Volume 569 Issue 7754, 2 May 2019

Soumya Swaminathan explains how the World Health Organization’s new science division can promote universal health coverage in all countries.

The violent storm dropped more than 1 metre of rain at one site in Puerto Rico in 24 hours.

Mutation map offers clues that could help scientists to characterize tumours.

Surface tension between an oil droplet and surrounding liquid helps droplet to defy gravity.

Modifying a T-cell receptor eliminates the serious side effects of an immunotherapy.

Meerkats help all those around them, regardless of the strength of familial ties.

Quantum dots help to make entangled photons with high efficiency.

Prehistoric faeces found in Texas includes scales, bones and a fang.

The week in science: 26 April–2 May 2019.

The virus is not harmful to humans, but is taking a huge economic toll on the pork industry.

The RTS,S vaccine is up to 40% effective at preventing malaria in young children.

LIGO and Virgo observatories have spotted ripples from what could be the first-ever detection of this long-sought event.

Jawbone from China reveals that the ancient human was widespread across the world — and lived at surprising altitude.

Next-generation mobile technology could interfere with crucial satellite-based Earth observations.

The Belt and Road Initiative, China’s mega-plan for global infrastructure, will transform the lives and work of tens of thousands of researchers.

Researchers are turning to China for support and collaboration as their countries take centre stage in the Belt and Road Initiative.

Transitioning to a low-carbon world will create new rivalries, winners and losers, argue Andreas Goldthau, Kirsten Westphal and colleagues.

The sudden collapse of thawing soils in the Arctic might double the warming from greenhouse gases released from tundra, warn Merritt R. Turetsky and colleagues.

Stuart Kauffman’s provocative take on emergence and evolution energizes Sara Imari Walker.

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

Amelia Hennighausen extols a tome on how ever-evolving photography has captured the glory of scientific phenomena.

Philosopher who crafted governance for embryo research.

Researchers share their tips for working in environments with unreliable infrastructure.

Without a national paid family-leave policy, some researchers are struggling at crucial career phases.

Some bacteria use multiprotein complexes to inject proteins into host cells. Components of these complexes have been linked to a nanotube-mediated route from host cells to bacteria that might provide food for disease-causing microbes.

A robust computational approach with added finesse provides evidence to support the view that the Sino-Tibetan languages arose in northern China and began to split into branches about 5,900 years ago.

Early life forms established a network of reactions for converting carbon dioxide into organic compounds. A non-biological system of reactions that could have formed the network’s core on ancient Earth has been reported.

The neutron-rich nickel nucleus ⁷⁸Ni is difficult to excite and, once excited, has competing spherical and deformed shapes. These intriguing properties make ⁷⁸Ni a valuable testing ground for nuclear theory.

How Nature reported evidence of geological activity on the Moon in 1969, and the crippling effects of a freak snowstorm in 1919.

The impact of climate change on biodiversity is a pressing concern. A study now combines experimental data with careful modelling to compare the vulnerability to warming of animal species on land and in the ocean.

A spectroscopic study of ⁷⁸Ni confirms its doubly magic nature and reveals it as a stronghold beyond which the magic numbers 28 and 50 break down because of competing deformation.

Multiple observational datasets and reconstructions using data from tree rings confirm that human activities were probably affecting the worldwide risk of droughts as early as at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Single-cell-based imaging and sequencing approaches are used to characterize organoid development and the intestinal regeneration process, which is driven by transient activation of YAP1.

The lipid transporter FATP2 reprograms neutrophils to polymorphonuclear myeloid-derived suppressor cells by mediating the uptake of arachidonic acid and promoting the synthesis of prostaglandin E₂.

Identification of the changes that converted a transposase to a recombinase sheds light on the evolution of the vertebrate adaptive immune system.

Actinides in the early Solar System could have originated in the merger of two neutron stars about 300 parsecs away.

Evidence is found for phase-tunable Majorana zero modes in scalable two-dimensional Josephson junctions produced by top-down fabrication.

Majorana bound states are created in a two-dimensional architecture by confining Majorana channels within a planar Josephson junction, using the phase difference across the junction and an in-plane magnetic field.

Bulk metallic glasses made from alloys of iridium, nickel, tantalum and boron are developed by combinatorial methods, with higher strength at high temperature than those previously produced.

A chemical reaction network that overlaps with the biological Krebs and glyoxylate cycles arises from pyruvate and glyoxylate in the presence of iron, suggesting how early metabolic pathways might have arisen from CO₂.

Comparisons across terrestrial and marine ectotherms reveal that marine species experience temperatures closer to their upper thermal limits, and that local extirpations related to warming are more common in the ocean.

Divergence estimates from phylogenetic analyses of 109 languages of the Sino-Tibetan family support a model in which this family originates in the Yellow River basin of northern China.

A critical period for social reward learning in mice, which closes at maturity, can be reopened by MDMA-mediated upregulation of oxytocin-dependent plasticity.

Single-cell transcriptome profiling reveals the presence in the intestinal crypt of revival stem cells, which give rise to crypt-base columnar cells and are essential for repair of the intestinal epithelium following injury.

Immune responses in the gut and associated draining lymph nodes differ between tolerogenic and inflammatory depending on their anatomical location.

A systematic proteomic investigation of disease mediators secreted by pancreatic stellate cells identifies leukaemia inhibitory factor (LIF) as a key factor that acts on cancer cells, promoting tumour progression and chemoresistance.

Genetic deletion of mammalian chromatin remodelling complexes reveals that ISWI and SWI/SNF are required for binding of specific transcription factors and that ISWI regulates nucleosome positioning and nuclear organization in stem cells.

Cryo-electron microscopy reveals three conformations of the serotonin transporter in complex with ibogaine, detailing the structural rearrangements that occur between the different stages of its transport cycle.