Volume 584 Issue 7819, 6 August 2020

Sampling simulated data can reveal common ways in which our cognitive biases mislead us.

Most linear accelerators are energy hogs, but a new model recovers waste energy that can be ploughed back into the system.

The creation of spotless cephalopods hints that squid could make a good model organism for applying CRISPR to brain research.

A type of gut bacterium worsens the inflammatory response and cardiovascular problems in mice.

A curious gel can soak up water vapour from the air and swell to enormous size without bursting.

The latest science news, in brief.

Perseverance will stow away rocks for eventual delivery to Earth, and will listen for Martian sounds for the first time.

As NASA prepares to launch the first spacecraft that will collect samples from Mars, Nature looks at back at missions that have grabbed extraterrestrial material.

Companies could struggle to enrol enough trial participants, or gather enough data to convince regulatory agencies that the shots work.

Researchers say now is bad time to introduce a system for naming viral species, when scientists are focused on the coronavirus outbreak.

Barry Simon linked a phenomenon that had shocked physicists to topology, the branch of mathematics that studies shapes.

This coronavirus is here for the long haul — here’s what scientists predict for the next months and years.

The scenarios foresaw leaky travel bans, a scramble for vaccines and disputes between state and federal leaders, but none could anticipate the current levels of dysfunction in the United States.

Genetic research is rewriting the history of diseases.

Post-crash fascism and horrific detention of refugees — a biography traces the forces that drove nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs to treachery.

Two scourges of the infodemic show how to spot quantitative chicanery.

As the United Nations warns of famine on a scale not seen in 50 years, researchers must help to build agile, inclusive data collection and analysis to inform agricultural policy.

As tensions mount and treaties totter, fresh thinking is needed — on deterrence, emerging technologies and key players in east Asia.

A standardized exam is under fire amid claims that it perpetuates bias and exclusion.

Crafting a useful letter takes time and effort, particularly with the many demands on an academic’s time.

Six lessons from astronomy’s embrace of cloud computing.

Archaeologist Mina Weinstein-Evron explains how one of the world’s most ancient burial sites yields ‘exquisite’ discoveries.

An innovative metric has been devised to quantify the size and extent of the warm waters during marine heatwaves. It thus reflects how far ocean organisms might travel to find cooler conditions — a key factor in these warming events.

Rice in deepwater paddy fields can survive a slow-rising flood by a remarkably rapid elongation of submerged stem sections. Two genes discovered to affect this process could aid targeted improvements in crop height and flood tolerance.

Chemists generally regard benzene rings as preformed units that are elaborated to build larger molecules. This idea has now been challenged in reactions for making anilines — precursors of many high-value chemical products.

The long-debated timing of the peopling of the Americas comes into focus, thanks to some archaeological findings. What are the implications of a revised timeline for our understanding of these earliest inhabitants?

The discovery of the biosynthetic pathway for colchicine, a medicine produced by plants, holds promise for the use of metabolic-engineering approaches in producing reliably high yields of this compound.

Researchers have measured the equation of state of hydrocarbon in a high-density regime, which is necessary for accurate modelling of the oscillations of white dwarf stars.

Small lightning flashes detected on Jupiter by Juno have shallow origins above the 2-bar level of Jupiter’s atmosphere where temperatures are too low for liquid water to exist.

The semiclassical quantization rule breaks down for a class of dispersionless flat bands, and their anomalous Landau level spectrum is characterized by their Hilbert–Schmidt quantum distance.

A colloidal system is used to demonstrate the Mpemba effect and obtain the parameters responsible for its anomalous relaxation dynamics, which are manipulated to achieve exponentially faster cooling than typical.

A transformation in which an ‘ene’ reductase catalyses the visible-light-induced intermolecular radical hydroalkylation of alkenes gives carbonyl compounds with a remote stereocentre in high yield and enantioselectivity.

A dual cobalt and photocatalysis system provides a way to assemble anilines from cyclohexanones and amines by progressively dehydrating the intermediate imine.

Ocean heatwaves displace surface isotherms by tens to thousands of kilometres—comparable to shifts associated with long-term warming trends—potentially driving rapid redistributions of marine species.

Chiquihuite Cave (Zacatecas, Mexico) provides evidence of human presence in the Americas between about 33,000–31,000 and 14,000–12,000 years ago, and expands the cultural variability known from sites of this date.

A Bayesian age model suggests that human dispersal to the Americas probably began before the Last Glacial Maximum, overlapping with the last dates of appearance for several faunal genera.

The authors show that metabolic activity leads to an increase in the intracellular pH of neuromesodermal precursors, and that this increase in pH, by allowing post-translational modification of β-catenin, is required for the activation of WNT signalling and mesodermal fate acquisition.

An experimental and analytical pipeline is used to assess, at the single-cell level, complex transcriptional and morphological mutant phenotypes that occur in mouse embryos during gastrulation.

Stem growth in rice is regulated by an accelerator gene and a decelerator gene in parallel with gibberellic acid, and the opposite selection of these genes has led to adaptations to different environments.

In a study of antibodies isolated from patients infected with SARS-CoV-2, antibodies that potently neutralized the virus competed with angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 for binding to the receptor-binding domain of the viral spike protein, suggesting that antibodies that disrupt this interaction could be developed to treat SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Two monoclonal antibodies isolated from a patient with COVID-19 are shown to interfere with SARS-CoV-2–receptor binding, and one displays potent action against this virus in vitro and in a rhesus macaque model.

The structure of the D2 dopamine receptor in complex with its G protein reveals how dopamine receptors are activated and, importantly, how a G-protein-coupled receptor can interact with its G protein in a phospholipid membrane.

Population-specific patterns of genomic mutations and selection of haematopoietic clones in Japanese and European participants predict the divergent rates of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and T cell leukaemia in these populations.

Analysis of blood-derived DNA from participants in the UK Biobank demonstrates that clonal expansions of acquired copy-neutral loss of heterozygosity mutations act on inherited alleles along a chromosome arm by modifying their allelic dosages.

Pax5 regulates contraction of the immunoglobulin heavy chain (Igh) locus—an essential step in V(D)J recombination—by promoting chromatin loop extrusion via repression of Wapl expression.

Discovery of a near-complete colchicine biosynthetic pathway enables the engineered production of the tropolone-containing alkaloid N-formyldemecolcine from amino acid precursors in Nicotiana benthamiana.

A cryo-electron microscopy structure of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase of SARS-CoV-2 sheds light on coronavirus replication and enables the analysis of the inhibitory mechanisms of candidate antiviral drugs.