Volume 577 Issue 7792, 30 January 2020

We asked readers what we should focus on in the next decade. Here is what you said.

Callous policies in Brexit’s wake will ill serve a nation that claims to cherish innovators — learn from 1930s Britain, says Georgina Ferry.

Collision with a huge object more than 2 billion years ago might even have altered the planet’s climate.

Carbon-14 dating reveals that an ‘antique’ Scotch is roughly 150 years younger than claimed.

Brain models in a dish offer clues to molecular signals involved in the human forebrain’s development.

Fossils hint that families of the hulking animals could have gathered at an Ice Age waterhole.

Remains found at a city near Pompeii present opposing narratives of how people perished in the AD 79 eruption.

The rebels’ departure from their rainforest strongholds triggered mass deforestation.

Calving events at Thwaites Glacier, which is shedding vast amounts of ice, are detected from up to 1,600 kilometres away.

The latest science news, in brief.

Researchers are racing to find out more about the epidemiology and genetic sequence of the coronavirus spreading in Asia and beyond.

Negotiators have less than a year to agree on how the United Kingdom will participate in European Union research programmes.

Bias and the prospect of societal harm increasingly plague artificial-intelligence research — but it’s not clear who should be on the lookout for these problems.

Structural biologist Rolf Hilgenfeld has been working on coronavirus treatments since the SARS outbreak.

Researchers have started an attribution study to determine how much global warming is to blame for the blazes that have ravaged the continent.

The indefatigably curious chemist and science-fiction icon championed rationality for the common good in 20 million published words. By David Leslie

Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome — more-realistic baselines make for better policy.

Volunteering with an organization can improve communication and help you adapt to the unexpected, say Sarah Groover and Ruth Gotian.

Mary-Anne Lea travels to remote coastal regions to study marine animals for insights into conserving their species.

Signalling from the sympathetic nervous system of mice when subjected to stress leads to the depletion of a stem-cell population in their hair follicles. This discovery sheds light on why stress turns hair prematurely grey.

The activity of calcium channels in the heart increases during what is called the fight-or-flight response. An investigation into the 50-year-old mystery of how this occurs has captured a previously overlooked suspect.

An optical study of cold solid hydrogen at extreme pressures indicates that electrons in the material are free to move like those in a metal. This suggests that the long-sought metallic phase of hydrogen might have been realized.

Two threads of research in the quest for methods that predict the 3D structures of proteins from their amino-acid sequences have become fully intertwined. The result is a leap forward in the accuracy of predictions.

Three methods for gene-expression profiling have now been combined to produce spatially defined single-cell maps of developing human organs from limited sample material, overcoming a major hurdle in studying human development.

The probable transition of hydrogen to its metal state near 425 GPa is observed, with the required high pressures created using a toroidal diamond anvil cell.

Dualities—mathematical mappings between different systems—can act as hidden symmetries that enable materials design beyond that suggested by crystallographic space groups.

A fully hardware-based memristor convolutional neural network using a hybrid training method achieves an energy efficiency more than two orders of magnitude greater than that of graphics-processing units.

Flash Joule heating of inexpensive carbon sources is used to produce gram-scale quantities of high-quality graphene in under a second, without the need for a furnace, solvents or reactive gases.

Redox-switchable chelation is demonstrated for a carborane cluster molecule, leading to controlled chemical or electrochemical capture and release of uranyl in monophasic or biphasic model solvent systems.

Pd-catalysed β-C(sp³)–H lactonization of aliphatic acids enabled by a mono-N-protected β-amino acid and tert-butyl hydrogen peroxide is reported, achieving high β-position selectivity without the use of a directing group.

A reduction in the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation initiated during the penultimate deglaciation led to excess polar ice losses, contributing to higher sea levels during the last interglacial period.

Genome-wide ancestry profiles of four individuals, dating to 8,000 and 3,000 years before present, from the archaeological site of Shum Laka (Cameroon) shed light on the deep population history of sub-Saharan Africa.

Analyses of single-cell recordings from mouse ventral tegmental area are consistent with a model of reinforcement learning in which the brain represents possible future rewards not as a single mean of stochastic outcomes, as in the canonical model, but instead as a probability distribution.

Stress induces hair greying in mice through depletion of melanocyte stem cells, which is mediated by the activation of sympathetic nerves rather than through immune attack or adrenal stress hormones.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis suppresses the production of inflammatory cytokines by host cells through the host-mediated ubiquitination of a mycobacterial protein, enhancing the interaction of a host signalling inhibitor with another signalling molecule.

In a mouse model of glioblastoma, treatment with VEGF-C increases lymphatic drainage in the central nervous system and improves the immune response, suggesting that modulating meningeal lymphatics could enhance checkpoint inhibitor therapy.

An in vivo approach to identify proteins whose enrichment near cardiac Ca_V1.2 channels changes upon β-adrenergic stimulation finds the G protein Rad, which is phosphorylated by protein kinase A, thereby relieving channel inhibition by Rad and causing an increased Ca²⁺ current.

The topoisomerase Top2 and the chromatin-binding protein Hmo1 maintain under-wound and over-wound DNA at different regions within a gene and thereby modulate the topology of genes.

AlphaFold predicts the distances between pairs of residues, is used to construct potentials of mean force that accurately describe the shape of a protein and can be optimized with gradient descent to predict protein structures.

Structural studies on the yeast transcription coactivator complex SAGA (Spt–Ada–Gcn5–acetyltransferase) provide insights into the mechanism of initiation of regulated transcription by this multiprotein complex, which is conserved among eukaryotes.

Structural studies on the yeast transcription coactivator complex SAGA (Spt–Ada–Gcn5–acetyltransferase) provide insights into the mechanism of initiation of regulated transcription by this multiprotein complex, which is conserved among eukaryotes.