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The research ship Chikyu has spent nearly a decade drilling into the sea floor off Japan.Credit: Kyodo News via Getty

Japan’s flagship ocean-drilling research vessel, Chikyu, has drilled 3,250 metres into the ocean floor — deeper than ever before. But it failed to achieve its ultimate goal of 5,200 metres, into the realm where two tectonic plates meet and cause enormous earthquakes. “It was a continuous six-month nightmare,” says Nobu Eguchi, the director of operations at the institute that operates Chikyu.

Nature | 4 min read

Murray Gell-Mann, one of the founders of modern particle physics, has died, aged 89. Gell-Mann’s most influential contribution was to propose the theory of quarks — fundamental particles ﻿that make up most ordinary matter. The particles’ existence was confirmed by researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California in 1968, and Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year. Physicists now know of six different types of quark, together with their antimatter counterparts.

Nature | 3 min read

Taiwan’s science ministry is thinking of introducing double-blind peer review to assess research-grant proposals, a trend being adopted by some journals to eliminate bias and conflicts of interest. In this system, both the applicant and the reviewers remain anonymous. The ministry has begun soliciting feedback from scientists about whether it should introduce such a system; some researchers think it’s a great idea, but others say it’ll be difficult to anonymize applicants when authors often reference their own work.

Nature | 2 min read

FEATURES & OPINION

Mobile-phone companies are sharing data from the call records of millions of people with researchers and humanitarians in places where population statistics tend to be hard to come by. The goal is to see whether the data can be used as weapons against epidemics and disasters, but critics worry about a lack of efficacy, consent and privacy. Nature explores the complicated question of whether such sharing benefits society enough to outweigh its potential for misuse.

Nature | 15 min read

Reviled and abused, the journal impact factor, reflects just one aspect of what journals are for — citation — argue seven specialists in bibliometrics, evaluations and publishing. They call for a broader, more-transparent suite of metrics to rate journals’ ability to register, curate, evaluate, disseminate and archive research.

Nature | 7 min read

We “would have no moral stance on anything unless we were social”, argues philosopher Patricia Churchland in a compelling new study of conscience. She sets the roots of this neurobiological capacity in the fundamental bond between mothers and children.

Nature | 5 min read