Volume 571 Issue 7765, 18 July 2019

Unless governments establish competent monitoring systems, the world will not reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals, says Jessica Espey.

The cooling compound menthol sets a human protein to work, triggering a cellular cascade.

No other emerging pathogen is known to have jumped so frequently from species to species.

Evidence points to a supernova as the source of a dazzling object that telescopes spotted in 2018.

Clever strategy stops larvae being engulfed by a flood of sticky latex.

Devices detect dopamine as it ripples from one neuron to others nearby.

Samples from the Arctic track rising and falling levels of lead over two millennia.

Swivelling panels balance solar-energy generation and interior temperatures.

The week in science: 12–18 July 2019.

Scientists have paid tribute to Suzanne Eaton, whose body was discovered in a cave in Crete last week.

Hayabusa2 touched down on Ryugu to collect material from beneath the surface.

Triumph over five human opponents at Texas hold’em brings bots closer to solving complicated real-world problems.

The fossils provide the first clear example of group nesting activities in dinosaurs.

The government plans to build a monitoring network in the wake of a study that attributed a spike in an ozone-depleting chemical to two Chinese provinces.

Nearly a year after flames consumed Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, researchers are struggling to revive their work and resume their lives.

A giant data store quietly being built in India could free vast swathes of science for computer analysis — but is it legal?

Thin, flexible, wireless monitoring systems could make medicine more predictive and personalized, argue Shuai Xu, Arun Jayaraman and John A. Rogers.

On the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance icon’s death, Martin Kemp looks anew at his innovative experimental models for the motion of water and blood.

Jack Stilgoe applauds an alarming history of how safety rules have developed with — and in spite of — the automotive industry.

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

Planning ahead and staying flexible are key to coping with the unexpected.

An analysis of the record of sea surface temperature reveals that some climate variations that are thought to have occurred in the North Atlantic and the North Pacific oceans are an artefact of changes in measurement approaches.

A method for detecting mutations and measuring gene-expression levels in the same cell has enabled an investigation into the effects of mutations in a specific gene on the emergence of a form of blood cancer.

How Nature reported the barring of UK women from engineering in 1919, and a celebration of key advances from the industrial revolution.

The quantum interference of electrons that have been scattered by light has been used to produce holograms of the underlying electromagnetic fields — and might open up methods for studying materials at high temporal and spatial resolution.

Computational models that predict the selectivity of reactions are typically accurate for only a specific reaction type and a narrow range of reaction components. A more general model has now been reported.

An analysis of gene expression in sea-squirt embryos at different stages of development deepens our understanding of how the body plans of vertebrates might have evolved from those of less complex animals.

A method of tracking changes in estimates of the remaining carbon budget over time should help to reconcile differences between these estimates and clarify their usefulness for setting emission reduction targets.

A workflow for deriving statistical models of one set of reactions that can be used to predict related reactions is presented, facilitating catalyst and enantioselective reaction development.

Comprehensive single-cell transcriptomes in the proto-vertebrate Ciona intestinalis identified provisional gene networks for 41 different neural subtypes, providing insights into the swimming circuit of tadpoles and the evolution of the vertebrate telencephalon.

Profiling of over 38,000 CD34⁺ cells from patients with CALR-mutated myeloproliferative neoplasms, using the ‘Genotyping of Transcriptomes’ procedure, reveals that the transcriptional output of these mutations depends upon native cell identity.

Analysis of the encoding of natural images by very large populations of neurons in the visual cortex of awake mice characterizes the high dimensional geometry of the neural responses.

Cryo-EM structures of the yeast P4-ATPase Drs2p–Cdc50p in three different states of activation provide insights into the function of this lipid flippase, including mechanisms of autoinhibition and PI4P-dependent activation.

A fast, high-fidelity two-qubit exchange gate between phosphorus donor electron spin qubits in silicon is demonstrated by creating a tunable exchange interaction between two electrons bound to phosphorus atom qubits.

The so-called pseudogap phase in hole-doped cuprate superconductors is associated with an unusually large thermal Hall effect that attains unprecedented levels as the parent Mott insulator is approached.

A ten-gram insect-inspired robot capable of crawling, walking, jumping, somersaulting and performing collective tasks is built from low-cost, assembly-free components, demonstrating its scalability for collective applications with expanded mobility.

A solution-based living annulative π-extension polymerization technique produces graphene nanoribbons with simultaneous control over their length, width and edges, resulting in the synthesis of graphene nanoribbon block copolymers.

Correction of oddities in the historical record of sea surface temperatures reveals that some basin-wide climate variations were an artefact of systematic biases that stem, in part, from Japanese records being truncated to whole numbers when the records were digitized.

Ageing-associated decline in intestinal stem cell function is mediated by increased Notum, a protein inhibitor of stemness-maintaining Wnt signalling, which is secreted by Paneth cells.

Genetic, pharmacological and metabolomics experiments reveal that the malate–aspartate shuttle and mitochondrial citrate export support the differentiation of mouse T helper 1 cells, whereas succinate dehydrogenase enforces their terminal effector function.

Mutations in the transcription factor FOXA1 that are common in prostate cancer result in gain-of-function effects that promote changes in the differentiation of tumour cells.

Comprehensive genomic analyses and mechanistic studies uncover three structural, functional and clinical classes of activating FOXA1 mutations and locus rearrangements in prostate cancer.

A technique known as scSLAM-seq that combines single-cell RNA sequencing with metabolic RNA labelling and nucleoside conversion is used to study the onset of cytomegalovirus infection in single mouse fibroblasts.

The cytosolic N⁶-methyladenosine (m⁶A)-binding proteins YTHDF1, YTHDF2 and YTHDF3 undergo liquid–liquid phase separation in vitro and in cells; this is enhanced by polymethylated mRNAs to form complexes that partition into different cellular phase-separated compartments.

Crystal and electron cryo-tomography structures of Mgm1 from Chaetomium thermophilum reveal that Mgm1 forms bent tetramers, which further assemble into helical filaments on both positively and negatively curved membranes.