Volume 583 Issue 7815, 9 July 2020

Carbon dioxide removal is becoming a serious proposition. But it is not a substitute for aggressive action to cut emissions.

Those who could be exploited by AI should be shaping its projects.

Emissions of sulfur hexafluoride soared over the 40 years to 2018, despite some countries’ efforts to curb its use.

A virus identified in China can infect human airway cells and seems to have infected pig-farm workers.

Reptiles’ writhing extends their time aloft.

The gases that envelop the distant dwarf planet might finally be freezing out and falling to the surface.

The latest science news, in brief.

A recent fire at a natural history museum in Minas Gerais is forcing some researchers to relive the pain of losing priceless specimens and artefacts.

The ‘quasiparticles’ defy the categories of ordinary particles and herald a potential way to build quantum computers.

From immunity to the role of genetics, Nature looks at five pressing questions about COVID-19 that researchers are tackling.

Jayaprakash Muliyil says coronavirus infections are rising rapidly in the country, and the surprisingly low death rate could be misleading.

A research institute that appointed Pier Paolo Pandolfi as its scientific director has reversed its decision after internal protests.

The United States, China and the United Arab Emirates will soon launch missions to a notoriously dangerous destination for spacecraft.

The United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter is the Arab world’s first interplanetary spacecraft — and has jump-started science in the country. Will the momentum last?

The social and economic impacts of COVID-19 fall harder on women than on men. Governments need to gather data and target policy to keep all citizens equally safe, sheltered and secure.

COVID-19 is exposing the fragility of the goals adopted by the United Nations — two-thirds are now unlikely to be met.

Frustrated and exhausted by systemic racism in the science community, Black researchers outline steps for action.

Engineer and roboticist Zach Ousnamer is helping to prepare NASA’s Perseverance rover for its launch to the red planet.

Efforts are intensifying to try to harness antibodies as a therapy for COVID-19. A study reveals the insights that can be gained from antibodies made by a person who had a coronavirus infection that caused the disease SARS.

Large-scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere might be achieved through enhanced rock weathering. It now seems that this approach is as promising as other strategies, in terms of cost and CO₂-removal potential.

Fibroblast, epithelial and endothelial cells are more than just the scaffold of an organ — it emerges that they communicate with immune cells and are primed to launch organ-specific gene-expression programs for antiviral defence.

DNA damage can cause mutations due to failure of DNA repair and errors during DNA replication. Tracking the strand of the DNA double helix on which damage occurs has shed light on processes that affect tumour evolution.

Pulsar timing measurements show a mass ratio of about 0.8 for the double neutron-star system PSR J1913+1102, and population synthesis models indicate that such asymmetric systems represent 2–30% of merging binaries.

Small-angle twisted bilayer–bilayer graphene is tunable by the twist angle and electric and magnetic fields, and can be used to gain further insights into correlated states in two-dimensional superlattices.

Twisted double bilayer graphene devices show tunable spin-polarized correlated states that are sensitive to electric and magnetic fields, providing further insights into correlated states in two-dimensional moiré materials.

An approach for integrating a large number of solid-state qubits on a photonic integrated circuit is used to construct a 128-channel artificial atom chip containing diamond quantum emitters.

A structural phase transition from metal to insulator on a solid surface is controlled by an ultrafast sequence of optical pulses.

A mobile robot autonomously operates analytical instruments in a wet chemistry laboratory, performing a photocatalyst optimization task much faster than a human would be able to.

A detailed assessment of the techno-economic potential of enhanced rock weathering on croplands identifies national CO₂ removal potentials, costs and engineering challenges if it were to be scaled up to help meet ambitious global CO₂ removal targets.

Dannychaeta tucolus, a bristle worm from the early Cambrian period, belongs to crown annelids, and has characters that provide evidence of ecological and morphological diversity in ancient annelids, thus reconciling the fossil record with molecular phylogenetic analyses.

Both piriform cortex and its sensory inputs from the olfactory bulb represent chemical odour relationships, but cortex reshapes relational information inherited from the sensory periphery to enhance odour generalization and to reflect experience.

Thousands of sperm genomes have been analysed with a new method called Sperm-seq, revealing interconnected meiotic variation at the single-cell and person-to-person levels, and suggesting chromosome compaction as a way to explain the relationships between diverse recombination phenotypes.

Mutagenic lesions such as those that give rise to cancer frequently segregate—unrepaired—during cell division, resulting in phasing of multiple alleles across generations of daughter cells and consequent tumour heterogeneity.

A systems-level map of the Arabidopsis hormone signalling network, comprising more than 2,000 binary protein–protein interactions, reveals hundreds of interpathway contact points, many of which mediate crosstalk between different hormone pathways.

Many of the molecular targets of strigolactones—plant hormones involved in development and in interactions with symbiotic and parasitic organisms—are uncovered, revealing how strigolactones function and an intriguing role for self-regulation of a downstream transcription factor.

SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses are identified in Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica); these pangolin-associated coronaviruses belonged to two sub-lineages of SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses, including one that exhibits strong similarity in the receptor-binding domain to SARS-CoV-2.

A newly identified coronavirus found in Malayan pangolins shares considerable sequence identity with SARS-CoV-2, which suggests that the latter may have originated from a recombination event involving SARS-related coronaviruses from bats and pangolins.

The monoclonal antibody S309, identified from memory B cells of an individual infected with SARS-CoV in 2003, or antibody cocktails that contain this antibody potently neutralize SARS-CoV-2.

Structural cells implement a broad range of immune-regulatory functions beyond their roles as barriers and connective tissues, and they utilize an epigenetically encoded potential for immune gene activation in their rapid response to viral infection.

During nutrient stress, ribosomal protein abundance is regulated primarily by translational and non-autophagic degradative mechanisms, but ribosome density per cell is largely maintained by reductions in cell volume and rates of cell division.

The cryo-EM structure of human U2 small nuclear ribonucleoprotein (snRNP) offers insights into what rearrangements are required for this snRNP to be stably incorporated into the spliceosome, and the role that the DEAD-box ATPase PRP5 may have in these rearrangements.

Crystallographic ‘snapshots’ taken at intervals of femtoseconds to milliseconds after activation show how a light-activated sodium pump carries sodium ions across the cell membrane.