Volume 586 Issue 7827, 1 October 2020

Public trust in a potential vaccine is under threat. Drug companies and their academic partners must disclose protocols and results data.

Smarter ways to assess fires will bring better methods of preventing damage.

Tweets about biology preprints generally come from members of the academic community — but politics also plays a part.

Artificial intelligence helps to propel a machine to victory in an Olympic sport described as ‘chess on ice’.

The elusive Cuvier’s beaked whale, already known for its prowess as a diver, turns out to have even more staying power than scientists thought.

Climate change drives vegetation gains in patches of the high Arctic tundra.

The latest science news, in brief.

The NAS told Nature that no one has used the complaint system put in place last year, even though several academy members are known sexual harassers.

Researchers warn that vaccines could stumble on safety trials, be fast-tracked because of politics or fail to meet the public’s expectations.

Pictures created from old observations show the void’s stormy evolution over the past decade.

Survey finds that many researchers are banned from speaking about their work or have had their research altered to downplay risks.

Infernos in South America’s Pantanal region have burnt twice the area of California’s fires this year. Researchers fear the rare ecosystem will never recover.

Researchers are exploring ways to use people’s voices to diagnose coronavirus infections, dementia, depression and much more.

The United States must change how it measures society, argues metrics maven Julia Lane.

Three scientific artists explain how to create impact with attractive visuals.

Converting paper records to digital formats provides secure back-ups that researchers can access from anywhere.

Conservation scientist Ricardo Rocha seeks to discover how deforestation affects communities of bats that feast on disease-bearing insects.

An assessment of past, present and future ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet shows that rates of loss in the twenty‑first century will be much higher than those at any time during the past 11,700 years.

The rhythmic activity of a single layer of neurons has now been shown to cause dissociation — an experience involving a feeling of disconnection from the surrounding world.

An ancient resistance mechanism poses a problem when using streptogramin antibiotics. A modular approach to drug synthesis exploits this same mechanism to generate an antibiotic that avoids the emergence of resistance.

Influenza vaccination induces a protective memory immune response. The finding that human naive and memory B cells enter vaccine-induced germinal-centre structures suggests that both cell types aid this memory response.

Theoretically predicted fractional antiferromagnetic skyrmions are experimentally realized in MnSc₂S₄ and are found to originate from anisotropic couplings over nearest neighbours in the crystal lattice.

An ultimately thin microwave bolometric sensor based on a superconductor–graphene–superconductor Josephson junction with monolayer graphene has a sensitivity approaching the fundamental limit imposed by intrinsic thermal fluctuations.

A thermal detector based on a graphene monolayer operates at the threshold for circuit quantum electrodynamics applications, achieving a minimum time constant of 200 ns.

Experiments and simulations show that local non-equilibrium forces exerted by self-propelled particles trapped inside a giant unilamellar lipid vesicle induce dramatic shape changes in the vesicle.

In a rotating reactor, immiscible or pairwise-immiscible liquids organize into stable but internally agitated concentric layers, enabling multistep syntheses and separations of reaction mixtures.

Analysis of two homologous groups of fungal pericyclases demonstrates how they can catalyse either an Alder-ene reaction—which has not previously been found in nature—or a hetero-Diels–Alder reaction.

Rates of ice-mass loss from southwestern Greenland this century will exceed the maximum rate over the past 12,000 years, and would not be the result of natural variation.

Analyses of the genomes of cichlid species reveal that the combination of ecological opportunity, sexual selection and exceptional genomic potential is the key to understanding explosive adaptive radiation in cichlids.

Genome-wide analysis of tandem DNA repeats in the genomes of individuals with autism spectrum disorder and control participants reveals a strong contribution of tandem repeat expansions to the genetic aetiology and phenotypic complexity of autism spectrum disorder.

Dissociative states in mouse and human brains are traced to low-frequency rhythmic neural activity—with distinct molecular, cellular and physiological properties—in the deep retrosplenial cortex and the posteromedial cortex.

The primate amygdala contains a shared neural circuitry for eye gaze and for valence; however, this circuitry implements two different neural codes—one for the outcome and another for the expectation of the outcome.

Single-cell transcriptomics roadmap of human dermal fibroblasts reprogrammed to primed and naive pluripotency reveals a route for the direct reprogramming of somatic cells into induced trophoblast stem cells.

Phytate metabolism and production of inositol trisphosphate by commensal bacteria activates epithelial histone deacetylase 3 and promotes intestinal repair.

A screen of the ReFRAME library of approximately 12,000 known drugs for antiviral activity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) identified several candidate compounds with suitable activities and pharmacological profiles, which could potentially expedite the deployment of therapies for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

Genome-wide CRISPR screens in mouse cancer cell lines are used to identify a core, conserved set of genes and pathways that govern how cancer cells evade killing by cytotoxic T lymphocytes.

The human germinal centre response to influenza virus vaccination is fuelled by the continued recruitment of naive B cells as well as pre-existing memory B cells.

In two mouse models of intestinal cancer, mutant p53 has an oncogenic effect in the distal gut but a tumour-suppressive effect in the proximal gut, and these opposing properties are determined by the gut microbiome.

Modified chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) technology is used to characterize the interactions between sister chromatids, despite their identical DNA sequences.

Modular synthesis and structural biology are used to design and characterize group A streptogramin antibiotics, one of which has activity against streptogramin-resistant strains and demonstrates efficacy in a mouse model of bacterial infection.

Catalytically inactive DNMT3B3 is crucial in de novo CpG methylation of DNA, interacting with the nucleosome core to orient catalytically active DNMT3A2 so that it can bind to nearby linker DNA.