The revolutionary animal lived and died in the muck. In its final hours, it inched across the sea floor, leaving a track like a tyre print, and finally went still. Then geology set to work. Over the next half a billion years, sediment turned to stone, preserving the deathbed scene. The fossilized creature looks like a piece of frayed rope measuring just a few centimetres wide. But it was a trailblazer among living things.

The threat to health care posed by the misuse of antimicrobial drugs has not crept up on us. As long ago as 1945, bacteriologist Alexander Fleming said, after winning a Nobel prize for his part in the discovery of penicillin, that overuse of the drug might lead to forms of bacteria that were resistant to its effects. If left unchecked, drug-resistant diseases could kill more people than cancer. Despite the warnings, and a global consensus among scientists and policymakers that something must be done to address resistance to antimicrobial drugs, society has struggled to respond.

Metal ions trapped in crystalline microporous solids known as zeolites are promising solid-state catalysts for a wide variety of oxidation reactions1–3. In the past few decades, there has been intense research into the structure and nuclearity (the number of metal ions) of the active sites in these zeolite-based catalysts4,5. Despite these efforts, there is still no agreement on the nuclearity: the proposed number of metal ions in the active sites ranges from one to three1,2,4,5. Writing in Nature, Gordon et al.6 propose that there are two titanium ions in the active sites of a well-characterized industrial zeolite catalyst called titanium silicalite-1 (TS-1), challenging the widely accepted idea that there is only one. Their work has implications not only for TS-1, but also for other metal-containing zeolites for which the structure of the active sites is not yet fully established.

The revolutionary animal lived and died in the muck. In its final hours, it inched across the sea floor, leaving a track like a tyre print, and finally went still. Then geology set to work. Over the next half a billion years, sediment turned to stone, preserving the deathbed scene. The fossilized creature looks like a piece of frayed rope measuring just a few centimetres wide. But it was a trailblazer among living things.

Metal ions trapped in crystalline microporous solids known as zeolites are promising solid-state catalysts for a wide variety of oxidation reactions1–3. In the past few decades, there has been intense research into the structure and nuclearity (the number of metal ions) of the active sites in these zeolite-based catalysts

There are 70 million neurons in the mouse brain, and Moritz Helmstaedter wants to map them all. He was a medical student at Heidelberg University in Germany when psychiatrists there suggested that some aspects of the human psyche lack a biological explanation. “I was totally appalled,” recalls Helmstaedter, who is now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany.