Volume 565 Issue 7737, 3 January 2019

To make green investments pay off, policymakers must learn from past mistakes and stop subsidizing polluters, urges Edward B. Barbier.

The week in science.

LIGO’s Asian cousin will this year deploy ambitious technology to improve sensitivity in the search for these faint, cosmic ripples — but its biggest enemy could be snowmelt.

Government's response to the protests has led to funding cuts for universities and the firing of faculty members.

High-pressure hydrogen materials could be a step towards a new era of superconductivity.

Gene-editing, open access and a biosafety rethink are set to shape research.

Misaligned stacks of the wonder material exhibit superconductivity and other curious properties.

Tracking moisture, snow and meltwater across the ‘third pole’ will help communities to plan for climate change, argue Jing Gao and colleagues.

Food and the gut go on show, Angolan ‘sea monsters’ resurface and Alexander von Humboldt pops into focus. Nicola Jones reports.

As the cost of 3D printers tumbles, researchers have begun using them to make everything from bespoke equipment for experiments to realistic models of human organs.

Two studies reiterate that very few postdoctoral researchers land academic posts — and suggest that the skills postdocs learn are not sought by employers outside academia.

Roles on the screen largely reinforce the message that scientists are white men.

Female researchers’ scientific impact might be undervalued by citation metrics in some countries.

Many enzymatic processes involve a mechanism in which reaction intermediates are covalently attached to the enzyme’s active site. A strategy has been devised that enables mimics of these intermediates to be visualized.

Antibodies have been engineered to recognize diverse strains of influenza, including both the A and B types of virus that cause human epidemics. Are we moving closer to achieving ‘universal’ protection against all flu strains?

Methane produced in sediments beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is released to the atmosphere by meltwater in the summer. This suggests that glacial melt could be an important global source of this greenhouse gas.

In materials called Weyl semimetals, electrons form structures that have distinct topological properties. The discovery of an ultrafast switch between two of these structures could have many practical applications.

The signalling molecule nitric oxide protects the kidneys by reprogramming metabolism, and its levels are regulated by a two-component system in mice. These findings identify new targets for drug discovery.

A scalable spintronic device operating via spin–orbit transduction and magnetoelectric switching and using advanced quantum materials shows non-volatility and improved performance and energy efficiency compared with CMOS devices.

Deletion of the A-to-I double-stranded RNA-editing enzyme ADAR1 sensitizes tumour cells to immunotherapy.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures and dynamics of a substrate-engaged human 26S proteasome reveal in atomic detail three principal modes of coordinated ATP hydrolysis that regulate different steps in the degradation of a ubiquitylated protein.

Direct observation of incommensurate spin correlations in doped and spin-imbalanced Hubbard chains confirms two fundamental predictions for Luttinger liquids and shows that such correlations are suppressed by interchain coupling.

Terahertz light pulses induce transitions between a topological and a trivial phase in the Weyl semimetal WTe₂ through an interlayer shear strain.

Evolved iron-containing enzymes based on cytochrome P450 achieve selective intermolecular alkylation of sp³ C–H bonds through a carbene C–H insertion strategy.

Subglacially produced methane of microbial origin is flushed to the ice margin of the Greenland ice sheet by meltwater, contributing to a previously unaccounted for methane flux to the atmosphere.

The distinctive ²⁰Ne/²²Ne ratio in material thought to come from deep mantle plumes provides evidence for nebular gas as a source of volatiles in Earth’s interior.

Levallois stone-tool technology found at the Guanyindong Cave site in southwest China was dated to approximately 170,000–80,000 years ago, which is much earlier than previously thought.

In mice, the ablation of spinal neurons that co-express TAC1 and LBX1 leads to the loss of coping responses to sustained pain without affecting reflexive defensive reactions to external threats.

Misexpression of the sperm-cell-expressed transcription factor BABY BOOM1 in the rice egg cell induces embryo development without fertilization, establishing the feasibility of asexual reproduction in crops and potentially enabling the clonal propagation of hybrids through seeds.

AKR1A1-regulated protein S-nitrosylation protects against kidney injury through PKM2-mediated metabolic reprogramming.

Phenotypically, transcriptionally and metabolically diverse subsets of T_H17 cells develop in a chronic autoimmune disease: one subset has inferred stemness features and low anabolic metabolism, while a reciprocal subset has higher metabolic activity that supports transdifferentiation into T_H1 cells.

Computational design incorporating modular buried hydrogen networks produces highly orthogonal protein heterodimers.

A method for encoding the non-canonical amino acid 2,3-diaminopropionate into proteins allows key acyl intermediates in the biosynthesis of valinomycin to be trapped, providing insight into the oligomerization and cyclization reactions involved.

A subnanometre-resolution cryo-electron microscopy structure of the Rh5–CyRPA–Ripr complex of Plasmodium falciparum provides insights into how this ligand interacts with the receptor basigin in erythrocyte hosts.