Volume 582 Issue 7812, 18 June 2020

Nature asked authors and editors for advice on how to improve peer-review communication.

Advocacy works, but more must be done to protect against misinformation.

Bowhead whale stock has survived by wintering under the Arctic ice.

A mission to explore the planets also furnishes insights into the small stuff.

Radar shows the surprisingly complex architecture of Falerii Novi, a now-buried settlement founded in 241 BC.

Some drug-resistant pathogens might persist in patient wards for as long as eight years.

The latest science news, in brief.

Plans for the new bill follow months of protests, but researchers are divided about how it might affect them.

The nearby burst came from a magnetized star — and provides a close-up view of one of astronomy’s biggest puzzles.

Influential model judged reproducible — although software engineers called its code ‘horrible’ and ‘a buggy mess’.

Evidence is mounting that healthy blood vessels protect children from serious effects of COVID-19, such as stroke.

Artificial structures developed the rudimentary components of a heart and nervous system.

Cohort studies that follow populations over years have quickly pivoted to trace the pandemic’s physical, mental and social consequences.

After two Black scholars shared their experiences on Twitter, a firestorm followed.

A new breed of researcher is turning to computation to understand society — and then change it.

Germany and Taiwan top a ranking drawn up pre-crisis by architect of US Affordable Care Act; United States trails behind.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks.

Emergency procedures that keep electricity running and food banks stocked can also keep health workers in protective equipment.

A new framework for animal-behaviour research will help to avoid sampling bias — ten years on from the call to widen the pool of human participants in psychology studies beyond the WEIRD.

With student enrolment projected to fall, some US and UK institutions have halted recruitment.

Psychiatrist Dixon Chibanda trains teams of grandmothers to provide open-air counselling sessions in Zimbabwe.

Undifferentiated human stem cells have been coaxed to develop into skin-like structures in vitro. When engrafted onto mice, the structures produce hair — highlighting the potential of the approach for regenerative therapies.

Observations of millisecond-long radio bursts from beyond the Milky Way have revealed a repeat pattern with a roughly 16-day period — a finding that adds to the enigma of the origin of these bursts.

Sex chromosomes must exchange genetic information at a short region during meiotic cell division. Molecular factors have now been found that alter sex-chromosome structure and enhance this exchange process.

The huge, elaborate, 5,000-year-old tomb at Newgrange, Ireland, is thought to have been built for a powerful elite. DNA of a man buried there reveals a case of incest. Was this a strategy to maintain a dynastic bloodline?

A periodicity of roughly 16 days is detected for the fast radio burst 180916.J0158+65, suggesting that the burst arises from a periodically modulated mechanism instead of a cataclysmic or sporadic process.

Observations of the radio galaxy Centaurus A at teraelectronvolt energies resolve its large-scale jet and favour electron synchrotron processes as the source of its X-ray emission.

Wave destabilization is demonstrated in semiconductor ring lasers operating at low pumping levels, where ultrafast gain recovery leads to the emergence of a frequency comb regime owing to phase turbulence.

A turnkey regime for soliton microcombs is demonstrated, in which solitons are generated by switching on a co-integrated pump laser, eliminating the need for photonic and electronic control circuitry.

A diamond composite with a hierarchical microstructure possesses a combination of hardness and toughness surpassing that of all known materials.

An imaging method combining soft-landing electrospray ion beam deposition and low-temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy resolves the structures of glycans at sub-nanometre resolution, revealing the connectivity of glycan chains and the types of linkages.

Sea surface density observations in the Arctic Ocean reveal a relationship between the present-day surface water density and the anthropogenic carbon inventory and coincident acidification, suggesting that recent acidification projections are underestimates.

Skeletal remains from the Neolithic passage tomb at Newgrange (Ireland) represent the adult son of a first-degree incestuous union, suggesting that a politico-religious elite may have controlled the construction of Irish sites of this type.

Modelling of population flows in China enables the forecasting of the distribution of confirmed cases of COVID-19 and the identification of areas at high risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission at an early stage.

Studies in rats and mice at different times of day suggest that the failure of neuroprotective strategies for stroke in translational studies might be related to the difference in circadian cycles between humans and rodents.

Skin organoids generated in vitro from human pluripotent stem cells form complex, multilayered skin tissue with hair follicles, sebaceous glands and neural circuitry, and integrate with endogenous skin when grafted onto immunocompromised mice.

Single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics reveal that the somitogenesis clock is active in mouse gastruloids, which can be induced to generate somites with the correct rostral–caudal patterning.

Human gastruloids—three-dimensional aggregates derived from human embryonic stem cells—show features of human embryos at around 19–21 days, and provide a model for the study of early human development.

A CRISPR-based screening platform was used to identify previously uncharacterized genes that regulate the regulatory T cell-specific master transcription factor Foxp3, indicating that this screening method may be broadly applicable for the discovery of other genes involved in autoimmunity and immune responses to cancer.

An analysis of the immunoglobulin repertoire of B cells in Peyer’s patch germinal centres in mice provides evidence for the selection of B cell receptor clonotypes by gut antigens and antigen-driven affinity maturation.

In mice, the pseudoautosomal region of the sex chromosomes undergoes a dynamic structural rearrangement to promote a high rate of DNA double-strand breaks and to ensure X–Y recombination.

RNA in situ conformation sequencing (RIC-seq) enables the generation of three-dimensional interaction maps of RNA in cells, which sheds light on the interactions and regulatory functions of RNA.

Dimethyl sulfate mutational profiling with sequencing, combined with the newly developed DREEM algorithm, reveals that heterogeneity of RNA structure in HIV-1 regulates the use of splice sites and expression of viral genes.

The X-ray crystal structure of the potassium channel TASK-1 reveals the presence of an X-gate, which traps small-molecule inhibitors in the intramembrane vestibule and explains their low washout rates from the channel.