Volume 582 Issue 7810, 4 June 2020

NASA’s partnership with SpaceX and its founder Elon Musk should recognize the global nature of space exploration and research.

To navigate pandemic trade-offs, policymakers need syntheses.

High activity in certain brain regions reveals which children have the most robust working memory.

Volcanoes in Siberia poisoned the planet with mercury, contributing to a global mass extinction.

A trove of mysterious miniature stencilled artworks adorns rock surfaces in the Australian countryside.

Entangled photons can be used to make quantum radar that delivers a target’s location.

The latest science news, in brief.

As scientists around the world return to work, they’re encountering new safety rules and awkward restrictions — and sometimes writing the protocols themselves.

As President Trump terminates the US relationship with the agency, experts foresee incoherence, inefficiency and a resurgence of deadly diseases.

A study that suggested using hydroxychloroquine — a malaria drug — to treat people with COVID-19 could be dangerous has slowed clinical trials, but the study itself has also been questioned.

Scientists in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and other places are using sequence data to track new infections as lockdowns ease.

Babies born before 28 weeks of gestation are surviving into adulthood at higher rates than ever, and scientists are checking in on their health.

Pull down the walls and assist those displaced by climate change, argues a book on the movement of people, animals and plants.

From mapping coronavirus to recording extinctions, Heather Houser describes the intersection of art and data visualization.

Playful master of games who transformed mathematics.

Protect privacy, equality and fairness in digital contact tracing with these key questions.

COVID-19 has provided an opportunity to rethink the scientific conference. If online meetings become the norm, how can researchers make the most of them?

The web-based tool BioRender has become a staple of biomedical research drawings.

A growing emphasis on do-it-yourself science is helping researchers to equip labs in resource-limited areas.

Molecular biologist Christian Happi is working around the clock to get testing available throughout the continent.

Understanding the prebiotic origins of the nucleic acids is a long-standing challenge. The latest experiments support the idea that the first nucleic acid encoded information using a mixed ‘alphabet’ of RNA and DNA subunits.

There is growing evidence that gut microbes can influence disease. Analysis of a mouse model of the neurodegenerative condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis offers insight into how gut bacteria might contribute to this illness.

Seventy laboratories that analysed the same neuroimaging data each produced different results. This finding highlights the potential consequences of a lack of standardized pipelines for processing complex data.

A Laughlin state is a phase of matter that has remarkable features, such as excitations that behave as a fraction of a particle. The long-sought creation of a photonic Laughlin state is a milestone for the field of quantum simulation.

Grafts of stem-cell-derived precursors of dopamine neurons could be used to treat Parkinson’s disease, but this approach has limitations. Injecting a growth factor three weeks after transplantation can overcome some of these limits.

Pairs of photons in the Laughlin state are created by mimicking a fractional quantum Hall system using the synthetic magnetic field induced by a twisted optical cavity and Rydberg-mediated polariton interactions.

The coupling between light and relativistic free electrons is enhanced through phase matching of electrons with optical whispering-gallery modes in dielectric microspheres and through extended modal lifetimes.

The strong interaction of coherent free electrons with a photonic-crystal cavity enables the measurement of the lifetimes of the cavity modes and provides a technique for multidimensional near-field imaging and spectroscopy.

Water-repellent nanostructures are housed within an interconnected microstructure frame to yield mechanically robust superhydrophobic surfaces.

A prebiotic synthesis of the purine DNA nucleosides (deoxyadenosine and deoxyinosine) in which the pyrimidine RNA nucleosides (cytidine and uridine) persist has implications for the coexistence of DNA and RNA at the dawn of life.

Carbon dioxide and helium data support lateral advection of carbon-rich cratonic mantle below the East African Rift System, which concentrates deep carbon and causes active carbonatite magmatism near the craton edge.

From 1980 to 2018, the levels of total and non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol increased in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreased in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe.

Analysis of Icelandic genomes reveals chromosome fragments of Neanderthal and Denisovan origin, the latter of which occurred through Denisovan gene flow either into ancestors of the Neanderthals or directly into humans.

The results obtained by seventy different teams analysing the same functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset show substantial variation, highlighting the influence of analytical choices and the importance of sharing workflows publicly and performing multiple analyses.

Reduced abundance of immune-stimulating gut bacteria ameliorated the inflammatory and autoimmune phenotypes of mice with mutations in C9orf72, which in the human orthologue are linked to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia.

Analysis of genomic data from more than 60,000 cancer samples uncovers frequent multiple driver mutations in individual oncogenes, which confer enhanced oncogenicity in combination.

Composite mutations, of two or more nonsynonymous somatic mutations in the same cancer-associated gene, are present in nearly one in four human tumours.

Antibodies against Plasmodium falciparum glutamic-acid-rich protein (PfGARP), an antigen expressed on the surface of infected red blood cells, kill P. falciparum parasites by inducing programmed cell death and reduce the risk of severe malaria.

Mouse models of severe congenital neutropenia using patient-derived mutations in the GFI1 locus are used to determine the mechanisms by which the disease progresses.

Following cell division, phase separation of the transmembrane adaptor LEM2 ensures that the ESCRT machinery remodels microtubules and seals the nuclear envelope.

The three-dimensional structure of pericentromeres in budding yeast is defined by convergent genes, which mark pericentromere borders and trap cohesin complexes loaded at centromeres, generating an architecture that allows correct chromosome segregation.

Several mechanisms regulate the distribution of double-strand breaks during meiosis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, ensuring that the shortest chromosomes are able to successfully recombine.

Cryo-electron microscopy reveals the structures of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter holocomplex in low- and high-calcium conditions, showing the gating mechanism that underlies uniporter activation in response to intracellular calcium signals.