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An ornate pin found in the burial of a woman at Königsbrunn, Germany, suggests the owner had a high social status.Credit: K. Massy

Archeologists have shed fresh light on a Bronze Age society by reconstructing the family trees of more than 100 people buried on ancient farmsteads in southern Germany. DNA reveals the social inequality within individual households, with high-status family members buried near unrelated, low-status individuals — possibly servants, farm workers or slaves. And the genealogies also unearth a mystery: some of the high-status women had no children or other blood relations in the group, and the levels of strontium isotopes in their teeth show they came from far-away lands.

Nature | 5 min read

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, scrambled to save specimens and experiments that require refrigeration after the state’s largest utility company shut off power to reduce the risk of wildfires. The preventive outage follow a traumatic 2018 fire season: the company acknowledges that its equipment sparked the catastrophic Camp Fire, which killed 86 people. Many labs at UC Berkeley lack reliable back-up power, so some researchers have had to move their experiments off campus to save them.

Nature | 3 min read

Geographer and former university president Tashpolat Tiyip has been missing since April 2017, caught up in China’s campaign against Uyghur and other mostly-Muslim ethnic minorities. After Amnesty International warned that Tiyip’s execution could be imminent — despite murky information about the allegations he’s facing — the American Association of Geographers wrote to the Chinese government to support his case. Tiyip’s detention has fed fear among fellow scientists, because he was an official in the Chinese Communist Party and had previously been lauded in the media as a role model.

Science | 6 min read

NOBEL ROUND-UP Physiology or Medicine: Cancer researcher William Kaelin, physician-scientist Peter Ratcliffe and geneticist Gregg Semenza won for describing how cells sense and respond to oxygen by switching genes on and off. Among the applications of their discovery is a better understanding of how the body reacts when oxygen levels drop owing to exercise or stroke, and efforts to manipulate the response to slow the growth of oxygen-hungry cancer tumours. In 2017, Kaelin wrote in Nature that many of the papers that he, Semenza and Ratcliffe wrote leading up to their discoveries “would be considered quaint, preliminary and barely publishable today”. “The goal of a paper seems to have shifted from validating specific conclusions to making the broadest possible assertions,” he argued, calling for a return to a focus on quality over impact. Chemistry: Solid-state physicist John Goodenough and chemists Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino won for the development of lithium-ion batteries. All three contributed to the invention of the kind of lightweight, rechargeable batteries that power most of our gadgets — and which make “possible a fossil fuel-free society”, the Nobel chemistry committee said. Goodenough becomes the oldest Nobel laureate at the age of 97. He told Nature (and it’s well worth listening to the interview just for his infectious laugh) that he still works in the lab every day. “What would I do, just retire and wait to die? I don’t think so!” he joked. Physics: Astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz share half of the prize for their 1995 discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star. They detected the planet through its tiny gravitational pull on the star 51 Pegasi, a technique that is now used to study some of the more than 4,000 exoplanets known to exist. Cosmologist James Peebles receives the other half of the prize for his widely influential theoretical work describing how the cosmos evolved following the Big Bang. Queloz told Nature in a delightfully cheerful interview that the week he got the prize started out poorly — he got a flat tyre on his bike. So what will he do with his share of the money? “I think I’m going to buy a new bike. I’m serious!” he said.

FEATURES & OPINION

Every scientific discipline has its catnip for cranks: physics has perpetual motion, medicine has homeopathy and mathematics has squaring the circle. Its status is legendary: “I hope my handwriting, etc. do not give the impression that I am just a crank or circle-squarer,” wrote Noble laureate John Nash in a 1955 letter to the US National Security Agency. Mathematician David Richeson explores the mesmerizing appeal of the geometric impossibility, from the Greeks to today.

Lapham’s Quarterly | 8 min read

A new method might be able to predict whether an earthquake will be followed by smaller aftershocks — or whether worse is to come. Seismologist Stefan Wiemer tells the Nature Podcast about the traffic-light system he developed for the predictions, and the system’s many caveats.

Nature Podcast | 23 min listen

Go deeper with the expert analysis in the Nature News & Views article.

Reference: Nature paper

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BOOKS & ARTS

Doris Lessing, photographed in 1990.Credit: Schiffer-Fuchs/ullstein bild via Getty

On the centenary of the Nobel laureate’s birth, biographer Patrick French explores Doris Lessing’s science-infused series Canopus in Argos. The space-based books still divide readers, but they embody her lifelong interest in science and societal upheaval in fascinating ways, writes French.

Nature | 6 min read

Barbara Kiser’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes psychedelic psychiatry, breast cancer, and a paean to the emperor penguin.

Nature | 2 min read