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Picks include a rogue gene-editor, a wunderkind physicist and a DNA detective who helped catch a serial killer.

Plastic solar cells contain a blend of conjugated polymer and fullerene electron-acceptor material that phase separates, resulting in the formation of heterojunctions. Improving the performance of these devices requires an understanding of the blend morphology. Now researchers show how a microwave-assisted synthesis method can be used to create structurally diverse copolymers enabling the investigation of their structure–function relationship.

A high-bandwidth neuromotor interface offers performant out-of-the-box generalization across people.

Sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors (SGLT-2i) have demonstrated efficacy in reducing cardiovascular events and potentially improving kidney function in diabetic patients. Here, using the TriNetX platform, the authors show that SGLT-2 inhibitors reduce all-cause mortality and major adverse cardiac and kidney events in diabetic kidney transplant recipients.

The authors present a statistical and computational framework to identify allele-specific variants, i.e., single nucleotide variants exhibiting allele-specificity (allelic imbalance) in any type of omics assay. Application of this framework to thousands of datasets yields an atlas of chromatin altering variants in diverse cell types.

Jeff Carruthers in Ottawa examines the most expensive private capital project ever undertaken, the AlCan gas pipeline

Stereo-EEG implantation suffers from limited spatial coverage, leading to potential missampling of the ‘true’ seizure-onset zone. The authors develop a framework to evaluate implantations based on spatial distribution of epileptic spike-gamma activity.

But ‘fiscal cliff’ threatens science and climate goals.

President Donald Trump and his administration have gutted science agencies, terminated research programmes and cancelled billions of dollars in grants to universities. What are the long-term impacts for the United States and the world?

Isothermal titration calorimetry is a useful tool for the characterization of antibodies and antibody-related products, which uses heat as a detection medium, circumventing the problems associated with other analytical methods.

While the ribosome has been harnessed for synthetic biology, designing ribosomes has remained challenging. Here, the authors demonstrate a community science approach for rational design of ribosomes with beneficial properties.

Nadav Ahituv, Nicola Illing, Jeff Wall and colleagues sequence the genome of the bat Miniopterus natalensis and perform RNA-seq and ChIP-seq (H3K27ac and H3K27me3) analyses on its developing forelimb and hindlimb autopods at sequential embryonic stages. Their analyses identify genomic regions that may contribute to bat wing formation.

Bacteria can form wall-deficient variants, or L-forms, that divide by a simple mechanism that does not require the FtsZ-based cell division machinery. Here, Wu et al. study L-forms in microfluidic systems to show the importance of geometric effects for cell growth, chromosome segregation and cell division.

Some science agencies fare well in US president’s budget request, but proposal will meet stiff resistance.

Understanding how cells dynamically adapt to their environment is important, but temporal information about cellular behaviour is often limited. Here, Miano et al. apply unsupervised machine learning to a dataset describing the activity of over 1,800 promoters in E. coli, measured every 10 minutes, defining three primary stages of promoter activation in response to heavy metal stress.

Chlorine incorporation into CH₃NH₃PbI₃improves solar cell performance, but its optoelectronic role is still unclear. Here the authors present a strategy that decouples the morphological impact, to reveal that chlorine incorporation affects carrier transport across the heterojunction interface rather than within the perovskite crystal.

A new generation of lithium-ion batteries, coupled with rising oil prices and the need to address climate change, has sparked a global race to electrify transportation. Jeff Tollefson investigates.

A limiting factor of the power conversion efficiencies of organic photovoltaic devices is low voltage output. Methano derivatives of the trimetallic endohedral fullerene Lu₃N@C₈₀ have now been synthesized and used as the acceptor in organic photovoltaics. The open circuit voltage of the devices is significantly above those made using alternative fullerenes.

Seed companies race to tap multibillion-dollar market.

IL-33 plays a central role in type II immune responses and is generally thought to be released following cellular damage and processed extracellularly. Rothenberg and colleagues describe a new ripoptosome pathway that is assembled following exposure to various unrelated environmental allergens and that processes IL-33 into an active form intracellularly.

Republicans sweep White House and US Congress, with uncertain implications for research.

