Volume 546 Issue 7656, 1 June 2017

Counting what species do is becoming as important as counting how many there are.

Confidential feedback from many interacting reviewers can help editors make better, quicker decisions, explains Benjamin List.

The week in science: 26 May–1 June 2017.

Studies to treat vision loss and Parkinson’s disease are the first to proceed under new regulations.

Parties promise more money for research, but scientists fear impact of split with European Union.

Genetic analysis reveals a close relationship with Middle Easterners, not central Africans.

Space mission will peer inside the densest matter in the Universe.

Proposed cuts include 11% at the National Science Foundation, 18% at the National Institutes of Health and 30% at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Ecologists are increasingly looking at how richness of traits — rather than number of species — helps set the health of ecosystems.

The classification of complex organisms is in chaos. Stephen T. Garnett and Les Christidis propose a solution.

Felix Creutzig calls for international coordination of land use to ensure everyone has access to its fruits.

Nathaniel Comfort finds heroism but little nuance in Jennifer Doudna's account of her co-discovery.

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

Philip Ball is intrigued by an analysis of Leonardo's iconic painting.

G-protein-coupled receptors are biological targets for drug discovery. Developments in cryo-electron microscopy have enabled the solution of the structure of a class B receptor in complex with its signalling protein. Two biologists and a microscopist explain the exciting implications of this work. See Article p.118

New detectors for radio telescopes can map emissions from many different molecules simultaneously across interstellar clouds. One such pioneering study has probed a wide area of a star-forming cloud in the Orion constellation.

The development of a microscopy technique that enables observation of the interactions between six types of organelle, in 3D and over time, holds promise for improving our understanding of intracellular processes. See Letter p.162

The function of materials that have been coated with an ionic liquid can be altered by applying an electric field to shuttle ions in and out. The technique has been used to make materials that have switchable properties. See Letter p.124

Isotopic data from an ice core have been used to estimate atmospheric oxidant levels during past climate transitions — pointing to relatively unexplored climate feedbacks as drivers of atmospheric composition. See Letter p.133

A gene has been identified that underpins the capacity of mycobacterial cells to divide to produce physiologically different daughter cells. This finding has implications for drug treatment of tuberculosis. See Letter p.153

A bag that mimics the environment of the womb can support lambs born extremely prematurely for four weeks. This development points to ways to improve the prospects of extremely premature babies.

A neural circuit in Drosophila reveals how the fly’s internal sense of heading rotates when it turns.

An antibody against the pituitary hormone Fsh reduces adiposity and increases thermogenesis in ovariectomized mice or mice fed a high-fat diet.

Structural ensembles of the 70S ribosome bound to cognate or near-cognate charged tRNAs in complex with EF-Tu illustrate the crucial role of the nucleotide G530 in decoding of mRNA, and demonstrate that translational fidelity results from direct control of GTPase by the decoding centre.

Volta phase-plate cryo-electron microscopy reveals the structure of the full-length calcitonin receptor in complex with its peptide ligand and Gα_sβγ.

Materials are described here that can change their crystalline phase in response to the electrically controlled insertion or extraction of oxygen and hydrogen ions, giving rise to three distinct phases with different optical, electrical and magnetic properties.

Upon exposure to ultra-intense, hard X-ray pulses, polyatomic molecules containing one heavy atom reach a much higher degree of ionization than do individual heavy atoms, contrary to previous assumptions.

Observations from a Greenland ice core reveal that tropospheric oxidants are sensitive to climate-driven changes in reactive halogen chemistry and stratosphere-to-troposphere transport of ozone, in addition to ozone precursor emissions.

Extreme temperatures and fluid pressures are measured, and their causes modelled, in a borehole into the Alpine Fault, where an earthquake rupture is expected within the next few decades.

Expanding protected areas for ecological conservation by just 5% has the potential to markedly increase terrestrial biodiversity protection.

A tree biodiversity and ecosystem function experiment shows that leaf bacterial diversity is positively related to plant community productivity, and explains a portion of the variation in productivity that would otherwise be attributed to plant diversity and functional traits.

A high-quality reference for the sunflower genome (Helianthus annuus L.) and analysis of gene networks involved in flowering time and oil metabolism provide a basis for nutritional exploitation and analyses of adaptation to climate change.

The mycobacterial protein LamA functions as an inhibitor of cell wall synthesis at the nascent cell pole, contributing to asymmetry in polar growth, and could represent a much-needed target for the development of anti-tuberculosis therapies.

The chemoattractant S1P is identified as an extrinsic factor that supports naive T cell survival, and acts via a signalling mechanism to maintain mitochondrial content and function.

Using confocal and lattice light sheet microscopy, the authors perform systems-level analysis of the organelle interactome in live cells, allowing them to visualize the frequency and locality of up to five-way interactions between different organelles.

In human cell lines with mutant KRAS and loss of LKB1, CPS1 expression correlates inversely with LKB1 expression; silencing CPS1 in these cells induces DNA damage and cell death as a result of pyrimidine depletion rather than ammonia toxicity.

Containerization technology takes the hassle out of setting up software and can boost the reproducibility of data-driven research.

Some scientists are fighting a toxic belief that a 50-hour working week is 'slacking off'.

Look past the academia treadmill, says Ushma S. Neill.

Physics and maths.