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Joe Biden addresses the audience during the US climate summit on 22 April.Credit: Al Drago/Getty
US pledges to slash climate emissions
The United States has pledged to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, compared with 2005 levels, and aim for net-zero emissions by 2050. US President Joe Biden announced the commitment as he opened a virtual climate summit that is being attended by 40 world leaders. The target is roughly in line with recent commitments by the European Union and others. “There’s a long way to go, but I’m more optimistic than I was a few months ago,” says climate analyst Bill Hare.
Source: Climate Action Tracker
Glimmer of hope from malaria vaccine trial
A malaria vaccine called R21 has proved to be 77% effective at preventing the disease in children in a small, early trial. There is one other malaria vaccine — GlaxoSmithKline’s RTS,S vaccine — but this jab is the first to reach the World Health Organization's goal of at least 75% efficacy. R21 has been in the works for several years, and it informed the development of the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, which came out of the same group at the University of Oxford. Large-scale phase III trials to prove the vaccine’s safety and efficacy are still to come, but this offers hope for a disease that kills 1,200 people each day, mostly children under 5.
Read more: Building a better malaria vaccine (Nature | 12 min read, from 2019)
Reference: The Lancet preprint
COVID-19 coronavirus update
More than 1 million genomes shared
More than 1.2 million coronavirus genome sequences from 172 countries and territories have now been shared on GISAID — the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data. Sequence data have been crucial to scientists studying the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the epidemiology of COVID-19 outbreaks and the movement of viral variants across the planet. “You have a system where we can watch how the virus spreads through the world, and see if control measures and the vaccines still work,” says GISAID scientific adviser Sebastian Maurer-Stroh.
Source: GISAID
Features & opinion
One of the world’s oldest experiments
Every few years, for 142 years, scientists have dug up a bottle of seeds from a secret location on the campus of Michigan State University. The Beal seed-viability experiment is an effort to find out how long seeds can lie dormant without losing their ability to germinate. Botanist William James Beal started the trial with 20 bottles; there are 4 left. Each generation of botanists at the university has passed the knowledge of the seeds’ hiding place to younger colleagues. “I think Professor Beal’s got the top experiment here,” says plant scientist Carol Baskin. “I wish he’d have buried more bottles.”
The New York Times | 8 min read
Futures: Hot buttered grubs
When space-time gets twisted like a giant rubber band, it affects everyone — even the staff of a backwoods municipal alternate-timeline-transfer station. Author Jordan Price ponders the possibilities in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.
Five best science books this week
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes pseudoscience, zero waste, and an action-adventure graphic novel featuring female scientists saving the world.
Video: Origami-inspired structures
Drawing inspiration from the art of origami, researchers have designed self-supporting structures that lock into place after being erected. “What is powerful with origami as an art form is that we know that from a 2D sheet of paper, you can fold any 3D shape,” says applied mathematician David Melancon. “So we have this enclosure made of rigid faces that is folded super, super compact. You inflate it… and then you can remove pressure and it stays there, deployed.”
Go deeper with engineer Sigrid Adriaenssens in the Nature News & Views article.
