Volume 549 Issue 7671, 14 September 2017

Studies highlight link between immune response and unusual neural wiring.

Another explanation offered for one of animal kingdom’s most distinctive features.

Research institutions should explicitly seek job candidates who can be frankly self-critical of their work, says Jeffrey Flier.

The week in science: 8–14 September 2017.

Reviewers and a co-author of a paper by genomics entrepreneur Craig Venter claim that it misrepresents the risks of public access to genome data.

UK government document fails to extinguish concerns over funding and migration.

Regulations are deterring research that could lead to disease treatments, say scientists.

As strains on the desert nation’s supply increase, scientists collaborate on projects to keep water flowing.

The United States is set to trial a version that will also cover race and disability, while other countries have already embraced the voluntary rating system.

Entrepreneurs are finding profits turning human waste into fertiliser, fuel and even food.

Early devices must solve real-world problems, urge Will Zeng and colleagues.

A surcharge on energy producers would fund climate adaptation and the low-carbon transition, suggest Anthony J. Webster and Richard H. Clarke.

W. Bernard Carlson relishes a biography of a self-taught engineer who revolutionized telecommunications.

Computer scientist Luc Steels uses artificial intelligence to explore the origins and evolution of language. He is best known for his 1999–2001 Talking Heads Experiment, in which robots had to construct a language from scratch to communicate with each other. Now Steels, who works at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), has composed an opera based on the legend of Faust, with a twenty-first-century twist. He talks about Mozart as a nascent computer programmer, how music maps onto language, and the blurred boundaries of a digitized world.

Raja Adal investigates the 150-year history of a typewriter able to reproduce thousands of characters.

Bacteria that can oxidize both ammonia to nitrite and nitrite to nitrate seem to be better adapted to ammonia-limited environments than most cultured microbes that oxidize ammonia to nitrite only, contrary to expectations. See Letter p.269

Experiments reveal that the laws governing the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang also apply to the behaviour of coupled lasers. The findings could be used to solve complex computational problems.

Cellular diversity can hamper cancer treatment. Analysis of tumour cell-division patterns now reveals how such heterogeneity can arise by a hierarchical pattern of stem-cell divisions yielding a mosaic of different cells. See Article p.227

Glaciers in the high mountains of Asia are a crucial water resource, but are at risk from global warming. Modelling suggests that the glaciers will shed mass in direct proportion to the warming to which they are exposed. See Letter p.257

Polypterid fish were considered to be archaic outliers of the bony-fish grouping. Fossil analysis now places them at the heart of early ray-finned fishes, a radical change that transforms the timing of their evolution. See Letter p.265

The direct conversion of heat into electricity — a reversible process known as the thermoelectric effect — can be greatly enhanced in some materials by embedding them with a small number of magnetic nanoparticles. See Letter p.247

The leading proposals for converting noise-resilient quantum devices from memories to processors are compared, paying attention to the relative resource demands of each.

To enable a quantum computer to solve practical problems more efficiently than classical computers, quantum programming languages and compilers are required to translate quantum algorithms into machine code; here the currently available software is reviewed.

The era of fully fledged quantum computers threatens to destroy internet security as we know it; the ways in which modern cryptography is developing solutions are reviewed.

Quantum machine learning software could enable quantum computers to learn complex patterns in data more efficiently than classical computers are able to.

Proposals for demonstrating quantum supremacy, when a quantum computer supersedes any possible classical computer at a specific task, are reviewed.

An overview of the nature and timescales of stratospheric ozone recovery and the extent to which it can currently be detected.

The 4D Nucleome Network aims to map the spatial and dynamic organization of the human and mouse genomes to gain insight into the structure and biological functions of the nucleus.

Using unique barcodes for tumour cells, the authors explore the dynamics of human glioblastoma subpopulations, and suggest that clonal heterogeneity emerges through stochastic fate decisions of a neutral proliferative hierarchy.

Cryo-electron microscopy snapshots of the E. coli flippase MsbA at discrete functional states reveal a ‘trap and flip’ mechanism for lipopolysaccharide flipping and the conformational transitions of MsbA during its substrate transport cycle.

Titanium oxide, water, sodium and a strongly scattering haze have been detected in the atmosphere of the hot Jupiter exoplanet WASP-19b.

The ground-state energy of small molecules is determined efficiently using six qubits of a superconducting quantum processor.

By embedding superparamagnetic nanoparticles in a thermoelectric matrix, phonon and electron transport within the material can be controlled simultaneously at nanometre and mesoscopic length scales, thereby improving the thermoelectric performance of the material.

A non-invasive scanning magnetometer, based on a single nitrogen–vacancy defect in diamond, visualizes antiferromagnetic order at the nanometre scale in thin films of bismuth ferrite at room temperature.

Models show that even if global temperature rise can be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, only about 65 per cent of glacier mass will remain in the high mountains of Asia by the end of this century, and if temperatures rise by more than this the effects will be much more extreme.

A synthesis of 67 biodiversity studies shows that, after controlling for environmental covariates, the effects of biodiversity on biomass are stronger in nature than in experiments and are comparable to the effects of other drivers of productivity.

High-resolution scans of fossilized fish skulls suggest that modern ray-finned fishes originated later than previously thought and necessitate reconsideration of the evolution of this major vertebrate group.

A pure culture of the complete nitrifier Nitrospira inopinata shows a high affinity for ammonia, low maximum rate of ammonia oxidation, high growth yield compared to canonical nitrifiers and genomic potential for alternative metabolisms, probably reflecting an important role in nitrification in oligotrophic environments.

N⁶-methyladenosine modification of mRNA determines cell fate decisions during the specification of the first haematopoietic stem cells in zebrafish.

Group 2 innate lymphoid cells express the neuromedin U receptor 1 (NMUR1) and respond to neuromedin U (NMU) released by adjacent enteric neurons, and this interaction results in an enhanced immediate early response to the nematode Nippostrongylus brasiliensis.

Intestinal type 2 innate lymphoid cells express the neuropeptide receptor NMUR1, which makes them responsive to neuronal neuromedin U, thereby promoting a type 2 cytokine response and accelerated expulsion of the gastro-intestinal nematode Nippostrongylus brasiliensis.

Crystal structures of the Polycomb-like proteins PHF1 and MTF2 with bound DNA and histone peptides show that extended homologous regions of the two proteins form a winged-helix structure that has an unexpected mechanism of binding to unmethylated CpG-containing DNA motifs.

Improvements in mapping protein–protein interactions are allowing researchers to deconstruct the delicate mechanics of cells.

Paid work beyond the bench can offer a welcome source of income to cash-strapped junior researchers and provide opportunities for career development.

UK report investigates whether international students remain illegally after graduating.

US universities fall short in hiring women and under-represented minorities.

It's a dream come true.