Members of the US National Academy of Sciences have long enjoyed a privileged path to publication in the body's prominent house journal. Meet the scientists who use it most heavily.

Diederik Stapel, the infamous lying Dutchman who in 2011 admitted to inventing the data in dozens of psychology research papers, unwittingly signaled his deceit through the language he used. As well as inflating the certainty surrounding his results, Stapel included more science-related terms to describe his methods when writing up his fraudulent findings than when describing genuine results. Researchers who have analyzed Stapel's papers say they can separate his genuine and fictional research with about 70 per cent accuracy.

The popular image of Antarctica as a frozen, almost lifeless desert needs a makeover. For the first time, water from a lake beneath the ice has been found to harbor a vibrant microbial ecosystem. Their discovery proves that water is habitable space, even if it's at sub-zero temperatures and there is no sunlight, says John Priscu of Montana State University in Bozeman. He co-led the US team that drilled into Lake Whillans, 800 m beneath the west Antarctic ice sheet.

Take a hot new method that's opened up a new era of genetic engineering, apply it to the wonder stem cells that in 2012 won their discoverer a Nobel prize, and people might just have a tool to cure HIV infection. That's the hope of a team led by Yuet Kan of the University of California, San Francisco--and they have proved the principle, altering the genome of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to give them a natural mutation that allows some people to resist HIV.

It's already possible to make some inferences about the appearance of crime suspects from their DNA alone, including their racial ancestry and some shades of hair color. And in 2012, a team led by Manfred Kayser of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, identified five genetic variants with detectable effects on facial shape. It was a start, but still a long way from reliable genetic photofits. To take the idea a step further, a team led by population geneticist Mark Shriver of Pennsylvania State University and imaging specialist Peter Claes of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium used a stereoscopic camera to capture 3D images of almost 600 volunteers from populations with mixed European and West African ancestry. Because people from Europe and Africa tend to have differently shaped faces, studying people with mixed ancestry increased the chances of finding genetic variants affecting facial structure. Claes and Shriver superimposed a mesh of more than 7,000 points onto the scanned 3D images and recorded the precise location of each point. They also developed a statistical model to consider how genes, sex and racial ancestry affect the position of these points and therefore the overall shape of the face.

Genome sequencing is already delivering a medical revolution for families with rare diseases. It should only be a matter of time before the benefits come to us all, as Peter Aldhous discovers

Barack Obama is certainly talking the talk on climate change--promising to put the fight against global warming at the heart of his second term. What's more surprising is that the US--historically, the world's biggest emitter--actually seems to be walking the walk. It is on track to meet Obama's 2009 pledge to cut US emissions by 17%, from 2005 levels, by 2020. The target could even be exceeded, which may give a boost to the long-stalled international climate talks. Here, Aldhous Obama's aggressive policies to curb US greenhouse gas emissions.

One can't patent a naturally occurring DNA sequence--but one can patent an altered product made from that sequence. That, in short, is the ruling handed down last week by the US Supreme Court on the validity of patents for the breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. Widely billed as a decision on whether human genes can be patented in the US, the ruling actually applies to DNA from any species. In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court decided that simply isolating a natural DNA sequence is not a patentable invention. However, it upheld Myriad Genetics' claims on complementary DNA (cDNA) derived from the BRCA genes. These are sequences made in the lab from RNA--the template used to produce the proteins that genes code for. This cDNA lacks the non-coding introns found in the full sequence of a gene and is therefore not a product of nature--which is why the court ruled that it can be patented.

Families afflicted by rare genetic disorders will be the first beneficiaries of genome sequencing. But everyone else will benefit, too, and more than you might imagine. It turns out that conditions any may face--such as heart disease and diabetes--may also be triggered by similarly rare mutations. David Dimmock, a pediatric geneticist at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, says most common diseases are merely a collection of rare diseases that happen to have the same end point. In other words, common conditions are actually rare disorders in disguise, which means that the same methods that will promise to deliver personalized medicine for all. Here, Aldhous discovers this genome sequencing that is delivering a medical revolution that should one day come to all.

Patients deserve better than an unscientific manual, says leading mental health institute

The Russian Ministry of Defence says it has started patrolling the Arctic's summertime shipping lanes, but is the move to do with resources or access to the world's oceans?

Renewable electricity is growing faster than any other power source. Will it be enough?

A disturbing new dimension is added to the heated debate over autism's underlying causes, following a study of thousands of women in the US

The phrase dangerous climate got scarier last week, with a new analysis suggesting that global warming will bring a rising tide of human violence. While the study suggests past surges in temperature have boosted conflicts, it doesn't necessarily follow that steady warming due to climate change over the coming decades will have the same effect. Unlike glaciers, humans have remarkable adaptive capacity, says Cullen Hendrix, a conflict specialist at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg VA. Trends over the past few decades reinforce this message. According to the Human Security Report Project based at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, the average number of international conflicts per year fell from more than six in the 1950s to less than one in the 2000s.

The president has asked Congress to release millions of dollars for new research into gun violence, including the influence of video games

The existence, or not of the eastern wolf as a distinct species has become a battleground in the fight to restore the conic grey wolf to greater swathes of the US. What was an obscure taxonomic debate has become a major row, as the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) tries to justify plans to remove endangered species status from the grey wolf. Today there are about 5,000 grey wolves in the contiguous US, almost all in the northern Rocky mountains and western Great Lakes regions--thanks chiefly to the protection afforded by its status. While those populations are recovering, and have already lost endangered status, the FWS proposal would hit hopes of further expansion.

An art project reconstructs faces based on DNA picked up from the streets – can we legally keep our discarded genetics away from prying eyes?

In the secure environment of a biosafety level 3 containment lab at St Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis TN, Jim Allay and Mike Tillman are looking for robust plaques--clumps of chicken embryo kidney cells infected with an engineered flu virus. The stakes could scarcely be higher. This virus is a vaccine carrying genes from the H7N9 bird flu that has killed more than 30 people in China. If H7N9 acquires the mutations it needs to pass from person to person, the strain that the St Jude team is racing to produce could be the main line of defense against a flu pandemic that would threaten millions of people. Just a handful of labs are set up to do this work. Two other labs in the UK and US have recently created initial seed strains. It is vital to give manufacturers a choice of vaccine strains so they can select one that grows well and provokes a strong immune response and then scale it up for full production.

A new system of evidence-based punishment for drugs crimes is paying dividends in a country plagued by overpopulated prisons

Who gets to say when unproven therapies can be offered to desperate people? To some, it's a matter of life or death, finds Peter Aldhous