Volume 570 Issue 7760, 13 June 2019

Expert elicitation draws on diverse specialists to synthesize conflicting views and evidence.

Funders should award competitive grants directly to journals to underwrite the costs of open access, urges Adriano Aguzzi.

A deep-learning program predicts whether an actor’s most productive year lies ahead or has already passed.

Brazilian mountains haven’t eroded and could be the oldest surface land on Earth.

Researchers screening potentially valuable enzymes ditch a time-consuming step.

Areas where water supplies are stretched thinnest are clustered in Asia and North America.

Ultra-high-resolution models of a black hole confirm a hypothesis proposed more than 40 years ago.

Odd chunks of dough might have had a ceremonial purpose.

Pachyderms use their trunks to discriminate between two hidden food piles of unequal size.

The week in science: 7–13 June 2019.

The proposal follows a Chinese scientist who claimed to have created twins from edited embryos last year.

A French court has ordered the return of 45 dinosaur and animal fossils to Brazil, and will soon rule on the fate of a spectacular pterosaur skeleton.

The policy also requires an ethics review for any grant applications to the US National Institutes of Health that involve fetal tissue.

Since 1900, nearly 3 species of seed-bearing plants have disappeared per year ― 500 times faster than they would naturally.

A German–Russian mission called SRG will detect millions of supermassive black holes, many new to science, and hundreds of thousands of stars.

More-human than mice, the world’s tiniest primates may just have what it takes to become the next top model organism.

Gather scientific evidence on the feasibility and risks of marine geoengineering to guide regulation of research, advise Philip Boyd and Chris Vivian.

How much have aerosol particles slowed warming? Joyce Penner sets out priorities for a coordinated campaign of observations and modelling.

Ted Nield mulls over an ambitious opus on the sixth element.

Can artificial intelligence crack long-standing puzzles in art history? David Adam finds out.

Sharon Weinberger commends a book on how a film inspired the United States to develop technology to capture everyone’s every move.

Seven researchers discuss the challenges posed by science’s embrace of one global language.

Chromosomal abnormalities are a hallmark of many types of human cancer, but it has been difficult to observe such changes in living cells and to study how they arise. Progress is now being made on this front.

Measurements of atmospheric ozone levels taken during the nineteenth century cast doubt on the computational models used today to simulate the atmosphere. An independent proxy of past ozone levels offers reassurance.

Fibroblast cells promote the development of rheumatoid arthritis. The finding that two distinct fibroblast populations affect different aspects of the disease in mice has implications for efforts to develop clinical treatments.

Humans reached the Americas from northeastern Siberia during the last ice age. Genomic analyses of ancient and modern individuals reveal the history of the peoples who have populated these regions.

Only a few types of natural amino-acid residue are used directly by enzymes to catalyse reactions. The incorporation of an unnatural residue into an enzyme shows how the catalytic repertoire of enzymes can be enlarged.

One type of CRISPR–Cas bacterial-defence system destroys phage and bacterial RNA, which leads to bacterial dormancy. Dormancy is found to limit viral spread, and also protects against unrelated viruses and viral mutants.

This Perspective discusses the challenges associated with the prediction of chemical synthesis, in particular the reaction conditions required for organic transformations, and the role of machine-learning approaches in the prediction process.

Analyses of 34 ancient genomes from northeastern Siberia, dating to between 31,000 and 600 years ago, reveal at least three major migration events in the late Pleistocene population history of the region.

Fine-scale estimates of the prevalence of HIV in adults across sub-Saharan Africa reveal substantial within-country variation and local differences in both the direction and rate of change in the prevalence of HIV between 2000 and 2017.

Cryo-electron microscopy and mutation experiments demonstrate that the inactive SHMT2 dimer—and not the pyridoxal-5′-phosphate-bound tetramer—binds to BRISC, which reveals a mechanism for the regulation of deubiquitylases and inflammatory signalling.

Experiment overturns Bohr’s view of quantum jumps, demonstrating that they possess a degree of predictability and when completed are continuous, coherent and even deterministic.

Bose–Einstein condensates are transported at hypersonic speeds over a distance of 15 cm in a neutral-atom accelerator ring while preserving their internal coherence.

Recombination of excitons to produce molecular light emission is made more efficient by controlling electron spin within the molecule to produce spin-triplet excitons only, without the usual accompanying spin-singlet excitons.

Unstructured light controls the elastic monopole moments of nematic liquid-crystal colloidal particles and switches them to quadrupoles, with like-charged monopoles attracting and oppositely charged ones repelling, enabling reconfigurable dynamic self-assembly.

A hydrolytic enzyme with a non-canonical organocatalytic mechanism was generated by introducing N_δ-methylhistidine into a designed active site using engineered translation components, allowing optimization of enzyme performance using laboratory evolution.

Isotope data from polar firn and ice are used to constrain the increase in tropospheric ozone between 1850 and 2005 ad.

Broadening activation energy distributions and increasing radiocarbon ages reveal the global importance of mineral protection in promoting organic carbon preservation.

Morphological, ultrastructural and spectroscopic analyses identify a fungal affinity for microfossils in shale from Arctic Canada, which pushes back the date for this kingdom to 1,010–890 million years ago.

DNA analysis of ancient individuals and modern populations suggests that the population history of North America can be explained by the admixture of two ancestral lineages—Palaeo-Eskimos and First Peoples.

The RNA-cleaving Cas13 degrades both host and bacteriophage transcripts, thereby rendering infected cells dormant and broadly resistant to phage-mediated lysis.

Distinct subsets of fibroblasts, which differ in their expression of thymus cell antigen 1 (THY1), are responsible for inflammation and tissue damage in mouse models of arthritis.

The cryo-electron microscopy structure of the bacteriophage ɸ6 dsRNA genome shows that the genome is packaged in a spooled manner that is more similar to dsDNA viruses than to other dsRNA viruses.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the herpesvirus capsid including the viral genome reveal ordered DNA structures and structural features of the capsid that suggest possible mechanisms for viral genome encapsidation.