Volume 575 Issue 7781, 7 November 2019

Volume 575 Issue 7781

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150 years of Nature

This issue marks the 150th anniversary of Nature — the first issue was published on 4 November 1869. The cover image visualizes the co-citation network for the journal. More than 88,000 papers published by Nature since 1900 are each represented by a dot, coloured by discipline. Papers are linked if another scientific paper cites both; the dot size reflects the number of these co-citation links. The complex network reveals the relationships between papers and captures the multidisciplinary scope of the journal. The story of key papers is revealed in a video, and a fully interactive version of this network can be explored at go.nature.com/n150int.

Design: Alice Grishchenko, Mauro Martino (IBM Research), Claire Welsh. Data analysis: Alexander Gates, Qing Ke, Onur Varol, Albert-László Barabási (BarabasiLab 2019).

150 years of Nature

This Week

News in Focus

Books & Arts

Opinion

Work

    Technology Feature

    • Where I Work

  • Where I Work |

    As a scientific glassblower, Terri Adams commands a workshop that is filled with tools for crafting bespoke scientific glass apparatus.

    • Sarah Boon

Research

    News & Views

  • News & Views |

    Arrays of nanoscale magnets have been constructed to form the magnetized panels of microscopic robots — thus allowing magnetic fields to be used to control the robots’ shape and movement.

    • Xuanhe Zhao
    •  & Yoonho Kim

  • News & Views |

    A better understanding of the genetic changes that enable cancers to spread is crucial. A comprehensive study of whole-genome sequences from metastatic cancer will help researchers to achieve this goal.

    • Jillian F. Wise
    •  & Michael S. Lawrence

  • News & Views |

    Atomic physicists and nuclear physicists have each made a refined measurement of the radius of the proton. Both values agree with a hotly debated result obtained by spectroscopy of an exotic form of hydrogen called muonic hydrogen.

    • Jean-Philippe Karr
    •  & Dominique Marchand

    • Insight

    • Reviews

  • Review Article |

    Structural metals enable improved energy efficiency through their reduced mass, higher thermal stability and better mechanical properties; here, methods of improving the sustainability of structural metals, from recycling to contaminant tolerance, are described.

    • Dierk Raabe
    • , C. Cem Tasan
    •  & Elsa A. Olivetti

    Collection:

  • Review Article |

    Genetic strategies for improving the yield and sustainability of agricultural crops, and the resilience of crops in the face of biotic and abiotic stresses contingent on projected climate change, are evaluated.

    • Julia Bailey-Serres
    • , Jane E. Parker
    •  & Julian I. Schroeder

    Collection:

    • Perspectives

    • Articles

  • Article |

    A magnetic-spectrometer-free method for electron–proton scattering data reveals a proton charge radius 2.7 standard deviations smaller than the currently accepted value from electron–proton scattering, yet consistent with other recent experiments.

    • W. Xiong
    • , A. Gasparian
    •  & Z. W. Zhao

  • Article |

    A carrier-resolved photo-Hall technique is developed to extract properties of both majority and minority carriers simultaneously and determine the critical parameters of semiconductor materials under light illumination.

    • Oki Gunawan
    • , Seong Ryul Pae
    •  & Byungha Shin

  • Article |

    Transport and scanning tunnelling microscopy studies of freestanding monolayers of an unconventional layered copper oxide establish that the superconducting properties of copper oxides are not changed in the 2D limit.

    • Yijun Yu
    • , Liguo Ma
    •  & Yuanbo Zhang

  • Article |

    A micromachine less than 100 micrometres across, made of arrays of nanomagnets on hinged panels, is encoded with multiple shape transformations  and actuated with a magnetic field.

    • Jizhai Cui
    • , Tian-Yun Huang
    •  & Laura J. Heyderman

  • Article |

    A new strong, biocompatible and biodegradable double-sided tape can adhere to wet tissues and devices through a mechanism involving rapid water removal from the surface, swift hydrogen and electrostatic interactions, and covalent bonding.

    • Hyunwoo Yuk
    • , Claudia E. Varela
    •  & Xuanhe Zhao

  • Article |

    Emission of methane from ‘point sources’—small surface features or infrastructure components—is monitored with an airborne spectrometer, identifying possible targets for mitigation efforts.

    • Riley M. Duren
    • , Andrew K. Thorpe
    •  & Charles E. Miller

  • Article |

    Analyses of mitochondrial genomes from populations in southern Africa provide evidence of a southern African origin of anatomically modern humans and a sustained occupation of the homeland before the first migrations of people appear to be driven by regional climate shifts.

    • Eva K. F. Chan
    • , Axel Timmermann
    •  & Vanessa M. Hayes

    Collection:

  • Article |

    A model demonstrates that people who eventually succeed and those who do not may initially appear similar, but are characterized by fundamentally distinct failure dynamics in terms of the efficiency and quality of each subsequent attempt to succeed.

    • Yian Yin
    • , Yang Wang
    •  & Dashun Wang

  • Article |

    Using mouse lines in which subsets of neurons are genetically labelled, the authors provide generalized anatomical rules for connections within and between the cortex and thalamus.

    • Julie A. Harris
    • , Stefan Mihalas
    •  & Hongkui Zeng

  • Article |

    Compounds that interact with mutant huntingtin and an autophagosomal protein are able to reduce cellular levels of mutant huntingtin by targeting it for autophagic degradation, demonstrating an approach that may have potential for treating proteopathies.

    • Zhaoyang Li
    • , Cen Wang
    •  & Boxun Lu

  • Article | | Open Access

    The mutational landscape of metastatic cancer genomes is analysed in a large-scale, pan-cancer study of metastatic solid tumours that includes whole-genome sequencing of 2,520 tumour–normal tissue pairs.

    • Peter Priestley
    • , Jonathan Baber
    •  & Edwin Cuppen

  • Article |

    An interbacterial defence strategy, involving clusters of immunity genes against toxins released by the type VI secretion system of the same or different species, is widespread among Bacteroides species, and transfer of these gene clusters confers resistance to toxins in vitro and in the mammalian gut.

    • Benjamin D. Ross
    • , Adrian J. Verster
    •  & Joseph D. Mougous

  • Article |

    Gastrointestinal stromal tumours can be initiated by gain-of-function mutations of the KIT or PDGFRA oncogenes but also by loss of the metabolic complex succinate dehydrogenase (SDH), which leads to DNA hypermethylation; this study shows that in SDH-deficient tumours, displacement of CTCF insulators by DNA methylation activates oncogene expression, illustrating how epigenetic alterations can drive oncogenic signalling in the absence of kinase mutations.

    • William A. Flavahan
    • , Yotam Drier
    •  & Bradley E. Bernstein

  • Article |

    The structure of the multiprotein Fanconi anaemia core complex, determined using cryo-electron microscopy and mass spectrometry, shows that the complex adopts an extended asymmetric structure and highlights the structural and functional asymmetry of the RING finger domains.

    • Shabih Shakeel
    • , Eeson Rajendra
    •  & Lori A. Passmore
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