Volume 560 Issue 7718, 16 August 2018

An in-depth analysis reveals the scale of differences among strains of common cell lines.

Granting bodies have to do more to stop corporate money from distorting science, says Linda Bauld.

Friendly foxes bear a gene variant linked to autism in humans.

When under threat, the brain takes both the good and the bad into account.

Castor oil allows for stable magnetic levitation of a laboratory ‘flea’.

The glare of an infrared flash illuminates xenon atoms’ transformation.

The turquoise killifish lives fast and dies young in ephemeral pools.

Personalized white blood cells attack tumours after incubation with cancer tissue.

A precise map of Mount St Helens’ magma reservoir emerges from seismic tests.

The week in science: 10–16 August 2018.

Health workers must figure out how to dispense vaccines amid fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Unpaywall has become indispensable to many academics, and tie-ins with established scientific search engines could broaden its reach.

The US Food and Drug Administration’s decision breathes new life into RNA-interference therapies.

Critics outraged over changes to chemical-safety review guidelines.

The world’s most powerful particle collider has yet to turn up new physics — now some physicists are turning to a different strategy.

Agent-based modelling offers opportunities to explore the complex social interactions at the heart of the addiction crisis.

Ecologists must understand how marine life responds to changing local conditions, rather than to overall global temperature rise, say Amanda E. Bates and 16 colleagues.

Huw Lewis-Jones revels in a study of field biology at the frontiers of climate change.

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

Andreas Vesalius’s illustrations of the human body baffled some early readers, as their marginalia reveal. Dániel Margócsy, Mark Somos and Stephen N. Joffe explain.

Nobel laureate in chemistry who discovered nature’s smallest rotary motor.

Four researchers explain how working with colleagues overseas has helped them to produce stronger science.

Catalysts working in pairs can promote more-effective reactions than can the same catalysts used sequentially. The coupling of an enzyme with a light-activated catalyst offers great potential for organic synthesis.

Humans perceive colours in categories such as red, even though we can discern red hues including ruby and crimson. It emerges that birds also categorize colours and this affects their colour-discrimination ability.

RNA sequencing of single cells in the mammalian trachea reveals a previously unknown airway cell that expresses genes involved in fluid and solute balance, and that might play a part in cystic fibrosis.

Cycloaddition reactions are powerful tools for synthesizing three-dimensional molecules, but their scope has been limited. A creative solution to this problem opens up opportunities for drug discovery.

Neutrinos are tiny, ghost-like particles that habitually change identity. A measurement of the rate of change in high-energy neutrinos racing through Earth provides a record-breaking test of Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

Genome-editing approaches have been used to fuse 16 yeast chromosomes to produce yeast strains with only 1 or 2 chromosomes. Surprisingly, this fusion has little effect on cell fitness.

Single-cell RNA sequencing analysis identifies cell types and lineages in airway epithelium, including the pulmonary ionocyte, a new cell type predominantly expressing the cystic fibrosis gene CFTR.

The extent, origins and consequences of genetic variation within human cell lines are studied, providing a framework for researchers to measure such variation in efforts to support maximally reproducible cancer research.

Successive fusion of yeast chromosomes is used to produce a single-chromosome strain that is viable, albeit with slightly reduced fitness.

Two- and three-layer WTe₂ exhibits spontaneous out-of-plane electric polarization that can be switched electrically at room temperature and is sufficiently robust for use in applications with other two-dimensional materials.

Heterobilayer excitonic devices consisting of two different van der Waals materials, in which excitons are shared between the layers, exhibit electrically controlled switching actions at room temperature.

Direct observation of the anode–electrolyte interface in a lithium-metal battery, without removing the liquid electrolyte, reveals two types of dendrites, one of which may contribute disproportionately to capacity fade.

Combining cycloaddition and carbon–carbon cross-coupling offers a way of simplifying the enantioselective preparation of chemical building blocks, natural products and medicines such as the antipsychotic asenapine.

A cooperative chemoenzymatic reaction combines photocatalytic alkene isomerization with enzymatic reduction to generate enantioenriched products in a stereoconvergent manner.

Satellite observations and Earth system model simulations reveal that marine heatwaves have increased in recent decades and will increase further in terms of frequency, intensity, duration and spatial extent.

Female zebra finches exhibited categorical perception of colour signals, as they categorized colour stimuli that varied along a continuous scale and showed increased discrimination between colours from opposite sides of the category boundary compared to equally different colours from within a category.

Experimental whole-ecosystem warming treatments of a Picea–Sphagnum peat bog reveal the likely phenological consequences of future temperature increases that exceed those of historical climate regimes.

Many small molecules that stimulate oligodendrocyte formation act not through their canonical pathways but by inhibiting enzymes within the cholesterol biosynthesis pathway and thereby inducing the accumulation of 8,9-unsaturated sterols.

Single-cell RNA sequencing analysis is used to identify cell types in the tracheal epithelium, including previously unidentified ionocytes, which express high levels of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator, CFTR.

Melanoma cells release programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) on the surface of circulating exosomes, suggesting a mechanism by which tumours could evade the immunesystem, and the potential application of exosomal PD-L1 to monitor patient responses to checkpoint therapies.

A pro-survival multiprotein signalling supercomplex consisting of the B cell receptor, MYD88, TLR9 and mTOR is discovered that coordinates NF-κB activation in diffuse large B cell lymphoma, and provides mechanistic insight into the efficacy of drug combinations.

Yeast chromosomes have been fused to produce viable strains with only two chromosomes that are reproductively isolated from the sixteen-chromosome wild type, but otherwise show high fitness in mitosis and meiosis.

During sexual reproduction in Schizosaccharomyces pombe, the rapid reconstitution of a bipartite Mi–Pi transcription complex after fusion blocks re-fertilization and induces meiosis, which ensures that the genome is maintained.