Volume 559 Issue 7713, 12 July 2018

Science offers renewed hope for those still waiting for their moment in the spotlight.

Key meeting should focus minds on the best way to extract minerals from the depths of the ocean.

Senior academics must step up and take the lead in discussing intolerance, says Devang Mehta.

Ancient breed of domestic rice traced to the Inner Niger Delta in West Africa.

Imaging techniques reveal honeycomb structure at the heart of a soot-particle precursor.

Genes involved in taste, smell and metabolism help marsupials to subsist on poisonous foliage.

Gaming gear makes short work of complex 3D modelling tasks.

Pregnancy test measures progesterone in humpback blubber.

Scientists scrutinize monumental complex of ditches and posts built more than 4,000 years ago.

Molecule with therapeutic potential stimulates immune cells that can gobble up tumour cells.

Different wavelengths of visible light used to create complex objects without the need for moving parts.

Treatment with the hormone helps to prevent the death of insulin-producing cells.

The week in science: 6–12 July 2018.

Top German institute plans to release results of a survey that will shed light on bullying issues.

EU researchers would overwhelm existing visa system and should retain special access to the United Kingdom, say science organizations.

Scientists might be able to draw from new sources of cannabis compounds for research.

Machine learning on mountain of safety data improves automated assessments.

Experiments in mice suggest that the technology has a long way to go before being used for pest control in the wild.

How does the brain know where it is? Nachum Ulanovsky hopes his flying friends can help him find the answer.

Fund and study these priorities for natural and social sciences to meet a gaping need, urge Abdallah S. Daar, Trillium Chang, Angela Salomon and Peter A. Singer.

People, politics and poor planning are behind most urban water shortages, argues Mike Muller.

Mott Greene applauds a history of how the Austro-Hungarian Empire shaped the field.

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

Mark Peplow extols two books on broken pipes and promises in Michigan.

Getting hold of the right equipment can be costly, so here’s a primer for cash-strapped principal investigators.

Institutions must boost pay and representation for ethnic-minority women, says professional association.

European association advises members to prepare graduate students and postdocs for range of non-academic roles.

Synthetic genetic circuits can induce cells to form simple 3D structures reminiscent of those generated during early embryonic development. This advance will help engineers build tissues that have desirable structures.

Climate anomalies punctuated the last ice age, characterized by the discharge of icebergs that released fresh water into the North Atlantic Ocean. It now emerges that fresh water also sometimes flooded the North Pacific.

Inhibitors of PARP proteins are used in cancer treatment. It emerges that PARP inhibitors exert their effect by accelerating DNA replication to a speed at which DNA damage occurs.

A carefully considered observational study estimates that up to 22% of infant deaths in sub-Saharan Africa could be prevented by improving air quality — a value much higher than previous estimates.

Exotic particles called Majorana fermions have potential applications in quantum computing, but their existence has yet to be definitively confirmed. Two groups have now glimpsed these particles.

The introduction of non-native rats can devastate island ecosystems. It now emerges that these rats also harm a complex web of interactions linking seabirds with the algae and fishes of nearby coral reefs.

China has addressed widespread rural poverty and environmental degradation head-on via unprecedented investment in sixteen large-scale sustainability programmes.

Measurements of the thermal Hall conductance in the first excited Landau level of the quantum Hall effect show the existence of a state with non-Abelian excitations.

The dual-specificity kinase DYRK3 acts as a central ‘dissolvase’, mediating the phase transitions of several types of membraneless organelles during mitosis.

The cryo-EM structure of the yeast origin recognition complex (ORC) bound to a 72-base-pair origin DNA sequence provides insights into the basis of the origin selection mechanism.

‘Oumuamua—the first known interstellar object to have entered the Solar System—is probably a comet, albeit with unusual dust and chemical properties owing to its origin in a distant solar system.

Half-integer quantization of the thermal Hall effect in a Kitaev spin liquid reveals chiral currents of charge-neutral Majorana fermions around the edges of the sample, produced by strong electronic correlations.

A top-contacting method for the fabrication of molecular devices uses metallic nanoparticles to electrically contact self-assembled monolayers, enabling the preparation of thousands of identical, ambient-stable metal–molecule–metal devices.

The rapid water transport through graphene oxide membranes can be switched off by introducing localized electric fields within the membranes that ionize surrounding water molecules and thus block transport.

Sediment-core and modelling analyses suggest that, during distinct cold periods known as Heinrich Stadials, changes in ocean circulation in the North Atlantic triggered discharge of freshwater from the Cordilleran Ice Sheet into the North Pacific.

Cooperation is more likely to evolve in a public-goods-distribution game when payoffs can change between rounds so that the stakes increase when players cooperate and decrease when players defect.

Productivity of coral reefs is enhanced near islands with no invasive rats, as populations of seabirds, which transfer nitrogen from deeper areas of ocean to the nearshore waters via their guano, are much larger than on rat-infested islands.

A 10 μg m⁻³ increase in the concentration of ambient respirable particulate matter is associated with a 9% rise in infant mortality in Africa and this increase is not affected by household wealth.

Screening pairwise combinations of antibiotics and other drugs against three bacterial pathogens reveals that antagonistic and synergistic drug–drug interactions are specific to microbial species and strains.

Activation of P2RX7 receptors by extracellular ATP is required for the generation, maintenance and function of central and tissue-resident CD8⁺ memory T cells.

The discovery and characterization of small-molecule antagonists that inhibit the stimulator of interferon genes (STING) protein may help to develop therapies for the treatment of autoinflammatory disease.

Structural analysis demonstrates how TRIP13 and p31^comet disassemble the mitotic checkpoint complex.

Inhibition of PARP is shown to accelerate the speed of replication fork elongation, which prevents fork stalling and induces DNA damage, with implications for genomic instability and cancer treatment.

Mutations in all three genes encoding ribonuclease H2 sensitize cells to poly(ADP–ribose) polymerase inhibitors by compromising ribonucleotide excision repair.