Volume 578 Issue 7796, 27 February 2020

More funders and publishers must support such work and emphasize its value to the research community.

A controversy over the possible presence of rooms around the tomb needs findings to be published in the open literature.

It is irresponsible to support research but not data stewardship, says Barend Mons.

The Yongle marine cavern provides a window onto unusual ocean chemistry.

Scientists reveal the pathway used by one gut microbe to transform vegetable components into anti-cancer compounds.

Chemists have borrowed a strategy from plant cell walls to produce a high-strength wood adhesive.

Male mice utter one type of high-pitched squeak when fighting, another when fleeing and yet another when pursuing a female.

Bubbles in Antarctic ice suggest that warming will not result in massive release of long-buried methane.

After training, an artificial-intelligence program can distinguish between five types of knot with 99% accuracy.

The remains of at least 48 people who died of plague have been found at an unprecedented English site.

The latest science news, in brief.

A new survey hints at a previously unknown space beyond Tutankhamun’s burial chamber.

From laboratory closures to equipment shortages, researchers worldwide tell Nature how they have been affected by the epidemic.

Thwaites Glacier’s collapse could raise sea levels worldwide by more than half a metre.

An uncharted island off Antarctica’s western coast could reveal how climate change is altering the continent.

Although AI companies market software for recognizing emotions in faces, psychologists debate whether expressions can be read so easily.

Scientists say climate change, deforestation and fires could cause the world’s largest rainforest to dry out. The big question is how soon that might happen.

Public acclaim escaped one of the twentieth century’s most illustrious astronomers, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin; a new biography sets her in the firmament. By Giuseppina Fabbiano.

After a century of digging, archaeologists are still tantalized by the secrets of the 7,000-year-old city of Megiddo. By Andrew Robinson.

Journals, funders and scholars must work together to create an infrastructure to study peer review.

The programme aims to help postdocs and other researchers to temporarily step away from the lab to handle caregiving responsibilities.

Ashmita Das describes the ethos of her freelance-research platform, Kolabtree.

A powerful set of molecular tools helps synthetic biologists to assemble DNA of different sizes, from the gene to the chromosome scale.

Marine biologist Jamie Craggs studies coral reproduction in a tight, dark space as he prepares to reseed reefs damaged by climate change.

Tumours are often stiffer than normal tissues and show abnormally fast metabolism of glucose. It emerges that the link between these two traits involves tension in a network of protein filaments in cells.

The discovery of a sensor that detects hydrogen peroxide at the surface of a cell provides insights into the mechanisms by which plant cells perceive and respond to environmental stress.

The structure of thyroglobulin, the enormous protein that acts as a precursor for thyroid hormones, has been determined, and its hormone-forming tyrosine amino-acid residues have been identified.

Metallic glasses are much stronger than conventional metals, but form certain instabilities under stress that lead to fracture. A process known as rejuvenation has been shown to solve this problem.

A method for directly converting connective-tissue cells into neurons opened up a new branch of research into cell-based therapies and called into question long-held beliefs about how development affects a cell’s identity.

The dense soup of matter in the core of neutron stars is hard to model, but particle-accelerator experiments in which energetic electrons scatter off atomic nuclei could help to explore this high-density regime.

This Review examines inflammatory bowel disease in the context of human genetics studies that help to identify pathways that regulate homeostasis of the mucosal immune system and discusses future prospects for disease-subtype classification and therapeutic intervention.

High-energy electron scattering that can isolate pairs of nucleons in high-momentum configurations reveals a transition to spin-independent scalar forces at small separation distances, supporting the use of point-like nucleon models to describe dense nuclear systems.

Optical chiral induction and spontaneous gyrotropic electronic order are realized in the transition-metal chalcogenide 1T-TiSe₂ by using illumination with mid-infrared circularly polarized light and simultaneous cooling below the critical temperature.

A new type of energy-harvesting device, based on protein nanowires from the microbe Geobacter sulforreducens, can generate a sustained power output by producing a moisture gradient across the nanowire film using natural humidity.

Using lead-absorbing materials to coat the front and back of perovskite solar cells can prevent lead leaching from damaged devices, without affecting the device performance or long-term operation stability.

Bulk metallic glasses can acquire the ability to strain-harden through a mechanical rejuvenation treatment at room temperature that retains their non-crystalline structure.

The synthesis of uranium- and thorium-containing metallabiphenylenes demonstrates the ability of the actinides to stabilize aromatic/antiaromatic structures where transition metals have failed.

The front of the Getz Ice Shelf in West Antarctica creates an abrupt topographic step that deflects ocean currents, suppressing 70% of the heat delivery to the ice sheet.

Phenotypic selection analysis is used to estimate the type and strength of selection that acts on more than 15,000 transcripts in rice (Oryza sativa), which provides insight into the adaptive evolutionary role of selection on gene expression.

HPCA1, a member of a previously uncharacterized subfamily of leucine-rich-repeat receptor-like kinases, is the hydrogen-peroxide sensor at the plasma membrane in Arabidopsis.

The glycopeptide antibiotic-related compounds complestatin and corbomycin function by binding to peptidoglycan and blocking the action of autolysins—peptidoglycan hydrolase enzymes that remodel the cell wall during growth.

In mixed bacterial populations that colonize nutrient patches, a growth–migration trade-off can lead to spatial exclusion that provides an advantage to populations that become rare, thereby stabilizing the community.

Single-cell RNA sequencing of cells from humans with multiple sclerosis and mice with a model of the disease identifies a population of disease-promoting astrocytes in which anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory proteins are suppressed.

An HLA- and gluten-dependent mouse model of coeliac disease with villous atrophy provides evidence for the cooperative role of IL-15 and gluten-specific CD4⁺ T cells in licensing the full activation of cytotoxic T cells that are necessary for inducing epithelial damage.

In mice, the interaction of the innate immune sensor TLR9 with beclin 1 is shown to have a role in glucose metabolism and AMPK activation in skeletal muscle during exercise.

Vγ6⁺ Vδ1⁺ γδ T cells control tolerance to cold by activating adipocyte IL-17RC and promoting sympathetic innervation of thermogenic adipose tissue in mice.

A single-cell, spatially resolved analysis of breast cancer demonstrates the heterogeneity of tumour and stroma tissue and provides a more-detailed method of patient classification than the current histology-based system.

Glycolysis in normal epithelial cells responds to microenvironmental mechanics via the modulation of actin bundles that sequester the phosphofructokinase-targeting ubiquitin ligase TRIM21, a process superseded by persistent actin bundles in cancer cells.

The cryo-electron microscopy structure of human thyroglobulin reveals that proximity, flexibility and solvent exposure are key characteristics of its hormonogenic tyrosine pairs, and provides a framework for understanding the formation of thyroid hormones.