Anode-free batteries have emerged as a promising storage means to offer high energy density but still suffer from long-term reversibility. The authors analyse the cell failure mechanisms and present an optimized electrolyte to extend the lifetime of anode-free pouch cells.

Thousands of quorum-sensing Escherichia coli colonies are synchronized over centimetres using redox signalling to create ‘biopixels’ that can sense trace amounts of arsenic in water.

Experimental evidence from a mature, phosphorous-limited, eucalypt forest finds that aboveground productivity was not significantly stimulated by elevated CO₂. Findings suggest that this effect may be limited across much of the tropics.

Withdrawal from global pact may take almost four years — which could give the winner of the 2020 presidential race the final word.

An extensive map of human DNase I hypersensitive sites, markers of regulatory DNA, in 125 diverse cell and tissue types is described; integration of this information with other ENCODE-generated data sets identifies new relationships between chromatin accessibility, transcription, DNA methylation and regulatory factor occupancy patterns.

Arany and colleagues integrate metabolomics data, tissue RNA-sequencing data and proteomics data from explanted hearts of patients with end-stage heart failure to provide a comprehensive ‘multi-omic’ evaluation of the metabolic pathways affected by heart failure.

Isotope analysis will provide new tools for weather modelling.

Nearshore field experiments simulating clam fishing during a heatwave reveal increased indirect mortality of sub-legal sized clams, highlighting a critical interaction between human fishing activity and climate change.

Industry-funding controversies highlight lack of standards among field’s journals.

Combined patch clamp recording, biocytin staining and single-cell RNA-sequencing of human neurocortical neurons shows an expansion of glutamatergic neuron types relative to mouse that characterizes the greater complexity of the human neocortex.

The maintenance of ecological diversity depends on the strength and direction of competitive interactions, but these interactions are difficult to study in microbial communities. Here the authors use engineered E. coli strains to show that competitively weak strains can persist when pairwise interactions are asymmetrical.

Drug runners, gold miners and loggers are rapidly invading the remote Peruvian Amazon, home to isolated people and a wealth of biodiversity. Nature met the researchers and Indigenous communities fighting to stop the destruction.

Rousseff rejects elements of Brazil’s revised forest code.

Officials at the US Environmental Protection Agency are consulting global-warming sceptics as they weigh up a technical review.

Conjugated polymers are promising materials for organic photovoltaic solar cells. By usingin situgrazing incidence wide-angle X-ray diffraction, Ocko and collaborators report the formation of a new type of crystalline arrangement in a conjugated polymer material known as PCDTBT.

The goal of the 1000 Genomes Project is to provide in-depth information on variation in human genome sequences. In the pilot phase reported here, different strategies for genome-wide sequencing, using high-throughput sequencing platforms, were developed and compared. The resulting data set includes more than 95% of the currently accessible variants found in any individual, and can be used to inform association and functional studies.

With one ageing telescope in space, and another mired in construction troubles on Earth, Matt Mountain has a tough job to do. Jeff Kanipe meets the new custodian of everyone's favourite space telescope.

Cellular actin networks can be rapidly disassembled and remodeled in a few seconds, yet in vitro actin filaments depolymerize over minutes. Here the authors show that Cyclase-associated protein (CAP) and Cofilin synergize to processively depolymerize actin filament pointed ends 330-fold faster than spontaneous depolymerization.

The international treaty drawn up to tackle ozone-destroying substances is gearing up to curb greenhouse gases. Jeff Tollefson reports.

In the third of a series of articles examining nuclear issues, Jeff Tollefson looks at options for fuelling a global boom in nuclear power stations without enabling nuclear proliferation.

A large empirical assessment of sequence-resolved structural variants from 14,891 genomes across diverse global populations in the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) provides a reference map for disease-association studies, population genetics, and diagnostic screening.

Choi et al. report that human NANOG proteins form gel-like condensates at extremely low concentrations, which facilitate the chromatin interaction that is essential for pluripotency maintenance.

Synthetic biologists aim to apply well-known principles of gene regulation to build living systems with desired properties. This study has combined microfluidics, single-cell microscopy and computational modelling to develop a bacterial gene oscillator that is fast, robust, persistent and whose frequency can be tuned externally. The combination of experimental and theoretical work reveals a simplified oscillator design without the need for positive feedback.