Volume 563 Issue 7732, 22 November 2018

The impact on science of Britain leaving the EU is still uncertain.

A survey reveals some lab heads are using the need for visas to create unacceptable conditions for junior researchers.

Rhetoric and policy are keeping innovators out, warns William Kerr — specialist visa applications have fallen by one-fifth in the Trump presidency.

The 70-kilogram lizards have little to fear, yet they seldom explore outside their natal valleys.

Obesity raises the risk of certain tumours, but might also amplify the effects of some cancer therapies.

A meteorite spanning up to 1.5 kilometres carved the newfound scar.

No evidence found to indicate that vitamin D and fish oil fight cancer.

Plant-based compounds kept foul odours and bacteria at bay.

Synthetic tool that binds to glucose could prove useful for people with diabetes.

Imposters pose as the source of a bright cloud of gas.

The week in science: 16–22 November 2018.

Official metal kilogram relinquishes its role to constants, but won’t yet retire — and more changes to scientific units are set to come.

If approved, divorce agreement will see the United Kingdom leave the European nuclear-regulation body — but many uncertainties remain for research.

Structures could help researchers to study the early stages of brain development disorders, including epilepsy.

Research is moving fast on the divisive genetic technology, which could help to eradicate diseases but also risks altering ecosystems in unpredictable ways.

Ice records pre-industrial levels of chemical that scrubs the atmosphere of greenhouses gases.

System tracks infrasound waves to determine when an eruption is imminent — and alerts the Italian government.

From Atlantic hurricanes to the Indian monsoons, storms are getting worse and becoming more erratic.

Technological advances are transforming what researchers can study at the atomic scale.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will founder unless they integrate quantum technologies, warn Aleksey K. Fedorov, Evgeniy O. Kiktenko and Alexander I. Lvovsky.

Huw Lewis-Jones reflects on how conceptualizing nature anew changed our relationship to it.

Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May’s latest collaboration is a stereoscopic delight, finds May Chiao.

Joanne Baker lauds a paean to the experimentalists of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Microsoft co-founder who established the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

Becoming a leader in a field you are passionate about can teach you crucial management skills and offer a support network outside of the lab.

Aeroplanes use propellers and turbines, and are typically powered by fossil-fuel combustion. An alternative method of propelling planes has been demonstrated that does not require moving parts or combustion.

Protein aggregation is a characteristic of several neurodegenerative diseases. But disease-associated aggregates of the protein TDP-43 have now been shown to have a beneficial role in healthy muscle.

The discovery of a mechanism that leads to cancer-therapy resistance highlights the many ways that tumour cells can adapt to survive — and reveals the limitations of categorizing patients by their gene mutations.

A strategy for using organic free radicals to make light-emitting diodes circumvents the constraints that limit the efficiency with which other organic LEDs convert electric current into light.

A nanometre-scale mechanism has been proposed to explain how bacteria improve their grip on human cells. The findings have implications for drug discovery, and might inspire biomimetic applications such as adhesives.

A high-quality genome sequence for the mosquito Aedes aegypti has now been assembled. The sequence will enable researchers to identify genes that could be targeted to keep mosquito populations at bay.

The phenomenon of ultralow friction between sliding incommensurate crystal surfaces—structural superlubricity—is examined, and the challenges and opportunities involved in its extension to the macroscale are assessed.

This Perspective discusses developments in LED-based solid-state lighting for physiological and agricultural applications, and the anticipated benefits in terms of health and productivity.

An improved, fully re-annotated Aedes aegypti genome assembly (AaegL5) provides insights into the sex-determining M locus, chemosensory systems that help mosquitoes to hunt humans and loci involved in insecticide resistance and will help to generate intervention strategies to fight this deadly disease vector.

Cytoplasmic, amyloid-like oligomeric assemblies that contain TDP-43 are increased in damaged tissues with elevated regeneration, thereby enhancing the possibility of amyloid fibre formation and/or aggregation of TDP-43 in disease.

Reversion of adult skeletal stem cells to a developmental state underlies the growth of new bone during jaw regeneration, in a process that relies on mechanotransduction via the focal adhesion kinase protein.

DYNLL1 antagonizes end resection of DNA double-strand breaks, thereby inhibiting homologous repair, and the loss of DYNLL1 correlates with poor progression-free survival of patients with BRCA1-mutant ovarian cancer.

A multi-qubit mixed-species register is used for repeated correlation measurements using conditional feedback to stabilize two-qubit subspaces and Bell states, achieving up to 50 sequential measurements with negligible crosstalk.

A solid-state propulsion system can sustain powered flight, as demonstrated by an electroaerodynamically propelled heavier-than-air aeroplane.

Organic light-emitting devices containing radical emitters can achieve an efficiency of 27 per cent at deep-red and infrared wavelengths based on the excitation of spin doublets, rather than singlet or triplet states.

After alloying with metal cations, a lead-free halide double perovskite shows stable performance and remarkably efficient white-light emission, with possible applications in lighting and display technologies.

Ordered oxygen complexes in high-entropy alloys enhance both strength and ductility in these compositionally complex solid solutions.

From 1901 to 2015, missing and disappeared glaciers produced a rise in sea level that may enable the historical budget for global-mean sea-level rise to be closed without recourse to an undiscovered physical process.

A phylogenetic assessment based on Raman microspectroscopy of pigment traces in fossilized eggshells from all major dinosaur clades reveals that eggshell coloration and pigment pattern originated in nonavian theropod dinosaurs.

New World hantaviruses—which cause a severe human respiratory disease—use surface glycoproteins to bind to the human protocadherin-1 protein and enter endothelial cells in vitro; depleting protocadherin-1 in Syrian golden hamsters largely protects against disease.

Tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4) is an enzyme co-factor that is involved in the nervous system; it is shown here to also function in T cell activation and proliferation, with roles in autoimmunity, allergic inflammation and cancer.

Mice with whole-body or liver-specific deletion of Atg7 release circulating arginase I and have reduced levels of serum arginine, which impairs the growth of allografted arginine-auxotrophic tumours.

POLAR, identified in a survey of the protein interactome of BRASSINOSTEROID INSENSITIVE 2 in Arabidopsis thaliana, has a key role in coordinating cell polarity and enabling asymmetric cell division.

An immunoprecipitation-based protocol is developed to analyse DNA methylation in small quantities of circulating cell-free DNA, and can detect and classify cancers in plasma samples from several tumour types.

The carboxy terminus of human UDP-α-d-glucose-6-dehydrogenase is structurally disordered, but has sequence-independent effects on the conformation of the enzyme and binding of an allosteric inhibitor, suggesting a reason for the persistence of intrinsically disordered peptide segments in the proteome.