Volume 559 Issue 7715, 26 July 2018

Awards highlight impressive efforts that reach the next generation.

Scientists have a new tool to help them judge how widely wildlife data should be shared.

The scientific community must take measures to keep preprints from distorting the public’s understanding of science, says Tom Sheldon.

Ancient kitchen scraps reveal that bread came before agriculture.

Detailed polymer structures generated in water droplets can be turned into carbon spheres.

Family tree shows that jellies and their relatives evolved eyes independently at least eight times.

Huge ridges and troughs on Charon hint at icy body's chilly past.

The sixteenth-century destruction of indigenous people left an imprint on an ecosystem.

Deadly type of Salmonella that is now rare in Europe is found in ancient Norwegian remains.

Device harnesses a ‘quantum dot’ to produce electric power with high efficiency.

Specimen dating to 99 million years ago is the first known fossil of a baby snake.

Rodents regain mobility after key neurons’ activity is dampened.

The week in science: 20–26 July 2018.

The strategy could also be used to bolster the defences of Tasmanian devils and corals on the Great Barrier Reef.

The Parker Solar Probe will dive into the sizzling solar corona to explore its mysteries.

The government is trying to bolster its research workforce but academics say more needs to be done to improve the sector.

Negotiations with Elsevier have stalled over open-access deals.

With the end of Europe’s major Planck mission, researchers are moving to smaller projects studying different aspects of the cosmic microwave background.

Scientists are racing to stamp out the disease in southeast Asia before unstoppable strains spread.

Reserves of cobalt and nickel used in electric-vehicle cells will not meet future demand. Refocus research to find new electrodes based on common elements such as iron and silicon, urge Kostiantyn Turcheniuk and colleagues.

Genetic testing for dogs is big business. It is too easy for companies to sell false hope, warn Lisa Moses, Steve Niemi and Elinor Karlsson. They call for regulation.

Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal revisit the extraordinary history of cultural responses to automata.

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

Outdated genome-sequencing machines need not die — researchers can repurpose them to drive next-generation biochemistry studies.

Scientists in areas that lack basic provisions — including dependable electricity, water supplies and funding — do research that has a high societal impact. Five people describe the challenges they face.

An excavation has uncovered stone tools in China that are about 2.1 million years old. This evidence pushes back the date of the earliest established signs of a hominin species outside Africa.

Atoms can exhibit wave-like behaviour to form matter waves. Such waves have been used to model the basic processes that underpin how light interacts with matter, providing an experimental platform for future research.

It emerges that viruses called phages, which infect bacteria, can suppress the bacterial immune system during an initial wave of unsuccessful infection, enabling subsequent viral infection to succeed.

Clinical use of the anticancer drug methotrexate can be limited by its high toxicity. It emerges that a diet rich in the amino acid histidine increases the effectiveness of methotrexate treatment and lowers toxicity in mice.

The males of two closely related species of fly respond differently to a female pheromone. It emerges that this difference is due to alterations in the activity of an evolutionarily conserved neural circuit in the brain.

An analysis of ancient coral from the Great Barrier Reef reveals that global sea level fell rapidly at the end of the last glacial period. The findings suggest that ice sheets are more dynamic than was previously thought.

The immense biodiversity of tropical ecosystems is threatened by multiple interacting local and global stressors that can only be addressed by the concerted efforts of grassroots organizations, researchers, national governments and the international community.

Tropical forests currently make a neutral contribution to the global carbon cycle, but they are likely to become a carbon source in the near future.

Our current understanding of the spatio-temporal complexity of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation phenomenon is reviewed and a unifying framework that identifies the key factors for this complexity is proposed.

Recent progress in machine learning in the chemical sciences and future directions in this field are discussed.

Micrometre-sized particles of two niobium tungsten oxides have high volumetric capacities and rate performances, enabled by very high lithium-ion diffusion coefficients.

A female Drosophila melanogaster pheromone is recognized by males from both the same and a closely related species through conserved peripheral sensory neurons; the signal is then differentially propagated to promote conspecific and suppress interspecies courtship.

A cryo-electron microscopy structure of fungal mitochondrial calcium uniporter shows that the channel is tetrameric and sheds light on channel assembly and function.

X-ray and cryo-electron microscopy structures of fungal mitochondrial calcium uniporter proteins reveal a tetrameric architecture and shed light on the function of the channel.

Structures of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter from fungal and metazoan organisms reveal a tetrameric architecture and shed light on the function of the channel.

The two episodes of star formation predicted by the ‘cold flow’ theory of galactic gas accretion also explain the observed bimodality in the chemical-abundance distribution of solar-neighbourhood stars.

An open quantum system containing ultracold rubidium atoms trapped in an optical lattice undergoes spontaneous emission of matter waves into free space.

DNA origami is used as a template to produce complex geometric shapes of nanoscale silica hybrid materials.

This study of whole-soil carbon dynamics finds that, of the atmospheric carbon that is incorporated into the topmost metre of soil over 50 years, just 19 per cent reaches the subsoil, in a manner that depends on land use and aridity.

Details of the drops in sea level associated with glaciation during the Last Glacial Maximum are revealed using a coral proxy from the Great Barrier Reef.

An Early Pleistocene artefact assemblage from the Chinese Loess Plateau indicates that hominins had left Africa by at least 2.1 million years ago, and occupied the Loess Plateau repeatedly for a long time.

Triple oxygen isotope measurements of 1.4-billion-year-old sedimentary sulfates reveal a unique mid-Proterozoic atmosphere and demonstrate that gross primary productivity in the mid-Proterozoic was between 6% and 41% of pre-anthropogenic levels.

The outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria is shown to be at least as stiff as the cell wall, and this property enables it to protect cells from mechanical pertubations.

A comprehensive characterization of the thymic stroma identifies a tuft-cell-like thymic epithelial cell population that is critical for shaping the immune niche in the thymus.

A comprehensive analysis of the thymic medulla identifies a tuft-cell-like thymic epithelial cell population that is necessary for shaping thymic function.

Histidine metabolism influences the sensitivity of cancer cells to methotrexate, with mice bearing leukaemia xenografts showing increased response to the drug upon histidine supplementation.

Modulation of DNA 5-hydroxymethylcytosine by glucose reveals an AMPK–TET2–5hmC axis that links diabetes to cancer.