Volume 562 Issue 7727, 18 October 2018

The floating of a seed shows how appreciating the wonders of the Universe can begin with a new look at the everyday.

Lists of academic publications to use or avoid must be based on transparent criteria.

A century after the world’s worst flu epidemic, rapid spread of misinformation is undermining trust in vaccines crucial to public health, warns Heidi Larson.

Home-based genetic sampling uncovers source of Siberian Huskies’ ice-blue stare.

But rarity of whales in some regions might deprive today’s bears of such emergency rations.

The forces that hold molecules together make a severed material whole again.

An advanced microscope helps researchers to detail some of the embryo’s earliest days.

Even the worst performers in a facial-recognition task knew about 1,000 faces.

Advanced version of an optical gyroscope cuts noise from scattered light.

Touchdowns on Jupiter’s moon Europa, which might host life, could be risky.

The week in science: 12–18 October 2018.

Consumer genetics poised to enable comparison of DNA evidence to genetic profiles of almost any American of European descent.

Researchers warn that the country’s science infrastructure is at risk of collapse if austerity measures continue.

International researchers fear data that could help determine the tsunami's cause will disappear before they can get to it.

National research council absolves one previously sanctioned lab leader of misconduct, and holds another researcher responsible.

Extreme weather events are expected to reduce global barley production.

European and Japanese €1.6-billion double probe, BepiColombo, will take seven years to reach the Solar System’s innermost planet.

Martin Wikelski has spent 17 years getting an antenna into space to track animals around the world. That’s the first step in his plan to revolutionize biology.

Opportunities abound to improve the cultivation of a once-forbidden plant.

Using artificial intelligence to predict outbursts of violence and probe their causes could save lives, argue Weisi Guo, Kristian Gleditsch and Alan Wilson.

Felicity Lawrence extols two chronicles on the ongoing battle to regulate the US food industry.

Meg Olmert weighs up a tale of artificial selection, class, entertainment and more than 200 breeds.

Mary Craig rounds up the highlights of this season’s releases.

Tilli Tansey navigates the extraordinary story of the life-giving liquid.

Richard Panek on two books tackling a counter-intuitive concept that defied Einstein.

Chris Baker enjoys Russell Poldrack’s clear-eyed account of attempts to decode brains scans.

Sarah Robey examines two books that together trace the birth and evolution of the nuclear age.

Certain fields draw frequent attacks on social media and other digital platforms. Three scientists explain how they navigate the minefields.

Ashani Weeraratna describes harassment she has faced and how current US immigration policies affect biomedical science.

Generous student scholarships help to boost the nation’s allure.

More time is needed for questions and breaks before the question stage.

A remarkable metal–ceramic composite material has been produced that could aid the development of the next generation of power plants — and might even have a role in curing the world of its addiction to fossil fuels.

The bacterial-defence system CRISPR–Cas can store DNA snippets that correspond to encountered viral RNA sequences. One such system has now been harnessed to record gene expression over time in bacteria.

In 1993, two papers reported observations of an astronomical phenomenon called gravitational microlensing. The results showed that microlensing could be used to probe the elusive dark matter that is thought to pervade the Universe.

Pigmented cells in the skin of cuttlefish can contract or relax to produce different skin-colour patterns. Tracking the dynamics of these cells reveals how this display system develops, and how it is controlled.

An exotic ultracold gas known as a Bose–Einstein condensate has been produced and studied in space. Such gases could be used to build quantum sensors that probe the properties of the Universe with extreme precision.

Asgard archaea are the closest known relatives of nucleus-bearing organisms called eukaryotes. A study indicates that these archaea have a dynamic network of actin protein — a trait thought of as eukaryote-specific.

An experimental measurement of the electric dipole moment of the electron with sensitivity an order of magnitude better than previous studies increases the accessible mass range of fundamental particles by a factor of three.

Tracking analyses of tens of thousands of individual chromatophores in freely behaving cephalopods enable studies of behaviour and development at cellular resolution.

A ‘mouse atlas’, comprising single-cell transcriptomic data from more than 100,000 cells from 20 organs and tissues, has been created as a resource for cell biology.

A large-scale genomics study shows that the cell of origin and founding mutations determine disease subtype and lead to the expression of multiple haematopoietic lineage-defining antigens in mixed phenotype acute leukaemia.

An RNA-adapting CRISPR–Cas system is coupled with amplification and sequencing steps to record, retrieve and analyse changes in the transcriptome of a bacterial cell over time.

A large-scale survey of fast radio bursts—short pulses of radio waves that seem to come from cosmological distances—finds 20 such events, including both the nearest and the most energetic bursts observed so far.

A Bose–Einstein condensate is created in space that has sufficient stability to enable its characteristic dynamics to be studied.

Time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy reveals how Dirac fermions in the band structure of the topological surface state of Bi₂Te₃ are accelerated by the carrier wave of a terahertz-frequency light pulse.

Integrating an optical Kerr frequency comb source with an electronically excited laser pump produces a battery-powered comb generator that does not require external lasers, moveable optics or laboratory set-ups.

A robust ceramic/refractory metal (ZrC/W)-based composite for use in heat exchangers in concentrated solar power plants above 1,023 kelvin is described, having attractive high-temperature thermal, mechanical and chemical properties combined with cost-effective processing.

A downward expansion of oxygen depletion in the eastern Pacific Ocean during the last ice age suggests an increase in the respired carbon reservoir, contributing to the lower levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during this period.

The flight of dandelion seeds is enabled by an extraordinary vortex ring, which was revealed by the visualization of the flow around the seed.

A population of cervical interneurons is identified that can regulate diaphragm function by modulating phrenic motor neurons; targeting this small population of neurons may be a functional strategy to restore breathing after traumatic spinal cord injury.

In human and mouse models of ovarian cancer, endoplasmic reticulum stress and the activation of the IRE1α–XBP1 pathway decreases the metabolic fitness of T cells and limits their anti-tumour functions.

When basal cell carcinoma is treated with a Smoothened inhibitor, a subset of cancer cells evades treatment by switching identity, allowing residual tumours to regrow when treatment is discontinued.

Treatment of basal cell carcinoma with Smoothened inhibitors leaves a small population of quiescent cells that can drive relapse but can be eliminated by additional treatment with a Wnt signalling inhibitor.

Asgard archaea encode functional profilins that can interact with mammalian actin, which suggests that—similar to eukaryotic cells—they possess a regulated actin cytoskeleton.

The structure of a pilus assembly intermediate reveals the timing of subunit polymerization and how chaperone–subunit complexes are transferred from N-terminal to C-terminal domains of the usher in the formation of bacterial pili.