The problem of abandoned fishing gear and its effects on marine life deserve greater attention. (Editorial)

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The UK government’s decision to subsidize a nuclear power station while cutting support for renewables is short-sighted. (Editorial)

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To forge a strong climate accord in Paris, nations must agree on a common goal in everyone's self-interest, say David J. C. MacKay and colleagues.

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The high prevalence of sickle haemoglobin in Africa shows that malaria has been a major force for human evolutionary selection, but surprisingly few other polymorphisms have been proven to confer resistance to malaria in large epidemiological studies. To address this problem, we conducted a multi-centre genome-wide association study (GWAS) of life-threatening Plasmodium falciparum infection (severe malaria) in over 11,000 African children, with replication data in a further 14,000 individuals.

Since the year 2000, a concerted campaign against malaria has led to unprecedented levels of intervention coverage across sub-Saharan Africa. Understanding the effect of this control effort is vital to inform future control planning. However, the effect of malaria interventions across the varied epidemiological settings of Africa remains poorly understood owing to the absence of reliable surveillance data and the simplistic approaches underlying current disease estimates.

India says that it will produce 40% of its energy from sources other than fossil fuels by 2030, and will reduce the intensity of its carbon dioxide emissions by roughly one-third. The country’s highly anticipated announcement on 2 October comes ahead of United Nations talks in Paris this December, at which nations hope to reach an updated agreement to fight climate change.

Most nations have strict controls on environmental waste, from arsenic to zinc. Yet no legal limits have been set to control pollution from drugs during their manufacture, use and disposal. That is despite evidence that pharmaceutical waste can wreak havoc in the environment — hormones found in contraceptives cause male fish to grow female sex organs, and a painkiller used in livestock has wiped out millions of vultures in India that fed on the carcasses. (Editorial)

Earlier spring leaf unfolding is a frequently observed response of plants to climate warming. Many deciduous tree species require chilling for dormancy release, and warming-related reductions in chilling may counteract the advance of leaf unfolding in response to warming. Empirical evidence for this, however, is limited to saplings or twigs in climate-controlled chambers.

Glacial erosion is fundamental to our understanding of the role of Cenozoic-era climate change in the development of topography worldwide, yet the factors that control the rate of erosion by ice remain poorly understood. In many tectonically active mountain ranges, glaciers have been inferred to be highly erosive, and conditions of glaciation are used to explain both the marked relief typical of alpine settings and the limit on mountain heights above the snowline, that is, the glacial buzzsaw.

Structural variants are implicated in numerous diseases and make up the majority of varying nucleotides among human genomes. Here we describe an integrated set of eight structural variant classes comprising both balanced and unbalanced variants, which we constructed using short-read DNA sequencing data and statistically phased onto haplotype blocks in 26 human populations.