stay current — but they can also cause emotional distress. Here's how to mitigate that.

Campaign aims to promote work–life balance.

US graduate programmes fail to prepare students for careers outside academia.

A simple trick.