Volume 584 Issue 7822, 27 August 2020

Two steps will help collaborations worldwide to share information and comply with EU privacy rules.

Fossilized ichthyosaur offers a prehistoric ‘Kinder Surprise’ for researchers.

Rain-fuelled nanogenerators could power small electrical devices.

A marine food web recreated in the laboratory provides a sobering look at ocean life in a warming world.

Hospital records show a link between the doctor’s ethnicity and the risk of death for Black newborns.

The latest science news, in brief.

Masks, class sizes and hygiene are important, but low community spread is key.

Researchers call for more rigorous clinical trials as rumours abound that US regulators are considering widening access to the potential therapy.

Wealthy countries have already pre-ordered more than two billion doses.

An algorithm developed to spot abnormal patterns of citations aims to find scientists who have manipulated reference lists.

Plant scientist Ottoline Leyser takes the reins of UK Research and Innovation at a turbulent time.

Despite COVID-19 infections running rampant in many states, nearly 1,000 academic institutions are welcoming people back to their campuses.

Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli bounced ideas off each other, Paul Halpern’s book shows.

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

The inventor of alternating current, motors and more is back — and this time, he sings.

Responses to the pandemic in India’s slums, Brazil’s favelas and Africa’s marketplaces show that networks play a crucial part in making cities more resilient. Let’s enhance and empower them.

Governments should stop spending billions of dollars on weapons and protect citizens from the real threats they face.

Subtle biases and structural inequalities need challenging just like overt acts of racial aggression and discrimination.

Universities and those who work there must reimagine spaces, behaviour and processes to promote a sense of belonging for everyone, say Danielle McCullough and Ruth Gotian.

Missing documentation and obsolete environments force participants in the Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge to get creative.

Quantum engineer Clarice Aiello aims to discover how laws of quantum mechanics affect vision and other functions.

An ingenious combination of satellite imaging, machine learning and stress analysis has revealed the Antarctic ice shelves that are most at risk of disintegrating as a result of atmospheric warming.

A pheromone molecule that makes crop-damaging locusts swarm has been identified. Could this pheromone, which is sensed by odorant receptors, be used to trap these insects and prevent the agricultural devastation that they cause?

Tiny devices have been developed that can act as the legs of laser-controlled microrobots. The compatibility of these devices with microelectronics systems suggests a path to the mass manufacture of autonomous microrobots.

New Guinea has the world’s richest island flora, according to the area’s first plant list catalogued by experts. Completing this list poses a formidable challenge that New Guineans are best placed to take up.

Learning how immune cells target tumours is crucial for cancer immunotherapy. The finding that a type of dendritic cell activates two sorts of T cell and coordinates their crosstalk sheds light on immune responses to tumours.

This Review explores the role of viscoelasticity of tissues and extracellular matrices in cell–matrix interactions and mechanotransduction and the potential utility of viscoelastic biomaterials in regenerative medicine.

The size of the inner disk of the T Tauri star TW Hydrae is determined using optical long-baseline interferometric observations, indicating that hydrogen emission comes from a region approximately 3.5 stellar radii across.

Ionizing radiation from environmental radioactivity and cosmic rays increases the density of broken Cooper pairs in superconducting qubits, reducing their coherence times, but can be partially mitigated by lead shielding.

A new class of voltage-controllable electrochemical actuators that are compatible with silicon processing are used to produce over one million sub-hundred-micrometre walking robots on a single four-inch wafer.

A molecular strand can be knotted and unknotted into three different topologies, depending on the complexing metal ion used (copper or lanthanide or none).

A compilation of proxy data are used with an isotope-enabled climate model ensemble to constrain cooling during the Last Glacial Maximum, producing estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity that agree well with the current consensus range.

Using a neural network trained on continent-wide data and a fracture model, the ice shelves in Antarctica that may be prone to hydrofracturing under further atmospheric warming are identified.

A catalogue of the vascular flora of New Guinea indicates that this island is the most floristically diverse in the world, and that 68% of the species identified are endemic to New Guinea.

4-Vinylanisole, which is emitted by gregarious locusts or as a result of aggregation of solitary locusts, is identified as an aggregation pheromone that strongly attracts both solitary and gregarious locusts, acting via the olfactory receptor OR35.

A genome-wide association study shows that myocardial trabeculae are an important determinant of cardiac performance in the adult heart, identifies conserved pathways that regulate structural complexity and reveals the influence of trabeculae on the susceptibility to cardiovascular disease.

Each one of the complete set of 118 neuron classes in Caenorhabditis elegans can be specified individually by the expression of unique combinations of homeodomain proteins.

Resequencing analyses of three species of wild sunflower identify large non-recombining haplotype blocks that correlate with ecologically relevant traits, soil and climate characteristics, and that differentiate species ecotypes.

The multipotency of basal stem cells is directly regulated by luminal cells through the secretion of TNF, and, following luminal cell ablation, the Notch, Wnt and EGFR signalling pathways reactivate basal cell multipotency.

The small molecule GS-6207, which disrupts the function of the HIV capsid protein, shows potential as a long-acting therapeutic agent for the treatment and prevention of HIV infection.

A predicted loss-of-function germline mutation in FLT3 causes a reduction in full-length FLT3, with a compensatory increase in the levels of FLT3 ligand, leading to increased risk of autoimmune thyroid disease.

Conventional type 1 dendritic cells perform antigen processing and priming of CD4⁺ and CD8⁺ T cells against tumour antigens, orchestrating their cross-talk to effect anti-tumour immunity.

The PAT complex, an intermembrane chaperone complex comprising the ER-resident membrane proteins CCDC47 and Asterix, directly interacts with nascent transmembrane domains to facilitate the biogenesis of multi-spanning membrane proteins.

Newly identified protein SPOCD1 is crucial in de novo DNA methylation directed by PIWI proteins and piRNAs, helping to control DNA silencing in mouse male germline.

Time-resolved cryogenic electron microscopy structures of a ribosome during the delivery of aminoacyl-tRNA by EF-Tu•GTP capture 33 ribosomal states, enabling visualization of the initial selection, proofreading and peptidyl transfer stages.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the ATP-permeable channel pannexin 1 reveal a gating mechanism involving multiple distinct ion-conducting pathways.