Volume 550 Issue 7675, 12 October 2017

Annual jamborees fail to ignite public passion but are crucial to progress on global-warming.

Organic matter drifts down to the equatorial ocean floor in distinct patterns.

Grants from big science funders can be hard to use without better administration and mutual understanding, says Rana Dajani.

The week in science: 6–12 October 2017.

Tribal leaders are developing a policy for genetic research and data sharing, potentially ending a 15-year moratorium.

If officials don't act soon, research institutions could start shutting down next year.

Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson share the prize for developing a technique to image biomolecules.

Ecologists catalogue bird and mammal populations as warming transforms Death Valley.

Project obtains tissues from recently deceased individuals to look for the origins of disease.

After decades of delays, a challenging clean-up project is gaining ground.

How Anne Wojcicki led her company from the brink of failure to scientific pre-eminence.

Eric D. Green, Edward M. Rubin and Maynard V. Olson speculate on the next forty years of the applications, from policing to data storage.

Fifty years on, the agreement is being pushed to its limits by changing geopolitics, technology and commercial interests, warns Joan Johnson-Freese.

Malcolm Longair extols a long-heralded tome by Roger Blandford and 2017 Nobel laureate Kip Thorne.

Mark Peplow surveys a gorgeous gala of reactions in Theodore Gray's new book.

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

A collection of papers catalogues the associations between genetic variation and gene expression in healthy tissues – the largest analysis of this kind so far. See Article p.204 & Letters p.239, p.244 & p.249

Pariahs are fundamental building blocks in a branch of mathematics called group theory, but seem to be unconnected from both physics and other areas of mathematics. Such a connection has now been identified.

Cancer cells can develop an 'addiction' to the drugs they are treated with, so that they need the drugs to survive. Analysis of the underlying mechanism reveals a potential clinical strategy for harnessing this phenomenon. See Letter p.270

Although liquid metals are effective fluids for heat transfer, pumping them at high temperatures is limited by their corrosiveness to solid metals. A clever pump design addresses this challenge using only ceramics. See Article p.199

The discovery of the receptors for the protein GDF15 suggests that it regulates food uptake through the emergency pathway — a neuronal circuit that causes weight loss in response to cancer, tissue damage and stress. See Letter p.255

Observations of the distant dwarf planet Haumea constrain its size, shape and density, and reveal an encircling planetary ring. The discovery suggests that rings are not as rare in the Solar System as previously thought. See Letter p.219

By using ceramics for the mechanical and sealing components of a mechanical pump, liquid metal can be circulated continuously at temperatures at least as high as 1,673 kelvin.

Samples of different body regions from hundreds of human donors are used to study how genetic variation influences gene expression levels in 44 disease-relevant tissues.

In Escherichia coli, the control of RNA polymerase backtracking by transcription elongation factors impairs DNA break repair by affecting RecBCD resection and consequently RecA loading at sites far removed from the original DNA break.

Observations of a stellar occultation of Haumea, one of the four known trans-Neptunian dwarf planets, constrain its size, shape and density, and reveal a ring coplanar with Haumea’s largest moon.

Light-field-driven control of electrons in a conductor is demonstrated by inducing a current by laser pulses in graphene that is sensitive to the carrier-envelope phase.

Layer-by-layer stacking enables the construction of transition-metal dichalcogenide van der Waals heterostructures with high-quality, uniform interfaces and tunable electrical properties.

By exploiting geometric constraints and interfacial forces instead of chemistry, colloidal clusters can be controllably coalesced into particles with uniformly distributed surface patches.

The authors show that rare genetic variants contribute to large gene expression changes across diverse human tissues and provide an integrative method for interpretation of rare variants in individual genomes.

Multiple transcriptome approaches, including single-cell sequencing, demonstrate that escape from X chromosome inactivation is widespread and occasionally variable between cells, chromosomes, and tissues, resulting in sex-biased expression of at least 60 genes and potentially contributing to sex-specific differences in health and disease.

Using the GTEx data and others, a comprehensive analysis of adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing in mammals is presented; targets of the various ADAR enzymes are identified, as are several potential regulators of editing, such as AIMP2.

GDNF receptor alpha-like is a brainstem-restricted receptor for growth and differentiation factor 15, regulating appetite and body weight in non-homeostatic conditions by activating the emergency circuit response to disease and toxin stresses.

Deletion of the Hippo pathway component Salvador in mouse hearts with established ischaemic heart failure after myocardial infarction induces a reparative genetic program with increased scar border vascularity, reduced fibrosis, and recovery of pumping function.

In budding yeast, glucose withdrawal, via the Rag GTPases, leads to TORC1 inhibition through its re-organization into a giant, vacuole-associated helix named a TOROID (TORC1 organized in inhibited domain).

The identification of an ERK2–JUNB–FRA1 signalling pathway that drives addiction to therapeutic drugs in cancer cells, and an ERK2-dependent phenotype switch that precedes cell death after drug withdrawal, may help to guide therapies that exploit the addiction phenotype.

Herpesvirus saimiri expresses a small nuclear RNA named HSUR2, with which it recruits two cellular microRNAs to repress specific mRNA targets and thereby inhibit apoptosis in infected T cells.

The class 2 type VI RNA-guided RNA-targeting CRISPR–Cas effector Cas13 can be engineered for RNA knockdown and binding, expanding the CRISPR toolset with a flexible platform for studying RNA in mammalian cells and therapeutic development.

Offering long reads and rapidly improving accuracy, nanopore sequencing has the potential to upend the DNA sequencing market.

With willpower and suitable financial means, you can start a science career at any age.

Professors and students alike can benefit from attending a writers' workshop, says Eli Lazarus.

Postcards from the past.

The increasing acidity of our seas is a threat to marine life that for many species may be impossible to overcome.

Is running for office the next step for researchers in the fight against climate inaction?

In the scientific community, the big question is not whether action on climate change is required, but what form it should take — and the part that scientists should play. Three Nobel laureates and three early-career researchers gave their thoughts to Nature on the current state of climate action worldwide and the place of science in society.

Carbon capture and storage will be crucial for mitigating climate change and rebuilding the world's energy infrastructure.

A progressive and potentially life-threatening condition previously associated with alcoholism is becoming more common — even in non-drinkers.

Increased levels of obesity are driving an epidemic of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Understanding, diagnosing and treating this progressive condition are now priorities.