Volume 600 Issue 7889, 16 December 2021

Nature has made progress in improving the representation and participation of women at scientific conferences — but there is still much more to do.

Publications co-authored by scientists from the West are sometimes discounted by grant and hiring committees. That needs to change.

Coal-fired power plants are satisfying the world’s voracious appetite for plastic, but their emissions are causing a wave of disease and deaths.

The most complex stomach organoids yet are made with cells from three layers found in developing embryos.

Scientists discover sulfurous compounds that help to give pot a rank odour, holding out the promise of fragrance-free bud.

King snakes brought to Gran Canaria have multiplied, wreaking havoc on all of its native reptiles.

Moisture from the Mediterranean and Red seas helped to recharge an Iranian lake whose area has shrunk by 90% in recent decades.

Large structures can be built from a microbial material with self-healing properties.

The physics of crowds fails to describe behaviour of pedestrians at a famed bull-running festival.

The latest science news, in brief.

Early lab results suggest that existing vaccines could be less effective against the fast-spreading coronavirus variant, but boosters should improve immunity.

Barriers to reproducing preclinical results included unhelpful author communication, but critics argue that one-time replication attempts don’t tell the whole story.

Delhi court will scrutinize whether the pirate paper website falls foul of India’s copyright law. The verdict could have implications for academic publishers further afield.

Machine-learning algorithm predicts material properties using electron density.

The genome project leader reflects on his 12 years at the helm of a juggernaut biomedical agency, and what lies ahead.

Researchers are trying to dismantle the flawed concept of homogeneous racial mixing that has fostered discrimination in Mexico, Brazil and other countries.

Millions of people a year are hospitalized by respiratory syncytial virus and tens of thousands die. After decades of failure, four vaccines are now in late-stage trials.

Two very different books explore the past, present and future of glaciers.

Fund and use ‘living’ reviews of the latest data to steer research, practice and policy.

Jen Lewendon’s move from the United Kingdom for a postdoc restricted her travel and led to extended stints in quarantine. Here’s what the experience taught her.

Edmund Blades manages an atmospheric observatory at Ragged Point, Barbados.

A sophisticated theory for learning motor skills places emphasis on the need for inferring context — drawing conclusions about the structure of the environment — for efficiently storing and expressing motor memories.

Bipedalism is a defining feature of the human lineage, but not all hominin species walked in the same way. New data from a famous palaeoanthropology site reveal that at least two differently bipedal hominins roamed eastern Africa.

An individual’s genetics can influence their risk of infection and the severity of disease symptoms. A large international study has identified parts of the human genome that can affect the risk of severe COVID-19.

Trials of behavioural interventions are hard to compare, hampering policy decision-making. The effects of more than 50 interventions on exercise behaviour have been compared using an experimental design called a megastudy.

The potential origins and global spread of SARS-CoV-2, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and the importance of genomic surveillance for the control of the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed.

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.

A modelling study describing the formation of the polygonal surface structures in Sputnik Planitia on Pluto shows that convection driven by ice sublimation can generate planetary-scale surface patterns.

Using a gravitational-wave detector to  listen for dark matter signatures, a direct search for scalar field dark matter was conducted and new upper limits are set on the coupling constants.

Magnetically tunable interactions between lithium atoms and barium ions are used to demonstrate and probe Feshbach resonances between atoms and ions, which could have applications in the fields of experimental quantum simulation and fundamental physics.

An ensemble of electron spins is detected by their microwave fluorescence using a superconducting single microwave photon counter, making single-spin electron spin resonance spectroscopy a possible future prospect.

A study using local compressibility measurements reports fractional Chern insulator states at low magnetic field in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, and establishes the applied magnetic field as a means to tune the Berry curvature distribution.

The isotopic label tritium can be selectively added into aromatic organic compounds by a homogenous hydrogenolysis reaction using aryl thianthrenium salts, tritium gas and a molecular palladium catalyst.

Variations in Miocene sea level can be explained by a large marine-based West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

A new framework is proposed for assessing the risks of the atmospheric transformation products of commercial chemicals, combining laboratory and field experiments, advanced techniques for screening suspect chemicals, and in silico modelling.

The krypton isotopic pattern of Earth’s deep mantle indicates that volatile-rich material from the outer Solar System was delivered early in Earth’s accretion history.

Reanalysis of bipedal trackways from Laetoli site A in Tanzania suggest that the footprints were made by a hominin that coexisted with at least one other hominin species.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

A massive field study whereby many different treatments are tested synchronously in one large sample using a common objectively measured outcome, termed a megastudy, was performed to examine the ability of interventions to increase gym attendance by American adults.

 Studies in mice show that cognitive control training rapidly improves brain circuit function and enhances subsequent learning, which both persist for months.

A theory of motor learning based on the principle of contextual inference reveals that adaptation can arise by both creating and updating memories and changing how existing memories are differentially expressed, and predicts evoked recovery and context-dependent single-trial learning.

Plasma from voluntarily running mice reduces baseline expression of neuroinflammatory genes and experimentally induced brain inflammation when infused into sedentary mice.

An analysis of 2,173 individuals from the MetaCardis cohort quantifies the individual and combinatorial effects of a range of drugs on host health, metabolome and gut microbiome in cardiometabolic disease.

A study of the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in England between September 2020 and June 2021 finds that interventions capable of containing previous variants were insufficient to stop the more transmissible Alpha and Delta variants.

A complex range of mutations within the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is needed to escape polyclonal plasma neutralizing antibodies, and plasma from individuals who were first infected then vaccinated display the greatest resilience to escape mutations.

Individual memory antibodies selected over time by natural infection with SARS-CoV-2 have greater potency and breadth than antibodies elicited by vaccination, whereas the overall neutralizing potency of plasma is greater following vaccination.

Immune analyses against circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants show that mRNA vaccination induces robust neutralizing antibodies and boosts cross-variant neutralizing antibodies elicited by SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Single-cell-level analysis of memory B cells and their response to vaccination against all SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in individuals who either had or had not been previously exposed to the virus.

Protein immunofluorescence imaging and affinity purification–mass spectrometry are combined to create a unified map of human cell architecture across scales, which the authors call the multi-scale integrated cell (MuSIC).

Structural analysis of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae 80S ribosome trapped in an intermediate translocation state shows stabilization of codon–anticodon interactions by eukaryote-specific elements of the 80S ribosome, eEF2 and tRNA and demonstrates a major role for eEF2 in maintaining the directionality of translocation.

The trRosetta neural network was used to iteratively optimise model proteins from random 100-amino-acid sequences, resulting in ‘hallucinated’ proteins, which when expressed in bacteria closely resembled the model structures.

Mammalian prestin underlies cellular electromotility by sensing the voltage through a dynamic senor and converting it to an in-plane area expansion.