Volume 557 Issue 7705, 17 May 2018

Universities should take responsibility to ensure professional science is performed in an environment that is supportive, productive and rigorous.

Industrial partnership and new anode technology could provide a greener way to make the metal — but cleaner electricity sources are also needed.

I was hired to ferret out errors and establish routines that promote rigorous research, says Catherine Winchester.

Animals age more slowly after reduction of a protein that affects metabolism.

Clashes in a city park cause decline of a vulnerable species.

Effect reached up to one metre below the dusty surface.

Carbon emissions from tourism are rising at an alarming rate.

Pathogen first appeared when the amphibian trade began to boom.

Compound’s bizarre pulsing behaviour challenges convention.

Microbes weaken host’s immune response by triggering pain neurons.

A molecular motor flips end over end to cover 300 nanometres a minute.

Guidebook provides fine-scale details that could inform work on new treatments.

The week in science: 11–17 May 2018.

International research collaborations could end in wake of US President Donald Trump’s decision.

Yoshinori Watanabe hopes to revive his career by attending a year-long retraining programme.

Scientists welcome relative windfall after years of stagnating funds.

Most scientists welcome the dam-removal trend but some call for research into potential ill effects.

Gene collections and astronomy studies dominate the list of the most-cited publications with DOIs on the popular online encyclopaedia.

A special issue on how to make lab groups productive, rigorous and happy.

A Nature survey of 3,200 scientists reveals the tensions bubbling in research groups around the world.

Academic leaders must audit departments for flaws and strengths, then tailor practices to build good behaviour, say C. K. Gunsalus and Aaron D. Robinson.

Ambiguity in expectations and evaluations harms progress, say Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and colleagues.

Nature asked scientists to recommend one thing that institutional and laboratory leaders could do to make science more productive, rigorous and happy.

Simon Baron-Cohen absorbs the grave revelations in a study on a paediatrician enmeshed in autism’s history.

Eric Topol extols a gripping account of the rise and fall of the US medical-testing company.

Jonathan Adams is invigorated by a study on the nitty-gritty of research, from publishing to conferences.

Immunologist who paved the way to a malaria vaccine.

Lessons in leadership from outside the laboratory.

Little is known about the star-birth activity of the earliest galaxies. Observations of a particularly distant galaxy provide evidence for such activity when the Universe was just 2% of its current age.

An artificial-intelligence technique called deep learning has now been used to model spatial navigation. The system develops a representation of space similar to that of the grid cells found in the mammalian brain.

Computer simulations show that areas of the ocean that have low levels of dissolved oxygen will expand, but then shrink, in response to global warming — adding to an emerging picture of the finely balanced processes involved.

Seventy-six pairs of transcription factors can induce mouse connective-tissue cells to adopt a neuron-like identity in vitro. This discovery provides insights into both neuronal development and cell reprogramming.

Chlorofluorocarbons are the main class of chemical that depleted the ozone layer in the stratosphere. Measurements reveal that emissions of these compounds are rising again, despite international rules restricting their use.

Computational and biochemical studies have revealed the mechanisms by which arrestin proteins are activated by G-protein-coupled receptors — potentially opening up broad avenues for drug discovery.

Sequences of 137 ancient and 502 modern human genomes illuminate the population history of the Eurasian steppes after the Bronze Age and document the replacement of Indo-European speakers of West Eurasian ancestry by Turkic-speaking groups of East Asian ancestry.

A screen in which combinatorial pairs of transcription factors are exogenously expressed in fibroblasts identifies different combinations that reprogram these cells into induced neuronal cells with diverse functional properties.

Transient engagement of the G protein-coupled receptor core can act as a catalyst to activate cellular β-arrestin function after dissociation from the receptor.

Reconstitution of a functional intraflagellar transport complex in Caenorhabditis elegans provides insight into the recruitment and activation of the kinesin-2 motor protein.

Observation of the emission line of doubly ionized oxygen at a redshift of 9.1096 reveals that star formation began at a redshift of about 15, around 250 million years after the Big Bang.

Measurements of the quark pressure distribution in the proton reveal a strong repulsive pressure near the proton’s centre (stronger than the pressure in neutron stars) and a binding pressure at greater distances.

Twin optical fields enable a form of quantum key distribution that can exceed the secret-key capacity without using quantum repeaters and that has security independent of the measuring devices.

For appropriately aligned layers of different two-dimensional materials, the separation between layers—and hence the interlayer coupling—is very sensitive to pressure, leading to pressure-induced changes in the electronic properties of the heterostructures.

Electrode films prepared from a liquid-crystal phase of vertically aligned two-dimensional titanium carbide show electrochemical energy storage that is nearly independent of film thickness.

Atmospheric CFC-11 concentrations have been declining less rapidly since 2012; evidence suggests that this finding is explained by an increase in the emission of CFC-11during these years.

Phylogenies reconstructed using 12 hepatitis B virus genomes, which were recovered from ancient human genome data, reveal a complex history of hepatitis B evolution that is not evident when using only modern samples.

The genome sequence of Triticum urartu, the progenitor of the A subgenome of hexaploid wheat, provides insight into genome duplication during grass evolution.

Grid-like representations emerge spontaneously within a neural network trained to self-localize, enabling the agent to take shortcuts to destinations using vector-based navigation.

Finely tuned control of strain engraftment and abundance in the mouse gut microbiota was achieved using the marine polysaccharide porphyran, which could exclusively be used by an introduced subset of wild-type or genetically modified Bacteroides strains.

A new model of cardiac trabeculation in mice is presented in which NOTCH1 and NRG1 have opposing roles in extracellular matrix degradation and synthesis that are essential for defining trabecular architecture.

The Cdc48 adaptor Vms1 is a peptidyl-tRNA hydrolase that cooperates with the ribosome quality control complex to catalyse the removal of nascent polypeptides from stalled ribosomes.

Molecular dynamics simulations and site-directed fluorescence spectroscopy show that the transmembrane core and cytoplasmic tail of G-protein-coupled receptors independently and cooperatively activate arrestin.