Volume 588 Issue 7838, 17 December 2020

The sentiment that underpinned the Brexit referendum’s success is not limited to the United Kingdom.

Although imperfect, the world’s biggest funding scheme got a lot right.

Odd protein droplets that behave like liquids make a smooth shift to having the properties of a solid.

Tiny particles forming on the roof of the world can affect global climate.

A steaming pile holds allure for giant pandas, especially at one time of year.

Artisanal baking practices nourished a strain of yeast that is distinct from industrial microbes.

The latest science news, in brief.

The FDA has issued an emergency-use authorization for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine. Regulators are gearing up to look for side effects.

The Oxford–AstraZeneca partnership is the first major developer to publish detailed data from phase III trials.

Photon-based quantum computer does a calculation that ordinary computers might never be able to do.

Some researchers worry that shifting priorities towards pandemic-focused science comes at the expense of other disciplines.

Childrens’ untrained immune response seems to be key to eliminating SARS-CoV-2.

Researchers report early successes using genetic approaches to treat sickle-cell anaemia and β-thalassaemia.

Rich nations have struggled with one of the most basic and important methods for controlling infectious diseases.

Measures meant to tame the coronavirus pandemic are quashing influenza and most other respiratory diseases, which could have wide-ranging implications.

From sequencing to stardom — alumnae of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology reflect on how they succeeded in science.

Researchers reflect on a challenging pandemic year and on how lockdowns changed their approach to work and their perceptions of the scientific enterprise.

How horses and cows are enticing skylarks and starlings back to an island meadow.

An atlas of European river barriers has been made, by curating and correcting existing records, and by surveying 2,700 kilometres of waterways. It reveals that rivers are fragmented by an amazing number of obstructions.

Atomic clocks known as optical clocks are more accurate and stable than current timekeepers. Two quantum-engineering approaches could improve the performance of optical clocks even further and extend their applications.

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages globally, interest in antiviral treatments has never been higher. Antibodies are key defence components, and engineering them to better exploit their natural functions might boost therapeutic options.

Dinosaur relatives called pterosaurs are the earliest known flying vertebrates. The branch of the evolutionary tree from which pterosaurs evolved has been unclear, but new fossil discoveries offer a solution to the mystery.

Spin transport far from equilibrium is studied in a Heisenberg model with adjustable anisotropy realized with coupled ultracold ⁷Li atoms, and different dynamical regimes are found for positive and negative anisotropies.

A tweezer clock containing about 150 ⁸⁸Sr atoms achieves trapping and optical excited-state lifetimes exceeding 40 seconds, and shows relative fractional frequency stability similar to that of leading atomic clocks.

A many-atom state of trapped ¹⁷¹Yb atoms that are entangled on an optical atomic-clock transition overcomes the standard quantum limit, providing a proof-of-principle demonstration towards entanglement-based optical atomic clocks.

The number of edge channels in quantum anomalous Hall insulators is controlled by varying either the magnetic dopant concentration or the interior spacer layer thickness, yielding Chern numbers up to 5.

A van der Waals structure based on a two-dimensional magnet and layered superconductor offers a potential system in which topological superconductivity could be easily tuned and integrated into devices.

An anion and metal ion template is used to form woven polymer patches that are joined together by polymerization into a fully woven, two-dimensional, molecular patchwork.

Validated barrier inventories and modelling indicate that Europe’s rivers are fragmented by more than one million barriers, such as dams, weirs and fords, causing major impacts on biodiversity.

Estimates of global total biomass (the mass of all living things) and anthopogenic mass (the mass embedded in inanimate objects made by humans) over time show that we are roughly at the timepoint when anthropogenic mass exceeds total biomass.

Lagerpetids, bipedal archosaurs that are thought to be related to dinosaurs, are instead a sister group to pterosaurs, and although they have no obvious flight adaptations they share numerous synapomorphies with pterosaurs across the entire skeleton.

Direct electrical stimulation of the brain in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) predictably varied subjective valuation and choices, linking valuation and economic decision making to the orbitofrontal cortex.

The components of active zones at neuronal synapses are well known, but the processes underlying the assembly of these structures are less so; here, a role for liquid–liquid phase separation of scaffold proteins is identified.

In the absence of progranulin, microglia enter a disease-specific state that causes endolysosomal dysfunction and neurodegeneration, and these microglia promote TDP-43 granule formation, nuclear pore defects and cell death specifically in excitatory neurons via the complement activation pathway.

Single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing are used to construct a cellular atlas of the human heart that will aid further research into cardiac physiology and disease.

Thermal proteome profiling combined with a reverse genetics approach provides insights into the abundance and thermal stability of the global proteome of Escherichia coli.

mTORC1 stabilizes HMG-CoA reductase, a rate-limiting enzyme in the cholesterol biosynthesis pathway, via the deubiquitylase USP20 in response to feeding.

An antibody Fc domain variant with enhanced binding to an activating Fc receptor on dendritic cells promotes the induction of a protective CD8 T cell response.

IFITM3 shifts upon phosphorylation from acting as an antiviral effector to being a scaffold for PIP3 and thereby amplifies PI3K signalling, which can be co-opted for malignant transformation in B cell leukaemia and lymphoma.

Cryo-electron microscopy and tomography studies reveal the structures, conformations and distributions of spike protein trimers on intact severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virions and provide a basis for understanding the interactions of the spike protein with neutralizing antibodies.

Accumulation of hydrophobic residues at the interface between monomers may favour the maintenance of multimeric protein states during evolution, even if multimerization confers no functional advantage.

Crystal structures of the MEK kinase bound to the scaffold protein KSR and various MEK inhibitors, including the anti-cancer drug trametinib, reveal the molecular and functional mechanisms behind MEK inhibition.

The structure of myosin-2 in the shutdown state reveals how the shutdown state is stabilized and how phosphorylation of light chains allows myosin to be activated.

High-resolution cryo-electron microscopy structure of smooth muscle myosin II in the inhibited state enables increased understanding of the functions of the head and tail regions in regulation of myosin activity and the pathological mechanisms of disease mutations.