Editorials
A European plan to commercialize quantum technologies needs a bold goal.
doi: 10.1038/533145b
The safe use of medicines during breastfeeding is not an easy topic to study, but new parents deserve better information on the risks and benefits.
doi: 10.1038/533145a
Scientists should unite over electronic-cigarette regulation, or big tobacco will step in.
doi: 10.1038/533146a
News
A wave of user-friendly devices is making the technology an attractive research tool.
doi: 10.1038/533153a
Huge study uncovers 74 genetic markers that influence the number of years spent in education.
doi: 10.1038/533154a
Scholars excited by depiction of actual objects on the body of a 3,000-year-old woman.
doi: 10.1038/nature.2016.19864
Scientists fear that security-driven switch to X-ray irradiators will harm their research.
doi: 10.1038/533156a
Thierry Mandon on cutting red tape, French researchers’ self-effacement and shaking up social science.
doi: 10.1038/nature.2016.19868
Document submitted to the Italian Senate criticizes institute that will oversee a €1.5-billion project.
doi: 10.1038/533158a
News Features
The geneticist built a career studying aspects of sex that make some people uncomfortable. Now things are getting uncomfortable for him.
doi: 10.1038/533160a
As cyberattacks grow ever more sophisticated, those who defend against them are embracing behavioural science and economics to understand both the perpetrators and their victims.
doi: 10.1038/533164a
News & Views
The early stages of human development are normally hidden within the womb, but improved techniques for culturing embryos from the blastocyst stage promise to make these steps easier to investigate. See Letter p.251
doi: 10.1038/nature17894
If organic molecules were trees, then the numerous carbon–hydrogen bonds within them would be leaves. A catalyst that targets one 'leaf' out of many similar other ones looks set to be a huge leap for synthetic chemistry. See Letter p.230
doi: 10.1038/533183a
Ashes of ancient meteors recovered from a 2.7-billion-year-old lake bed imply that the upper atmosphere was rich in oxygen at a time when all other evidence implies that the atmosphere was oxygen-free. See Letter p.235
doi: 10.1038/533184a
Emergent quanta of momentum and charge, called quasiparticles, govern many of the properties of materials. The development of a quasiparticle collider promises to reveal fundamental insights into these peculiar entities. See Letter p.225
doi: 10.1038/533186a
Describing the motion of three or more bodies under the influence of gravity is one of the toughest problems in astronomy. The report of solutions to a large subclass of the four-body problem is truly remarkable.
doi: 10.1038/nature17896
Analysis of a sensory neural circuit in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans reveals that its wiring is sex-specific, and arises through the elimination of connections that are originally formed in both sexes. See Article p.206
doi: 10.1038/nature17898
Review
Palaeoclimatic evidence of monsoon rainfall dynamics across different regions and timescales suggests that monsoon systems exhibit substantial regional variation; meridional temperature gradients are a major driver of monsoon variability, but these gradients are influenced by other, interacting forcing mechanisms, making predictions of future changes in monsoon rainfall highly uncertain.
doi: 10.1038/nature17450
Articles
The genome sequence is presented for the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), providing information about a rediploidization following a salmonid-specific whole-genome duplication event that resulted in an autotetraploidization.
doi: 10.1038/nature17164
How sex-specific neuronal circuits are generated during development is poorly understood; here, sensory neurons are identified in the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans, which initially connect in both male- and hermaphrodite-specific patterns, but a specific subset of these connections is pruned by each sex upon sexual maturation to produce sex-specific connectivity patterns and dimorphic behaviours.
doi: 10.1038/nature17977
An analysis of bacterial community structure and antibiotic resistance gene content of interconnected human faecal and environmental samples from two low-income communities in Latin America was carried out using a combination of functional metagenomics, 16S sequencing and shotgun sequencing; resistomes across habitats are generally structured along ecological gradients, but key resistance genes can cross these boundaries, and the authors assessed the usefulness of excreta management protocols in the prevention of resistance gene dissemination.
