Contents
Vol 361, Issue 6401
Contents
This Week in Science
Editorial
Editors' Choice
Products & Materials
- New Products
A weekly roundup of information on newly offered instrumentation, apparatus, and laboratory materials of potential interest to researchers.
In Brief
In Depth
- Researchers welcome Trump's pick to head science office
Kelvin Droegemeier is steeped in Washington science policy.
- EU verdict on CRISPR crops dismays scientists
Decision to tightly regulate gene-edited plants is a blow to biotech and science, critics say.
- Did kindness prime our species for language?
Animal studies suggest tameness was key to language evolution.
- ‘Ending AIDS’ movement falters worldwide
But studies confirm treatment can slow infections in entire communities.
- How islands shrink people
Evolutionary dwarfing affected living people on the island of Flores, and may explain the stature of the extinct hobbit.
- Staying slim during pregnancy carries a price
Japanese are shrinking as low birth weight rises; their health may be at risk as well.
Feature
- A place in the sun
Spacecraft are venturing closer than ever to the sun to probe its mysterious atmosphere.
Working Life
Letters
Books et al.
- Neurodiversity, in profile
In the tradition of Oliver Sacks, two tomes investigate rare brain conditions
Essays on Science and Society
- Modulation without surgical intervention
Noninvasive deep brain stimulation can be achieved via temporally interfering electric fields
- Probing new targets for movement disorders
Genetic road maps pave the way to repairing basal ganglia function in Parkinson's disease
Policy Forum
- Indigenous communities, groundwater opportunities
A U.S. court decision unlocks vast potential to improve sustainable freshwater management
Perspectives
- A call for seagrass protection
Seagrass conservation is crucial for climate mitigation, biodiversity protection, and food security.
- Liquid water on Mars
A water body exists below the martian south polar ice cap
- Shouldering responsibility
Leaders do not shy away from responsibility when others' welfare is at stake
- Wheat—the cereal abandoned by GM
Genetic modification of wheat for disease resistance could help stabilize food production
Research Articles
- Multiplexed protein maps link subcellular organization to cellular states
Multiplexed (40-plex) indirect immunofluorescence quantifies subcellular protein organization on cellular and multicellular scales.
- Computational and neurobiological foundations of leadership decisions
The metacognitive computations and neural mechanisms that drive peoples’ choices to lead rather than to follow are explored.
- Emergent simplicity in microbial community assembly
Microbial communities assemble into similar family-level compositions containing divergent genera and species.
- Selective trade-offs maintain alleles underpinning complex trait variation in plants
Genetic variation in wild plant populations may fluctuate owing to environmental selection.
Review
Reports
- Scale-invariant magnetoresistance in a cuprate superconductor
At high magnetic fields up to 80 tesla, the resistivity of a thin-film La-based cuprate scales linearly with the field.
- A dust-enshrouded tidal disruption event with a resolved radio jet in a galaxy merger
A relativistic radio jet is seen switching on after a star is ripped apart by a black hole.
- Ultrastable laser interferometry for earthquake detection with terrestrial and submarine cables
Ultrastable lasers can be used to detect earthquakes in land-based and submarine fiber optic cables.
- Radar evidence of subglacial liquid water on Mars
Radar data from Mars Express show that there is a lake of liquid water underneath the solid ice of Mars’ southern ice cap.
- Giant polarization in super-tetragonal thin films through interphase strain
Epitaxial growth of PbTiO3/PbO composite thin films gives rise to strain and a very large spontaneous polarization.
- Quantification of drought during the collapse of the classic Maya civilization
The collapse of Lowland Classic Maya civilization during the Terminal Classic Period was triggered by a 50% reduction in rainfall.
- HAIRY MERISTEM with WUSCHEL confines CLAVATA3 expression to the outer apical meristem layers
The domain of stem cells in the Arabidopsis shoot apical meristem is founded on WUS expression but bounded by HAM expression.
- Cryo-EM structure of a mitochondrial calcium uniporter
The structure of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter reveals a tetrameric architecture and the molecular framework underlying calcium selectivity.
- Evolutionary history and adaptation of a human pygmy population of Flores Island, Indonesia
Flores Island has two independent and distinct instances of island dwarfism in hominins.
Technical Comments
Erratum
About The Cover

COVER Jets of hot plasma trace magnetic field lines that leap out into space from the Sun's surface, as shown in this colorized image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which stares at the Sun from a vantage near Earth. New observatories will study these magnetic fields up close to understand how they heat the Sun's atmosphere and launch the solar wind. See page 441.
Image: Nathalia Alzate/SDO/NASA