Volume 565 Issue 7738, 10 January 2019

A series of steps shows hope for improving treatments.

Nature backs the Enabling FAIR Data initiative and requires authors to deposit data in community repositories.

The scientific community’s response to the CRISPR twins should not pre-empt broader discussion across society, warns J. Benjamin Hurlbut.

Rate of nation’s forest loss closely tracks the price of rubber on world markets.

How pilot whales know who’s an insider and who’s an outsider.

Hawaiian peaks host icy pockets year-round, but the cold spots are at risk from climate change.

An infusion of antibody-producing cells from the intestine tamps down neurological symptoms in mice.

Some 85 million years ago, an apex predator chomped on a flying reptile.

Gel sheets immersed in liquid could crawl forward like inchworms.

The same geological processes that formed the oldest continents gave shape to what some consider the youngest.

The week in science: 4–10 January 2019.

Space missions can continue to collect data, but thousands of federal researchers are forced to stay at home without pay.

Close-up images from NASA’s New Horizons probe show that space rock has two distinct lobes.

Erratic motion of north magnetic pole forces experts to update model that aids global navigation.

Researchers in Nigeria are combining genomics and conventional breeding to improve the starchy staple crop.

Chang’e-4 has sent back its first images and deployed a craft to the lunar surface.

Nick Sireau’s quest to give his sons weedkiller could help thousands struggling with rare genetic conditions.

Set up an international platform to share data and experiences, and coordinate industrial policies and trade to conserve resources and energy, urge Yong Geng, Joseph Sarkis and Raimund Bleischwitz.

Sharon Glotzer enjoys a riveting tale of derring-do in materials science.

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

Lasers have long held allure for physics, the military and science fiction, finds Luke Fleet.

Nature’s 2018 mentoring awards focus on supportive senior researchers in the US South.

Personalized recommendations and a solid science background are crucial, say Ruth Gotian and Ushma S. Neill.

A technique called reverberation mapping has previously been used to probe the structure of matter around supermassive black holes. Observations suggest that this technique can also be applied to much smaller black holes.

A computational strategy has delivered a redesigned, more stable version of a cytokine protein that mimics the natural protein’s interactions with receptors, opening the way for designer cytokine-based therapeutics.

Scenarios have been discovered in which it is impossible to prove whether or not a machine-learning algorithm could solve a particular problem. This finding might have implications for both established and future learning algorithms.

Some fat cells convert energy into heat, so targeting them to induce weight loss is appealing. The discovery that a subset of the cells burns glucose, rather than both glucose and lipids, could improve our ability to do just that.

A technically challenging analysis has revealed the physical properties of a mineral at pressures and temperatures as high as those in Earth’s mantle. The findings have implications for our understanding of Earth’s deep interior.

How Nature reported psychometric testing in 1919, and its own hundredth anniversary in 1969.

Clinical trials reveal that personalized vaccines can boost immune-cell responses to brain tumours that don’t usually respond to immunotherapy. The findings also point to how to improve such treatments.

Probing the local response of an integer quantum Hall system enables three different measures of its topology to be explored.

The mouse develops a developmentally and functionally distinct, non-canonical beige fat cell type as an adaptation to cold ambient temperature.

A hyper-stable de novo protein mimic of interleukin-2 computationally designed to not interact with a regulatory T-cell specific receptor subunit has improved therapeutic activity in mouse models of melanoma and colon cancer.

The cryo-electron microscopy structure of human γ-secretase in complex with its substrate Notch reveals pronounced structural rearrangements compared to the apo enzyme, including formation of a β-sheet involving residues from both enzyme and substrate.

X-ray observations of the evolution of a black-hole transient suggest a shrinkage of its corona, rather than a change in the inner edge of the accretion disk.

Photometry and parallax data from the Gaia satellite provide direct observational evidence of a theoretically predicted pile-up in the cooling sequence of white dwarfs, which is associated with core crystallization.

Observations at millimetre wavelengths reveal a young protostar surrounded by a disk with two differently tilted regions.

Femtosecond time-resolved X-ray diffraction reveals that in the ultrafast demagnitization of ferromagnetic iron, about 80% of the angular momentum lost from the spins is transferred to the lattice on a sub-picosecond timescale.

A new metal–organic framework has several conformational degrees of freedom that can be modified by the external chemical environment to change the structure and trigger the uptake of a guest molecule.

In situ high-pressure and high-temperature measurements of the sound velocity of CaSiO₃ perovskite suggest accumulation of basaltic crust in the Earth’s uppermost lower mantle.

Analyses of over 700,000 satellite images to map the global extent of tidal flats over the past thirty years, and enable assessments of the status and likely future trajectories of these coastal ecosystems.

Climate-driven periodicity of flowstone accretion between 3.2 and 1.3 million years ago in Cradle of Humankind caves reveals that the presence of hominin fossils reflects accumulation in open caves during intermittent, substantially drier phases.

Isolates of the Vibrio cholerae O1 serotype Ogawa from Yemen are from a single sublineage of the seventh pandemic El Tor (7PET) lineage and are susceptible to several commonly used antibiotics as well as to polymyxins.

Neoantigen-targeting vaccines are a feasible therapy for tumours with a low mutation burden and immunologically ‘cold’ tumour microenvironment, as neoantigen-specific T cells from the peripheral blood migrate into intracranial glioblastoma, thereby altering the immune milieu of the glioblastoma.

In a phase I trial, highly individualized peptide vaccines against unmutated tumour antigens and neoepitopes elicited sustained responses in CD8⁺ and CD4⁺ T cells, respectively, in patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma.

In a mouse model of ischaemic stroke, regulatory T cells infiltrate the injured brain in response to the chemokines CCL1 and CCL20 and suppress excessive astrogliosis via the production of amphiregulin.

Allele-specific single-cell RNA sequencing provides insights into transcription kinetics, with data indicating that core promoter sequences affect burst size, whereas enhancers mainly affect burst frequency.