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An illustration of NASA's Perseverance rover, which is due to land on Mars in February 2021.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
How to get rocks back from Mars
The US and European space agencies have unveiled a daring plan to bring the first rocks back from Mars. The samples will be collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is due to launch in the coming months. The ambitious interplanetary pilgrimage to return the rocks will involve two spacecraft that travel to Mars in 2026: a small rocket that will blast off the Martian surface, carrying the rocks into orbit, where a second craft will take them and fly back to Earth by 2031. “This is by no means a simple task,” says Jim Watzin, head of NASA’s Mars exploration programme in Washington DC. “But we have kept it as simple as possible.”
Raiders of the lost apple
A volunteer-run organization has rediscovered 10 lost apple varieties in the northwestern United States. The Lost Apple Project seeks to rescue some of the 17,000 apple cultivars thought to have once been grown in North America, of which only about 4,500 are known to exist today. Members use old maps, county-fair records, newspaper clippings and nursery sales ledgers to find abandoned orchards and collect fruits. They then ship them to an Oregon conservancy, where they are studied. The organization also tries to reconstruct the history of the orchards. “When I find an apple that’s lost, I want to know who homesteaded it, when they were there, who their children were, when they took their last drink of water,” says amateur botanist E. J. Brandt.
COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak
Sam McNeil/AP/Shutterstock
Wuhan death toll jumps by 50%
The city of Wuhan in China has added another 1,300 fatalities to its official count. The revision puts the number of deaths in the 11-million-person city at 3,869. China’s overall death toll is more than 4,600. Chinese officials said the reasons for the revision included the addition of deaths of people at home and at medical institutions that weren’t reporting data to its epidemic network. (Nature | Continuously updated)
Most people infected on aircraft carrier have no symptoms
The US aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt has become another natural experiment for the transmission of COVID-19. The Navy has tested almost the entire crew after one member died from the disease. Many who tested positive had no symptoms, just like on the cruise ship Diamond Princess. On the cruise, which was packed with older people, the asymptomatic proportion was 18%. On the aircraft carrier — unsurprisingly home to mostly young, healthy people — it was 60%. “We’re learning that stealth in the form of asymptomatic transmission is this adversary’s secret power,” said Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham, surgeon general of the Navy. (Reuters | 3 min read)
Wisps of hope for remdesivir
The researcher overseeing a closely watched clinical trial in Chicago has indicated that the antiviral medicine remdesivir might be showing positive signs against COVID-19. More than 100 people, most with severe disease, were treated with daily infusions of remdesivir (there was no control group). “Overall our patients have done very well,” infectious-disease specialist Kathleen Mullane told colleagues in an internal video call. Study leaders urge extreme caution about these preliminary and as-yet-unpublished results. (STAT | 5 min read)
Watching the wave engulf New York
Emergency-room physician Helen Ouyang describes how she went from hearing how the coronavirus outbreak overwhelmed hospitals in Lombardy, Italy, to seeing it happen first-hand in her hospital in New York. “It has been less than six weeks, but I’ve never felt less useful as a doctor,” writes Ouyang. “The one thing I can do — what I think will matter most, in the end — is just to be a person.” (The New York Times | 43 min read)
Not a great time to be a parent-scientist
Alessandra Minello, a social demographer who studies how families manage household and paid work, explores how the pandemic will affect researchers who are working from home and caring for children. She highlights the role of women, who tend to spend significantly more time on household work than do men, even in the most gender-egalitarian countries. (Nature | 5 min read)
The last coronavirus-free continent
Researchers in Antarctica, who are used to isolation, have taken things up a notch to maintain the continent’s status as the last place on Earth without COVID-19. On King George Island, social events between the various national bases have been cancelled. And scientists wait anxiously to see what impact the global pandemic will have on their continuing research. (Reuters | 4 min read) Read the latest coronavirus news, continuously updated on Nature.
Read Nature’s continuously updated selection of the must-read papers and preprints on COVID-19.
Video of the week
Physicists have found the strongest evidence yet that neutrinos are fundamentally different from their antimatter counterparts. Researchers at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan found that one flavour of neutrino — muons — morphed into different types of particle at a different rate than did their antimatter twins. If confirmed, the results could help to solve the Universe’s greatest mystery: why there is more matter than antimatter. (Nature | 4 min video)
Go deeper with the expert perspective from physicists Silvia Pascoli and Jessica Turner in the Nature News & Views.
Features & opinion
Donald Knuth wants you to code beautifully
Donald Knuth’s earliest claim to fame was at age 13, when he won a contest by finding 4,700 anagrams for ‘Ziegler’s Giant Bar’ — and was awarded chocolate for his entire class. It was only the first of many honours that would come to include the A. M. Turing Award, the most prestigious in computer science. Knuth describes his multi-volume opus-in-progress, The Art of Computer Programming, as a manifesto for writing code so beautiful that it can be read by humans like a story. “It describes the way I love to do math and the way I wish I had been taught.”
Five best science books this week
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes how to stay healthy indoors, the past and future of power, and shoe libraries.
Coronapod: Why tests sit unused in US labs
Following a Nature investigation that revealed thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US laboratories, researchers tell the Coronapod what they found when they dug deeper into what’s holding things back. Plus, the team discusses what a freeze on US funding means for the World Health Organization, and investigates the role of the immune system in the death of COVID-19 patients.
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Where I work
Li Hua is a structural biologist and pharmacologist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China.Credit: Peng Nian for Nature
“Since January, I have spent every day alone in my laboratory, urgently trying to find a cure for COVID‑19,” says structural biologist and pharmacologist Li Hua, who lives on campus at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, the epicentre of the pandemic. Li’s colleagues, who had left for the Lunar New Year holiday, could not return during the lockdown and he is currently the only one who can access the lab. Now the lockdown there has ended, Li is working with collaborators in Shanghai to test the efficacy of the drug candidates he identified. (Nature | 3 min read)
