Volume 591 Issue 7851, 25 March 2021

Vaccine confidence will be the casualty of Europe’s war of words over the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccine.

Policymakers need insight from humanities and social sciences to tackle the pandemic.

A survey reveals clusters of mountainside forts that could have relayed signals to each other by fire or smoke.

Jointed legs allow a quadrupedal machine to shape-shift for optimal energy use.

A leading theory says that the red planet lost its ancient water to space, but research suggests that Martian minerals sucked up some of it.

Elite athletes help to reveal the costs of intense physical activity.

The island lived up to its name one million years ago, when the ice sheet of today was missing.

The stain-resistant textile needs less washing, which means less energy consumption and lower emissions of greenhouse gases.

Without elder instructors of their own kind, young regent honeyeaters are adapting the songs of other species.

The latest science news, in brief.

No signs of past life have emerged yet, but rocks at the landing site show signs of having been shaped by wind and water.

The experiments use human cells to imitate the blastocyst phase — offering a crucial window into human development.

Global COVID-19 cases have fallen significantly since they peaked in early January. Scientists are asking whether this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic.

But uptake by patients and physicians has been low in the United States, where some therapies have been authorized for months.

Mars becomes the first inner planet after Earth to have the size of its core estimated with seismology.

Organoids made of tear-producing cells offer chances to study, and possibly treat, eye disorders.

Some publishers say they are battling industrialized cheating. A Nature analysis examines the ‘paper mill’ problem — and how editors are trying to cope.

Even with vaccination efforts in full force, the theoretical threshold for vanquishing COVID-19 looks to be out of reach.

She confirmed dark matter, probed spiral galaxies and fought inequality

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks.

If the three biggest economies agree a carbon tax on imports, it will catalyse climate action globally.

Grant success rates for scientists in under-represented groups are lower than for white applicants, finds analysis.

Flexible circuits inspired by human skin offer options for health monitoring, prosthetics and pressure-sensing robots.

Dorothy Okello teaches computing to displaced people, and launches programmes to get more women into science, technology and business.

Early in development, human embryos form a structure called the blastocyst. Two research groups have now generated human blastocyst-like structures from cells in a dish, providing a valuable model for advancing human embryology.

An analysis of experiments in which the air around terrestrial plants or plant communities was enriched with carbon dioxide reveals a coordination between the resulting changes in soil carbon stocks and above-ground plant biomass.

Three atomic clocks based on different atoms have been compared with record accuracy. The findings bring a redefinition of the second a step closer and aid the search for dark matter — an elusive component of the Universe.

Organelles called mitochondria have essential roles in the cell and must be inherited successfully as it divides. It turns out that three types of interaction with filaments of actin protein mix and partition mitochondria during cell division.

Having more than two sets of chromosomes can help plants to adapt and evolve, but generating new crops with this type of genome is challenging. A road map for doing just that has now been developed using wild rice.

This Review proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching climate–society interactions that focuses on the mechanisms through which climate change has influenced societies, and the uncertainties of discerning this influence across different spatiotemporal scales.

The volume of global aquaculture production has tripled since 2000 with positive trends in environmental performance, but the sector faces mounting challenges including pathogen management, pollution, climate change, and increasing dependence on land-based resource systems.

A network of optical atomic clocks based on three different atomic species is reported and their frequency ratios are measured with uncertainties at or below 8 × 10⁻¹⁸.

A nondestructive detector of photonic qubits, comprising a single ⁸⁷Rb atom trapped in the centre point of two crossed fibre-based optical resonators, is demonstrated.

High-fidelity control and readout of a superconducting qubit is performed with a low-noise optical fibre link that delivers microwave signals directly to the millikelvin quantum computing environment.

Using germanium quantum dots, a four-qubit processor capable of single-, two-, three-, and four-qubit gates, demonstrated by the creation of four-qubit Greenberger−Horne−Zeilinger states, is the largest yet realized with solid-state electron spins.

Polymer-covered inorganic nanoparticles are designed to self-assemble into micrometre-sized superlattice crystallites that can subsequently be built into freestanding centimetre-scale solids with hierarchical order across seven orders of magnitude.

Oceanographic observations from 1970–2018 reveal substantial changes in the summer upper-ocean structure, showing a thickening of the mixed layer and a density gradient increase at its base.

A synthesis of elevated carbon dioxide experiments reveals that when plant biomass is strongly stimulated by elevated carbon dioxide levels, soil carbon storage declines, and where biomass is weakly stimulated, soil carbon accumulates.

In macaque motor cortex, moment-to-moment fluctuations in neurally derived decision variables are tightly linked to decision state and predict behavioural choices with better accuracy than condition-averaged decision variables or the visual stimulus alone, and can be used to distinguish between different models of decision making.

Recordings of cells in the human dorsomedial prefrontal cortex identify a population of neurons that encode information about others’ beliefs and distinguish them from self-belief-related representations, providing insight into cellular-level processing underlying human theory of mind.

Exposure to a novel experience can ‘reset’ connections between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in mice, allowing them to overcome an existing learned behaviour and to replace it with a new one.

An in vitro culture strategy enables the generation of blastocyst-like structures termed human blastoids from naive human pluripotent stem cells, providing a model for studying human embryogenesis.

Human fibroblasts are reprogrammed to generate blastocyst-like structures called iBlastoids, which recapitulate aspects of embryo implantation.

Absolute microbial abundances delineate longitudinal dynamics of bacteria, fungi and archaea in the infant gut microbiome, uncovering drivers of microbiome development masked by relative abundances and revealing notable parallels to macroscopic ecosystem assemblies.

In a cohort of 87 individuals with COVID-19, the memory B cell response at 6.2 months after the onset of disease evolves in a manner that is consistent with the persistence of SARS-CoV-2 antigen.

The tumour microenvironment is low in glucose and high in the alternative metabolite lactate, which regulatory T cells are shown here to use, maintaining their ability to suppress effector immune cells.

CTLA-4 promotes glucose uptake by tumour-infiltrating regulatory T cells, making them unstable.

During mitosis, complementary actin-based mechanisms ensure equal and random distributions of mitochondria among daughter cells following symmetrical cell division.

Single-stranded, DNA-damage-associated small RNAs generated by a BRCA1–RNA-interference complex promote PALB2–RAD52-mediated DNA repair at transcriptional termination pause sites that contain R-loops and are rich in single-stranded DNA breaks in both quiescent and proliferating cells.

The meiotic proteins Spo11 and Rec8, which ensure meiotic recombination and reductional chromosome segregation, have additional activities that challenge centromere stability by promoting centromeric nucleosome remodelling in both fission yeast and human cells.

Serial synchrotron crystallography reveals the structure of the human glycine transporter GlyT1, showing how a state-specific inhibitor exerts its effects, and potentially informing the design of new GlyT1 inhibitors to treat a range of disorders of the central nervous system.