Volume 585 Issue 7825, 17 September 2020

As some countries begin to raise barriers to international collaboration, scientists in the S20 engagement group are right to keep them down.

Many countries that see themselves as distinctive have handled the pandemic badly.

Polymer electrodes deposited onto the leaves of crop plants provide an early warning of ozone damage.

Torpor saves energy for hummingbirds that live high in the Andes Mountains.

Meltwater from thawing glaciers is expanding lakes, which could catastrophically burst their banks.

The Hubble Space Telescope shows that galactic ‘lenses’ of the invisible material are more common than computer models of galaxy clumping predict.

The latest science news, in brief.

UK trials of the Oxford and AstraZeneca vaccine have resumed after a brief pause, yet key details of the events involved have not been released.

As leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies fast-track COVID-19 vaccines through clinical trials, smaller developers face a battle to get their candidates noticed.

Faculty members, graduate students and other campus staff file lawsuits and protest against unsafe conditions as institutions reopen.

An exodus of foreign-born scientists would be a great loss for US science, say research leaders.

Fires are releasing record levels of carbon dioxide, partly because they are burning ancient peatlands that have been a carbon sink.

Months after infection with SARS-CoV-2, some people are still battling crushing fatigue, lung damage and other symptoms of ‘long COVID’.

Some people who become ill with the coronavirus develop neurological symptoms. Scientists are struggling to understand why.

Decades of data on the legacy of childhood experience for adult health and wealth should help policymakers plan for future well-being, shows a book by pioneers of cohort studies.

A Second World War disaster fuelled the crusade for cancer treatment, Jennet Conant’s book argues.

A cold-war-era corporation targeted voters and presaged many of today’s big-data controversies.

If you can, escape the plate-spinning frenzy of online meetings by going on holiday, ideally for two weeks, says John Tregoning.

Jeff C. Clements reckons with a recent set of reviewer comments that used ‘being critical’ as a justification to be mean.

With support from a NASA education programme, mechanical-engineering student Jessica Frantz hopes to launch an aerospace career.

A light-sensitive receptor protein expressed in neurons deep in the mouse brain has been shown to be stimulated by violet light, and to activate a pathway that reduces heat production in brown fat.

Filaments of keratin — stable protein polymers best known for their function in hair and nails — provide a memory of cell polarity at a crucial stage in early mouse development.

Evidence has been found of a planet circling the smouldering remains of a dead star in a tight orbit. The discovery raises the question of how the planet survived the star’s death throes — and whether other planets also orbit the remains.

Skin cancers resulting from distinct mutations have characteristic tissue forms and different disease outcomes. Analysing the architecture of benign and aggressive tumours reveals how mechanical forces drive these patterns.

NumPy is the primary array programming library for Python; here its fundamental concepts are reviewed and its evolution into a flexible interoperability layer between increasingly specialized computational libraries is discussed.

A giant planet candidate roughly the size of Jupiter but more than 14 times as massive is observed by TESS and other instruments to be transiting the white dwarf star WD 1856+534.

A fundamental superconducting qubit is introduced: ‘blochnium’ is dual to the transmon, relies on a circuit element called hyperinductance, and its fundamental physical variable is the quasicharge of the Josephson junction.

The widely available silicon-on-insulator technology is used to develop a miniaturized ultrasound detector, which is 200 times smaller than the wavelengths of sound that it can detect.

Plasmonic effects in organic light-emitting devices, which are normally considered a source of energy loss, are harnessed to enhance the stability of these devices while maintaining operational efficiency.

The building blocks of the nanostructures observed on Drosophila corneas are determined, and then used to create artificial nanostructures with anti-reflective and anti-adhesive properties.

Ancient DNA analyses reveal that Viking Age migrations from Scandinavia resulted in differential influxes of ancestry to different parts of Europe, and the increased presence of non-local ancestry within Scandinavia.

In a mouse model of the leukodystrophy Pelizaeus–Merzbacher disease, myelination, motor performance, respiratory function and lifespan are improved by suppressing proteolipid protein expression, suggesting PLP1 as a therapeutic target for human patients with this disease and, more broadly, antisense oligonucleotides as a pharmaceutical modality for treatment of myelin disorders.

Keratins are determinants of cell fate during mammalian embryogenesis, and are distributed asymmetrically between daughter cells during cell division.

A model of the effects of different non-pharmaceutical interventions on the spread of COVID-19 in China suggests that a strategy involving the rapid implementation of a combination of interventions is most effective.

The E3 ubiquitin ligase TRIM7 polyubiquitinates the envelope protein of Zika virus, adding Lys63-linked polyubiquitin chains that interact with the TIM1 receptor of host cells to enhance virus entry and replication.

Mice possess neurons in the preoptic area of the hypothalamus that are sensitive to violet light; these deep brain neurons sense light via OPN5 and regulate adaptive thermogenesis in brown fat.

The transient reactivation of ETV2 in adult human endothelial cells reprograms these cells to become adaptable vasculogenic endothelia that in three-dimensional matrices self-assemble into vascular networks that can transport blood and physiologically arborize organoids and decellularized tissues.

Mathematical and experimental approaches are used to investigate the mechanical forces that shape the tumour architecture of two different common forms of skin cancer: basal cell carcinomas and invasive squamous cell carcinomas.

Acentrosomal assembly of the mitotic spindle upon inhibition of the PLK4 protein is shown to depend on the ubiquitin ligase TRIM37, with implications for the use of PLK4 inhibitors to treat neuroblastoma and breast cancer.

TRIM37 overexpression promotes centrosome dysfunction that drives genomic instability in breast cancer cell lines containing the recurrent 17q23 amplicon, revealing a vulnerability that can be targeted to eliminate cancer cells.

Fission yeast grown in sublethal levels of caffeine develop heterochromatin-dependent epimutations conferring unstable heritable gene silencing that conveys resistance to caffeine, while remaining genetically wild type.

A machine learning approach shows that the downstream core promoter region (DPR) is widely used in human gene promoters, and that many promoters contain either a DPR or a TATA box, but not both.

Cryo-electron microscopy reveals the structures of α-synuclein filaments from the brains of individuals with multiple system atrophy.