Volume 582 Issue 7813, 25 June 2020

Twenty years ago, the twentieth century’s last great scientific contest ended in a tie, aided by some deft statecraft from the White House.

Economic researchers neglect the role of financialization in global existential crises.

A coating made of liquid crystals perspires a drug-laced liquid.

The brilliant auroras seen near Earth’s poles have a rival on Mars.

Late-blossoming neurons show intriguing features that might endow them with advanced capabilities.

Personality traits help to explain why some people and not others hoarded a humdrum product in the face of a deadly virus.

The latest science news, in brief.

Public-health researchers use the infection fatality rate to gauge how to respond to a new disease, but it’s tricky to calculate.

In a large trial, a cheap and widely available steroid cut deaths by one-third among patients critically ill with COVID-19.

Researchers fear that breakthroughs from abroad will be too slow or inequitably shared to benefit the global south.

NASA’s New Horizons mission measures the distances of two stars from the outer reaches of the Solar System.

Israel is in the middle of a building boom to house its rapidly growing population, but some researchers fear the country isn’t doing enough to conserve its wealth of archaeological sites.

Richard Horton skewers leaders in two of the richest, most powerful and scientifically advanced countries for getting it so wrong.

One scientist’s zero-to-hero journey into risk, uncertainty, delusional models and the game of life.

Pandemic politics highlight how predictions need to be transparent and humble to invite insight, not blame.

A new measure for the rate of heat removal from battery packs gives manufacturers a simple way to compare products.

Researchers share tips for supporting research and life at a distance.

US federal biologist Christin Khan embraces risk above the Atlantic Ocean to monitor a rare species.

Astrocytes are non-neuronal brain cells that express a protein called PTB. It emerges that PTB depletion unlocks the potential of astrocytes to convert to neurons in a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease.

Archaeology is transforming our view of how ancient Maya societies developed. Use of lidar technology has now led to the discovery that large, monumental structures that aid naked-eye astronomy were built unexpectedly early.

Altered metabolism and genome instability are hallmarks of cancer. A mechanism now explains how three small molecules that accumulate in tumours connect abnormal metabolism to genomic problems by hindering DNA repair.

Quantum key distribution is a cryptographic method that can guarantee secure communication. A satellite-based experiment has shown that this technique can be applied over long distances without the need for trusted relays.

Global warming is threatening the survival of coral reefs. A laboratory model system has now been developed that should aid efforts to understand reef biology and the processes that underlie harmful bleaching events.

A transiting planet with a period of about 8.5 days and a radius 0.4 times that of Jupiter is reported within the debris disk around the star AU Microscopii.

An efficient entanglement-based quantum key distribution is sent from the Micius satellite to two ground observatories 1,120 kilometres apart to establish secure quantum cryptography for the exchange of quantum keys.

Combining thermal scanning-probe lithography with templating enables the production of high-quality gratings that manipulate light through Fourier-spectrum engineering in ways that are not achievable with conventional gratings.

Thin films of amorphous boron nitride are mechanically and electrically robust, prevent diffusion of metal atoms into semiconductors and have ultralow dielectric constants that exceed current recommendations for high-performance electronics.

A Damascus-like steel consisting of alternating hard and soft layers is created by using a laser additive manufacturing technique and digital control of the processing parameters.

Femtosecond X-ray liquidography is used to track the vibrational wavepacket trajectories of gold atoms in solution, enabling time-resolved observations of the emergence of vibrations and the evolution of the formation of covalent bonds.

Serpentine subducted below the Lesser Antilles volcanic arc supplies water to the arc, controlling the location of seismicity, volcanic productivity and thickness of crust.

Lidar survey of the Maya lowlands uncovers the monumental site of Aguada Fénix, which dates to around 1000–800 bc and points to the role of communal construction in the development of Maya civilization.

Single-cell RNA sequencing identifies the pattern of gene expression during lineage progression in endosymbiotic cells of the fast-growing soft coral Xenia, revealing principles that underlie uptake and maintenance of endosymbionts by this coral.

Neurons in the canary premotor cortex homologue encode past song phrases and transitions, carrying information relevant to future choice of phrases as ‘hidden states’ during song.

Feedback projections onto neurons of the mouse primary visual cortex generate a second excitatory receptive field that is driven by stimuli outside of the classical feedforward receptive field, with responses mediated by higher visual areas.

Depletion of the RNA-binding protein PTB (also known as PTBP1) in astrocytes reprograms these cells to become functional neurons and, in a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease, reverses the disease phenotype.

Aerodynamic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in two hospitals in Wuhan indicates that SARS-CoV-2 may have the potential to be transmitted through aerosols, although the infectivity of the virus RNA was not established in this study.

A yeast-based synthetic genomics platform is used to reconstruct and characterize large RNA viruses from synthetic DNA fragments; this technique will facilitate the rapid analysis of RNA viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, during an outbreak.

The biosynthetic pathway that produces the secondary bile acids DCA and LCA in human gut microbes has been fully characterized, engineered into another bacterial host, and used to confer DCA production in germ-free mice—an important proof-of-principle for the engineering of gut microbial pathways.

Single-cell RNA sequencing of haematopoietic cells from human embryos at different developmental stages sheds light on the development and specification of macrophages in different tissues.

Sexual dimorphism in genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia, systemic lupus erythematosus and Sjögren’s syndrome is linked to differential protein abundance from alleles of complement component 4.

Within three-dimensional environments, leukocytes can migrate even in the complete absence of adhesive forces using the topographical features of the substrate to propel themselves.

Metabolites that are elevated in tumours inhibit the lysine demethylase KDM4B, resulting in aberrant hypermethylation of histone 3 lysine 9 and decreased homology-dependent DNA repair.

An advanced proteomics workflow is used to identify 340,000 proteins from 100 taxonomically diverse species, providing a comparative view of proteomes across the evolutionary range.