Volume 566 Issue 7744, 21 February 2019

Small teams might be more likely to produce ‘disruptive research’, but science needs a wide range of group sizes to truly flourish.

Australian chief scientist Alan Finkel calls for formal action to bake in better research practices.

Methods that would minimize suffering were chosen to kill people found in peat bogs.

Tree-planting campaigns and crop expansion in the planet’s most populous nation are driving an expansion in leaf coverage.

Offspring are shown to the best bat boxes and tree holes, but receive no assistance when it comes to self-catering.

An entire mountainside came crashing down after a devastating earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province.

The bacterial content of breast milk differs between mothers who pump and those who nurse.

A modular probe can be programmed to travel to a precise cellular destination.

Dust particles might have given rise to the cosmic grains of an everyday seasoning.

The week in science: 15–21 February 2019.

Abandoned projects and delayed research have become common problems as security issues crop up across the country.

Scientists on board German research icebreaker Polarstern hope to observe underwater ecosystem changing in real-time.

A planned US$35-million upgrade could enable LIGO to spot one black-hole merger per hour by the mid-2020s.

Innovation ministry’s decision to issue grant call using money meant for Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ operations sparks protests.

Researchers say the policy could intensify existing issues with research quality and misconduct.

Planes and airships that can soar through the stratosphere could enable new approaches to research.

As leader of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, Chikwe Ihekweazu works to protect the nation — and the world — from devastating outbreaks.

Manage methane emissions and produce clean, cheap energy at the same time, argues Mike Muller.

Viruses hold solutions to a lot of problems, so let’s fund and reward cataloguing, urge Jens H. Kuhn and colleagues.

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder welcomes a study on Darwinian solutions to social issues.

In the nineteenth century, reform at the ancient university came from an unexpected source. Georgina Ferry enjoys its history.

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

Six female researchers discuss how they overcame social and financial obstacles in science and engineering.

Hippocamp, a previously undetected moon of Neptune, has a peculiar location and a tiny size relative to the planet’s other inner moons, which suggests a violent history for the region within 100,000 kilometres of the planet.

The link between sleep and cardiovascular disease is poorly understood. Findings in mice now show that disrupted sleep causes the brain to signal the bone marrow to boost white blood cell production, damaging blood vessels.

The application of a new citation metric prompts a reassessment of the relationship between the size of scientific teams and research impact, and calls into question the trend to emphasize ‘big team’ science.

How Nature reported the roles of birds in the First World War, and a resurgent kanagaroo population in 1968.

The structure of a neutron or a proton is modified when the particle is bound in an atomic nucleus. Experimental data suggest an explanation for this phenomenon that could have broad implications for nuclear physics.

To survive and divide, cancer cells need a constant supply of lipid molecules called monounsaturated fatty acids. Tumours can achieve this by an unsuspected route that harnesses a metabolic pathway also used in hair follicles.

A treatment called eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing alleviates post-traumatic stress disorder through enigmatic mechanisms. A study in mice offers potential clues into the biological basis of this approach.

Early-stage cancerous growths can look similar under the microscope, and whether they will form an invasive tumour is hard to predict. Genomic profiles of these growths in the human lung now enable such a prediction to be made.

Bilateral sensory stimulation, which is used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in humans, alleviates fear memory in mice through a circuit involving the superior colliculus and the medial thalamus.

The transcription factor PU.1 is an essential regulator of the pro-fibrotic gene expression program in fibroblasts; PU.1 expression is upregulated in various fibrotic diseases, whereas inactivation of PU.1 induces regression of fibrosis in a number of organs.

Hubble Space Telescope observations of the seventh inner moon of Neptune, Hippocamp, show that it is smaller than the other six, orbits near Proteus and probably originates from a fragment of Proteus.

Simultaneous high-precision measurements of the EMC effect and short-range correlated abundances for several nuclei reveal a universal modification of the structure of nucleons in short-range correlated neutron–proton pairs.

Waveguide quantum electrodynamics is used to couple a single collective excitation of an atomic array to a nanoscale waveguide; the excitation is stored and later read out, generating guided single photons on demand.

Scanning tunnelling microscopy shows that 1D channels between quantum Hall states with different valley polarization are metallic or insulating depending on constraints imposed on electron–electron interaction by valley flavour.

Integration of an ultrafast flexible rectifier made from a two-dimensional material with a flexible antenna achieves wireless energy harvesting of Wi-Fi radiation, which could power future flexible electronic systems.

Complex networks are used to analyse global-scale teleconnections between extreme-rainfall events, revealing a peak in the distance distribution of statistically significant connections at around 10,000 kilometres.

Analyses of the output produced by large versus small teams of researchers and innovators demonstrate that their work differs systematically in the extent to which it disrupts or develops existing science and technology.

The fragmentation of sleep in Apoe^−/− mice induces monocytosis and accelerated atherosclerosis due to a reduction in hypocretin that otherwise restricts bone marrow CSF1 availability.

Analyses at single-cell resolution show that diverse subtypes of microglia exist during development and homeostasis of the central nervous system, and identify specific subsets of microglia associated with demyelination and neurodegenerative disease in mice and humans.

A genetic study of the baseline human antibody repertoire, based on the circulating B cell populations of ten subjects, reveals universally shared antibody clonotypes within repertoires that are largely unique to the individual.

Many clonotypes in human B cell repertoires are shared, including between adult and umbilical cord blood repertoires, which indicates that this similarity is not driven only by exposure to common antigens.

In several human and mouse cancer cell lines and carcinomas, a sapienate biosynthesis pathway underpins metabolic plasticity by allowing these cells to bypass stearoyl-CoA desaturase-dependent fatty acid desaturation.

The motility of dynein towards the minus end of the microtubule is controlled by the length and angle of the coiled-coil stalk that connects the motor to the microtubule.

The structure of NDH, a photosynthetic membrane-protein complex that is related to respiratory complex I, is obtained by single-particle cryo-electron microscopy.