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A genome-wide association study in ~3 million individuals identifies 3,952 independent variants associated with educational attainment. A polygenic index explains 12–16% of variance for this trait and contributes to risk prediction for ten diseases.

Inbreeding depression has been observed in many different species, but in humans a systematic analysis has been difficult so far. Here, analysing more than 1.3 million individuals, the authors show that a genomic inbreeding coefficient (FROH) is associated with disadvantageous outcomes in 32 out of 100 traits tested.

Gene discovery and polygenic predictions from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals.

A genetic study identifies hundreds of loci associated with risk tolerance and risky behaviors, finds evidence of substantial shared genetic influences across these phenotypes, and implicates genes involved in neurotransmission.

Daniel Benjamin, Meike Bartels, Philipp Koellinger and colleagues report a genome-wide association meta-analysis of subjective well-being, depressive symptoms and neuroticism. The study leverages a large sample size together with genetic correlations between the phenotypes to identify, with high confidence, loci associated with each phenotype.

Benjamin et al. construct polygenic indexes (DNA-based predictors) for 47 phenotypes and make them available to researchers in 11 datasets. They also present a theoretical framework and estimator to help interpret analyses using polygenic indexes.

Entanglement was observed in top–antitop quark events by the ATLAS experiment produced at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using a proton–proton collision dataset with a centre-of-mass energy of √s  = 13 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 140 fb⁻¹.

MTAG is a new method for joint analysis of summary statistics from genome-wide association studies of different traits. Applying MTAG to summary statistics for depressive symptoms, neuroticism and subjective well-being increased discovery of associated loci as compared to single-trait analyses.

Melinda Mills, Nicola Barban, Harold Snieder, Marcel den Hoed and colleagues perform a meta-analysis of data from over 300,000 individuals for age at first birth and number of children ever born. They identify 12 significant loci that associate with these traits, providing insights into the genetic basis of human reproductive behavior.

In a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator, the energy spread of an electron bunch is reduced with respect to the plasma entrance, which is achieved through setting a positive energy chirp that rotates the bunches’ longitudinal phase space.

Within-sibship genome-wide association analyses using data from 178,076 siblings illustrate differences between population-based and within-sibship GWAS estimates for phenotypes influenced by demographic and indirect genetic effects.

A genome-wide association study in 293,723 individuals identifies 74 genetic variants associated with educational attainment, which, although only explaining a small proportion of the variation in educational attainment, highlights candidate genes and pathways for further study.

This genome-wide study of age at first sexual intercourse and first birth identifies 371 signals driven by reproductive biology, externalising behaviour and environmental effects, with later onset associated with lower incidence of some diseases.

The astronomical event GW170817, detected in gravitational and electromagnetic waves, is used to determine the expansion rate of the Universe, which is consistent with and independent of existing measurements.

Matthew Robinson, Peter Visscher and colleagues use phenotypic data on 172,000 sibling pairs and phenotypic and SNP data on 150,832 unrelated individuals to estimate the heritability of body mass index across a range of experimental designs. They conclude that substantially larger sample sizes across ages and lifestyle factors will be required to understand the full genetic architecture of this trait.

Cosmic rays are believed to be mainly accelerated by the winds and supernovae of massive stars, although definite evidence for this is lacking. The active regions of starburst galaxies have exceptionally high rates of star formation, and therefore should produce cosmic rays that interact with interstellar gas and radiation to produce diffuse γ-rays. The detection and analysis of >700-GeV γ-rays from M82, the prototype small starburst galaxy, now links cosmic-ray acceleration to star formation activity.

We propose to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance from 0.05 to 0.005 for claims of new discoveries.

A stochastic background of gravitational waves is expected to arise from a superposition of a large number of unresolved gravitational-wave sources and should carry unique signatures from the earliest epochs of the Universe. Limits on the amplitude of the stochastic gravitational-wave background are now reported using the data from a two-year science run of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. These limits rule out certain models of early Universe evolution.