Volume 587 Issue 7833, 12 November 2020

It is better to stop misinformation taking root than to try to weed it out.

The burial and others like it suggest that female hunters were common in the Americas thousands of years ago.

Armed with a DNA core, a sensor can sneak into a cell and read out the voltage differences of the organelles inside.

The cities in India are notorious for their polluted air, but the air outside cities is just as dirty.

A creature so small that it could fit into a matchbox if it folded its wing made an epic migration.

The latest science news, in brief.

The new president has the opportunity to reverse four years of anti-science policies — but he has a hard road ahead as he inherits a nation divided.

Chang’e-5 has just one lunar day to collect lunar material from a previously unexplored region of the Moon’s near side.

With its orbiter Hope on its way to Mars, the United Arab Emirates has now set its sights on the Moon.

Researchers say it is unclear on what basis the drugs were approved for ‘emergency use’.

Nature talks to Peter Shor 25 years after he showed how to make quantum computations feasible — and how they could endanger our data.

Hard-won experience, changing demographics and reduced strain on hospitals are all possibilities — but no one knows how long the change will last.

Ozone-hole Nobel winner, Montreal Protocol advocate, presidents’ adviser.

Beyond vaccine safety, efficacy and procurement lie licensing and delivery — nations must get ready.

Julia Nolte realized that the only fair comparison to make during a PhD is with your past self.

The shift to virtual conferences needs to be accompanied by a sensitivity to people in different time zones.

Teresa Lambe is working with AstraZeneca to give the world a shot against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

Mismatches are alterations in DNA that prevent the bases on each strand of the double helix from aligning correctly. It emerges that mismatches can bend DNA into favourable conformations for binding by proteins.

Tropical cyclones weaken after they reach land. But it emerges that for the North Atlantic basin, storms are weakening more slowly as regional sea surface temperatures increase.

The enzyme caspase-8 can induce cell death or promote survival and the expression of inflammatory proteins. The discovery of a previously unknown caspase-8 target solves one mystery about immune-defence regulation.

Experiments conducted deep beneath a mountain have provided the most precise measurements yet of a key nuclear reaction that occurred seconds after the Big Bang — refining our knowledge of the constituents of the Universe.

A whole-genome alignment of 240 phylogenetically diverse species of eutherian mammal—including 131 previously uncharacterized species—from the Zoonomia Project provides data that support biological discovery, medical research and conservation.

Analysis of the size and depth of craters on boulders on the asteroid (101955) Bennu indicates that Bennu has been in near-Earth space for 1.75 ± 0.75 million years.

High-precision cross-sections of the nuclear reaction that burns deuterium to create helium-3 are used to produce theoretical estimates of the primordial baryon density that are in agreement with recent astronomical observations.

An optical sensing technique reveals an abundance of correlated insulating states at fractional fillings of moiré superlattices that are proposed to arise from a series of charge-ordered states.

Strain gauges with both high sensitivity and high mechanical resilience, based on strain-mediated contact in anisotropically resistive structures, are demonstrated within a sensor-integrated, textile-based sleeve that can recognize human hand motions via muscle deformations.

The onset of rigidity in a two-dimensional colloidal glass-forming system is identified by the formation and merging of locally rigid domains in which particles move in a cooperative manner.

North Atlantic landfalling hurricanes are weakening more slowly than in the past because warming oceans are increasing the moisture carried by the storm until it hits land, and this storm moisture acts as an ongoing heat source post-landfall.

A robotic pipeline is used to survey a library of mutations in a Drosphila gene enhancer, showing that most mutations altered gene expression and had widespread pleiotropic effects that are likely to constrain regulatory evolution.

The Progressive Cactus program can create reference-free alignments of hundreds of large vertebrate genomes efficiently, and is used for the alignment of more than 600 amniote genomes.

A dataset of the genomes of 363 species from the Bird 10,000 Genomes Project shows increased power to detect shared and lineage-specific variation, demonstrating the importance of phylogenetically diverse taxon sampling in whole-genome sequencing.

Two populations of neurons with distinct anatomy and receptor expression that convey information from the spinal cord to the brain have different functional properties with respect to touch and pain.

Social memory is consolidated in the brain through the reactivation of neuronal firing by sharp-wave ripples in the CA2 region of the hippocampus, in a similar way to the consolidation of spatial memory.

A study of patients with COVID-19 and healthy donors found CD4⁺ T cells that react to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 and human endemic coronaviruses; however, the effect of pre-existing SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactive T cells on clinical outcomes remains to be determined.

NEDD4-binding protein 1 (N4BP1) is identified as a suppressor of cytokine production that is inactivated by caspase-8, which provides insight into the mechanisms underlying the immunodeficiency caused by mutations in FADD and caspase-8.

Genomic integration of an adeno-associated virus vector in a mouse model of Angelman syndrome unsilences paternal Ube3a and rescues anatomical and behavioural phenotypes, suggesting a pathway towards the treatment of this neurodevelopmental disorder.

The surfactant-like protein Ki-67 mediates the clustering of chromosomes during mitotic exit, which displaces large cytoplasmic molecules from the future nuclear space and thus enables the separation of cytoplasmic and nuclear components before the nuclear envelope reforms.

A high-throughput assay that introduces mismatched base pairs into the DNA sequence shows that mismatches can increase transcription factor binding affinity by prepaying some of the energetic cost of distorting the DNA.

Mother cells recycle parental MCMs and simultaneously synthesize nascent MCMs, both of which are inherited by daughter cells, in which the former are preferentially used to form active replisomes and the latter adjust the pace of replisome movement to minimize errors during DNA replication.

Telomeric-repeat-containing RNA is recruited to telomeres by a mechanism that involves the DNA recombinase RAD51 and the formation of DNA–RNA hybrids, or R-loops—a process similar to that involved in homology-directed DNA repair.

The structure of a RIFIN–LILRB1 complex reveals that a subset of RIFINs of Plasmodium falciparum mimics the binding mode of the natural ligand of human LILRB1 and suppress the function of natural killer cells in humans.

Structural and functional studies of the sodium leak channel, non-selective (NALCN) in complex with a distinct auxiliary subunit reveal the structural basis of the channel function and pharmacology and the functional impact of mutations that cause NALCN channelopathies.