doi: 10.1038/nature17672
Letters
Sunspots are cool areas caused by strong surface magnetic fields that inhibit convection. Moreover, strong magnetic fields can alter the average atmospheric structure, degrading our ability to measure stellar masses and ages. Stars that are more active than the Sun have more and stronger dark spots than does the Sun, including on the rotational pole. Doppler imaging, which has so far produced the most detailed images of surface structures on other stars, cannot always distinguish the hemisphere in which the starspots are located, especially in the equatorial region and if the data quality is not optimal. This leads to problems in investigating the north–south distribution of starspot active latitudes (those latitudes with more starspot activity); this distribution is a crucial constraint of dynamo theory. Polar spots, whose existence is inferred from Doppler tomography, could plausibly be observational artefacts. Here we report imaging of the old, magnetically active star ζ Andromedae using long-baseline infrared interferometry. In our data, a dark polar spot is seen in each of two observation epochs, whereas lower-latitude spot structures in both hemispheres do not persist between observations, revealing global starspot asymmetries. The north–south symmetry of active latitudes observed on the Sun is absent on ζ And, which hosts global spot patterns that cannot be produced by solar-type dynamos.
doi: 10.1038/nature17444
Three Earth-sized planets—receiving similar irradiation to Venus and Earth, and ideally suited for atmospheric study—have been found transiting a nearby ultracool dwarf star that has a mass of only eight per cent of that of the Sun.
doi: 10.1038/nature17448
A quasiparticle collider is developed that uses femtosecond optical pulses to create electron–hole pairs in the layered dichalcogenide tungsten diselenide, and a strong terahertz field to accelerate and collide the electrons with the holes.
doi: 10.1038/nature17958
The idea of carbon–hydrogen functionalization, in which C–H bonds are modified at will, represents a paradigm shift in the standard logic of organic synthesis; here, dirhodium catalysts are used to achieve highly site-selective, diastereoselective and enantioselective C–H functionalization of n-alkanes and terminally substituted n-alkyl compounds.
doi: 10.1038/nature17651
Evidence in support of low atmospheric oxygen concentrations on early Earth relates to the composition of the lower Archaean atmosphere; now the composition of fossil micrometeorites preserved in 2.7-billion-year-old rocks in Australia suggests that they were oxidized in an oxygen-rich Archaean upper atmosphere.
doi: 10.1038/nature17678
Models of thermochemical convection reveal flow patterns in the deep lower mantle under the north Pacific since 100 million years ago that explain how the enigmatic bend in the Hawaiian–Emperor hotspot track arose.
doi: 10.1038/nature17422
Here, 21-million-year-old fossils of a New World monkey from Panama are described, constituting the earliest known evidence for mammalian interchange between North and South America.
doi: 10.1038/nature17415
Signals recorded from motor cortex—through an intracortical implant—can be linked in real-time to activation of forearm muscles to restore movement in a paralysed human.
doi: 10.1038/nature17435
An in vitro model to study the early events that direct human embryo development after formation of the blastocyst and implantation in the uterine wall.
doi: 10.1038/nature17948
Little is known about cooperative behaviour among the gut microbiota; here, limited cooperation is demonstrated for Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, but Bacteroides ovatus is found to extracellularly digest a polysaccharide not for its own use, but to cooperatively feed other species such as Bacteroides vulgatus from which it receives return benefits.
doi: 10.1038/nature17626
Phosphorylation of the anaphase-promoting complex (APC/C) allows for its control by the co-activator Cdc20; a mechanism that has relevance to understanding the control of other large multimeric complexes by phosphorylation.
doi: 10.1038/nature17973
The adenosine A2A receptor, a class A G-protein-coupled receptor, exists as an ensemble of two inactive and two active states in equilibrium and is activated by conformational selection rather than induced fit.
doi: 10.1038/nature17668
The structure of the core region of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter (MCU) is determined by NMR and electron microscopy, revealing that MCU is a homo-pentamer with a specific transmembrane helix forming a hydrophilic pore across the membrane, and representing one of the largest membrane protein structures characterized by NMR spectroscopy.
doi: 10.1038/nature17656
The X-ray crystal structure of the transmembrane portion of the human glucagon receptor, a class B G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR), is solved in the presence of the antagonist MK-0893, with potential implications for the development of therapeutics that target other class B GPCRs.
doi: 10.1038/nature17414