Volume 560 Issue 7719, 23 August 2018

Peer reviewers should not feel pressured to produce a report if key data are missing.

Online technologies make it easy to share precise experimental protocols — and doing so is essential to modern science, says Lenny Teytelman.

The noisy scarlet macaw, which can reach nearly 90 centimetres in length, was bred far from its tropical habitat.

Intestinal microbes can be programmed to make up for a deficiency that causes a devastating inherited disorder.

Brain-cell experiments reveal the molecular roots of a potential drug’s unusual advantage.

Students sifting through archived data find an X-ray flare too brief to belong to an ordinary star.

Risk of type 2 diabetes is temporarily higher in those who kick the habit compared with those who keep puffing.

Contact with just one antibody molecule regulates current flow through a transistor.

One male bird has yielded all of the genome for the ‘alalā.

The week in science: 17–23 August 2018.

Genetic analysis uncovers a direct descendant of two different groups of early humans.

The incoming administration promises to use science to alleviate poverty, but it is facing an imminent economic crisis.

The Wellcome Trust pulled the grant from Nazneen Rahman, who worked at the Institute of Cancer Research in London.

Data from the European Space Agency’s long-awaited Aeolus mission will address one of the biggest gaps in the global forecasting system.

Preliminary data suggest that deep-water reefs are more vulnerable to storm threats than researchers had suspected.

An ideological clash could undermine a crucial assessment of the world’s disappearing plant and animal life.

Change the funding system and approaches to international partnerships for US-led big science projects, urge Matt Mountain and Adam Cohen.

Stanley M. Burstein and Caleb E. Finch reveal how a work by classical physician Galen pioneered the idea of the ‘healthspan’.

Physicist who described how electrons interact.

An oceanographer tells how she managed to host a programming workshop at a remote research station.

A simple software toolset can help to ease the pain of reproducing computational analyses.

A technician job can become a satisfying career — or act as a solid stepping stone.

How a study on the high rate of anxiety and depression in PhD students is helping to erase the stigma around mental-health issues.

A method has been developed to infer whether the expression of each gene in a single cell is increasing or decreasing, and at what rate, using RNA-sequencing data. This tool has many potential applications.

Certain materials contain both electric dipoles and magnetic moments. An experiment demonstrates that these properties can be coupled in previously unrecognized ways, leading to advanced functionality.

The route to the establishment of a beneficial microbial community in the gut after birth is not fully understood. It now emerges that a gut-cell protein in newborn mice shapes the long-term composition of this community.

A programmable array of superconducting quantum bits can simulate phase transitions in quantum systems, a step towards the study of exotic physics that is difficult or inefficient to model using ordinary computers.

A drug that slows cancer growth has been found to elevate the level of the hormone insulin. This insulin rise lessens the drug’s effectiveness, but a diet that lowers insulin can increase the benefits of the therapy in mice.

CPEB4 binds the mRNA of genes known to be associated with autism and shows an isoform imbalance in individuals with autism, and an equivalent imbalance in mice induces an autism-like phenotype.

A cryo-electron microscopy structure of the insect Orco subunit, which forms ion channels with diverse olfactory receptors, reveals a tetrameric cation channel and sheds light on insect olfaction.

Cross-correlation analysis of high-resolution spectra obtained as the exoplanet KELT-9b transited its host star reveals neutral and singly ionized atomic iron and singly ionized atomic titanium in the exoplanet’s atmosphere.

A large-scale programmable quantum simulation is described, using a D-Wave quantum processor to simulate a two-dimensional magnetic lattice in the vicinity of a topological phase transition.

A counter-intuitive state—known as a topological Anderson insulator—in which strong disorder leads to the formation of topologically protected rather than trivial states is realized in a photonic system.

The magnetization or polarization of domain states in multiferroics can be reversed while retaining the overall domain pattern, owing to the inherent versatility in coupling the large number of multiferroic order parameters.

Elevated rates of reverse weathering within silica-rich oceans led to enhanced carbon retention within the ocean–atmosphere system, promoting a stable, equable ice-free climate throughout Earth’s early to middle ages.

A Triassic stem turtle from China has a mixture of derived characters and plesiomorphic features, including an edentulous beak and a rigid puboischiadic plate.

Analysis of the El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruptions suggests that solar radiation management strategies using stratospheric sulfate aerosols would do little to counterbalance the effects of climate change on global crop yields.

Müller glia in mature mouse retina can be stimulated to produce rod cells; this treatment restores visual responses in a model of congenital blindness.

Age-dependent epithelial expression of the innate immune receptor TLR5 in the gut of newborn mice selects against the presence of flagellated bacteria and influences microbiota composition throughout life.

RNA velocity, estimated in single cells by comparison of spliced and unspliced mRNA, is a good indicator of transcriptome dynamics and will provide a useful tool for analysis of developmental lineage.

Glucose–insulin feedback can reactivate PI3K in tumours treated with PI3K inhibitors, reducing therapeutic efficacy, but this effect can be reduced by using drugs or diet to suppress the insulin response.

An autoinhibitory conformation of the histone H3K9 methyltransferase Clr4 of Schizosaccharomyces pombe helps to prevent aberrant heterochromatin formation and maintains epigenetic stability.

Inositol hexakisphosphate, which is found in all mammalian cells, binds to two separate sites to promote the assembly and maturation of HIV-1 virus particles.