Review, News & Views, Perspectives, Hypotheses and Analyses in 2021

The production of blood cells, including some immune cells, relies heavily on the bone-marrow microenvironment. Cardiovascular diseases are now found to corrupt this niche, leading to imbalances in blood-cell production.

An investigation into the nature of genetic connections between individuals interred in the same chambers of an ancient tomb in Britain about 5,700 years ago sheds light on kinship in an early society.

A microorganism that dwells in an underground oil reservoir has been found to degrade various petroleum compounds and use them to produce methane through a previously unreported biochemical pathway.

Advances in the precision of radiocarbon dating can offer year-specific data. Analyses of archaeological sites in Denmark and Canada provide insights into the chronology of the global networks of the Viking Age.

An optical device designed to control the properties of electron waves inside an electron microscope demonstrates that clever platforms for integrated photonics need not be powered by expensive laser systems.

The inclusion of nitrogen atoms stabilizes the zigzag edges of carbon-based nanoribbons, enabling the ribbons to be decoupled from a substrate and providing a probe for their unconventional magnetism.

The genomes of hundreds of individuals who lived in Great Britain and in continental Europe during the Bronze Age provide evidence for a migration of people from the continent to southern Britain between 1000 and 875 bc.

Nature’s pages feature an exhibition of scientific toys, and consider competing national claims to take credit for Copernicus.

Beads made from ostrich eggshells, produced by people over the past 50,000 years, provide evidence for a long period of social connection between eastern and southern Africa, followed by isolation and then reconnection.

Highlights from News & Views published this year.

Harnessing immune cells to target tumours is a growing trend. The results of a clinical trial combining such treatment with other standard therapies for gastric cancer have altered medical practice — and more changes are to come.

A computational method has been devised to identify drug-candidate molecules from a library of billions of molecules using 100 times less computational power than is used by standard methods.

Standard quantum theory contains square roots of negative numbers. But how essential are these ‘imaginary’ numbers? A way of disproving analogous theories that omit them has been proposed — and confirmed experimentally.

High-temperature, high-acidity and low-oxygen extremes may pose a particular threat to marine ecosystems, requiring a major effort to understand them and the ability of marine life to respond to them.

Nature’s pages look at efforts to understand the effect of typhoons on buildings, and feature reports of hitchhiking snails.

Treatment for leukaemia can fail for reasons that are not fully clear. Tracking the progress of individual cellular lineages for this type of cancer offers a way to investigate this phenomenon.

Increasing the sample size of a survey is often thought to increase the accuracy of the results. However, an analysis of big surveys on the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines shows that larger sample sizes do not protect against bias.

Proteins spanning the membranes of cells of the intestine and kidney use sodium-ion gradients to take up glucose, enabling water absorption, too. The structures of these transporter proteins have now been observed in detail.

Direct imaging has revealed the existence of a large planet orbiting a binary system that contains the most massive planet-hosting stars detected so far. The discovery challenges existing models for how planets and stars form.

In some neurodegenerative diseases, a protein called TDP-43 forms aggregates in the brain, resulting in neuronal cell death. The structure of these aggregates and their properties have been unveiled.