Volume 588 Issue 7836, 3 December 2020

Most funders have no plans to provide postdoctoral researchers with additional pandemic funding. Society will pay a high price if this neglect continues.

Why I put my political will behind knowledge to benefit the ocean and humanity.

Ancient teeth hint that a handful of sites served as sheltered sanctuaries for immature megalodon sharks.

Dying cells can revive for long enough to trigger their own replacement.

A species of leaf-cutter ant is the first known example of an insect with mineralized armour, which shields them during combat.

Trapped gas causes buried sediments to flow like water, rising and erupting dangerously at the sea floor.

The latest science news, in brief.

The viruses, both found in bats stored in laboratory freezers, are the first SARS-CoV-2 relatives to be found outside China.

Preliminary data suggest that the immunization was more effective in trial participants who received a lower dose.

Immunizations are speeding towards approval before clinical trials end, but scientists say this could complicate efforts to study long-term effects.

The journals will charge authors up to €9,500 to make research papers free to read, in a long-awaited alternative to subscription-only publishing.

Cosmologists suggest that an exotic substance called quintessence could be accelerating the Universe’s expansion — but the evidence is still tentative.

Delirium is very common on COVID wards. Researchers are testing whether these temporary bouts of confusion could bring on permanent cognitive decline.

Why do stone, bronze, iron, oil and data get all the attention?

Strange beasts stalk a history of thought experiments.

Physicist who won Nobel for optical tweezers that trap atoms and proteins.

Unleash the ocean’s potential to boost economies sustainably while addressing climate change, food security and biodiversity.

Nature’s first-ever survey of this key segment of the scientific workforce uncovers anxiety and doubt about their professional pathway.

Despite having a steep learning curve, the programming language offers speed and safety.

Immunologist Federica Benvenuti investigates the guard dogs of the immune system while training young scientists from developing nations.

An artificially intelligent controller can station a stratospheric balloon for weeks at a time without full knowledge of surrounding winds, opening up the prospect of unsupervised environmental monitoring.

Neurons progressively deteriorate with age and lose resilience to injury. It emerges that treatment with three transcription factors can re-endow neurons in the mature eye with youthful characteristics and the capacity to regenerate.

What determines the chemical make-up of human blood? Measurement of the contributions of factors ranging from genetics to lifestyle has now identified diet and gut microbes as key predictors of blood’s molecular composition.

A highly precise measurement of a physical constant known as the fine-structure constant provides a stringent test of the standard model of particle physics, and sets strong limits on the existence of speculative particles.

Recent work on optical computing for artificial intelligence applications is reviewed and the potential and challenges of all-optical and hybrid optical networks are discussed.

The authors review how the presence of organized crime in the fisheries sector hinders progress towards the development of a sustainable ocean economy and highlight practical opportunities to address this problem at both the local and the global level.

The triple-α reaction rate in proton-rich core-collapse supernovae is found to be enhanced at high nucleon densities, suppressing the formation of proton-rich nuclei from gallium to cadmium.

The fine-structure constant is determined with an accuracy of 81 parts per trillion using matter-wave interferometry to measure the rubidium atom recoil velocity.

Non-volatile electrical switching of magnetic order in an orbital Chern insulator is experimentally demonstrated using a moiré heterostructure and analysis shows that the effect is driven by topological edge states.

Electronic ferroelectricity is observed in a graphene-based moiré heterostructure, which is explained using a spontaneous interlayer charge-transfer model driven by layer-specific on-site Coulomb repulsion.

Data augmentation and a self-correcting design are used to develop a reinforcement-learning algorithm for the autonomous navigation of Loon superpressure balloons in challenging stratospheric weather conditions.

A synthetic route-planning algorithm, augmented with causal relationships that allow it to strategize over multiple steps, can design complex natural-product syntheses that are indistinguishable from those designed by human experts.

A model is proposed for the origin of cratonic lithospheric mantle in which rifting and melting in the hot, early Earth mantle leave behind large volumes of stiffer, depleted mantle.

Modelled supply curves show that, with policy reform and technological innovation, the production of food from the sea may increase sustainably, perhaps supplying 25% of the increase in demand for meat products by 2050.

Kylinxia zhangi is a transitional fossil that is an evolutionary ‘missing link’ between radiodonts (also known as anomalocaridids) and true arthropods, providing insights into the origin and early evolution of Arthropoda.

Population genomic analyses of Midas cichlid fishes in young Nicaraguan crater lakes suggest that sympatric speciation is promoted by polygenic architectures.

The authors uncover the diverse transcriptomic cell types of thirst-driving neurons in the lamina terminalis and show that unique combinations of neuron types respond to and mediate distinct thirst states.

By collecting nearly 50,000 perceptual estimates of smell, a reliable physicochemical measure that links odorant structure to odorant perception at a resolution that enables the creation of olfactory metamers was derived.

Expression of three Yamanaka transcription factors in mouse retinal ganglion cells restores youthful DNA methylation patterns, promotes axon regeneration after injury, and reverses vision loss in a mouse model of glaucoma and in aged mice, suggesting that mammalian tissues retain a record of youthful epigenetic information that can be accessed to improve tissue function.

Differences in the mechanical properties of individual cardiomyocytes drive their segregation into compact versus trabecular layer, thereby transforming the myocardium in a developing heart from a simple epithelium into an intricately patterned tissue with distinct cell fates.

The levels of 1,251 metabolites are measured in 475 phenotyped individuals, and machine-learning algorithms reveal that diet and the microbiome are the determinants with the strongest predictive power for the levels of these metabolites.

The authors show that large endogenous viral elements derived from giant viruses are prominent components of green algal genomes.

Blockade of the C5a–C5aR1 axis using anti-C5aR1 monoclonal antibodies prevented inflammation associated with COVID-19.

Blockade of lymphotoxin β-receptor (LTβR) signalling restores WNT signalling and epithelial repair in a model of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Inhibition of YBX1, a downstream target of the Janus kinase JAK2, sensitizes myeloproliferative neoplasm cells to JAK and could provide a means to eradicate such cells in human haematopoietic cancers.

Binding of the small molecule BI-3802 to the oncogenic transcription factor B cell lymphoma 6 (BCL6) induces polymerization of BCL6, leading to its ubiquitination by SIAH1 and proteasomal degradation.

Inverted-repeat Alu elements are the main source of drug-induced immunogenic double-stranded RNAs, which are destabilized by the RNA deaminase ADAR1, thereby limiting activation of the immune response.

SLC25A51 is identified as a transporter of intact NAD⁺ into mammalian mitochondria and is required to maintain the mitochondrial NAD⁺ pool and respiratory function.