Volume 589 Issue 7840, 7 January 2021

President-elect Joe Biden must coordinate efforts to gather COVID-19 infection data.

The latest science news, in brief.

Team detects a huge increase and says it could be due to climate change, but others can’t confirm the findings.

For the first time, the organizers of NeurIPS required speakers to consider the societal impact of their work.

NASA’s InSight mission yields the first data on the internal structure of a planet other than Earth.

Climate change and COVID-19 vaccines are among the themes set to shape research.

The speedy approach used to tackle SARS-CoV-2 could change the future of vaccine science.

Climate scientists recommend ways to boost the value of virtual conferences and reduce carbon footprints even when travel curbs ease.

A look at apps that predict the chance of infection and illness depending on what you’re doing and where you are.

For more than a decade, Josh Griffiths has been trapping the elusive venomous mammals to survey the status of their population.

Structural data revealing how an anti-tuberculosis drug works could aid efforts to improve therapeutic options for the disease. The findings also uncover aspects of how the drug’s target, the ATP synthase enzyme, operates.

Transitions between amorphous forms of solids and liquids are difficult to study. Machine learning has now provided fresh insight into pressure-induced transformations of amorphous silicon, opening the way to studies of other systems.

A high-throughput technique has been developed to screen genes implicated in neurodevelopmental diseases in 3D cell cultures. It reveals a mechanism that might be involved in a rare disorder called microcephaly.

The explosive growth of artificial intelligence calls for rapidly increasing computing power. Two reported photonic processors could meet these power requirements and revolutionize artificial-intelligence hardware.

Understanding the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 infections could help to limit viral spread. Analysing mobile-phone data to track human contacts at different city venues offers a way to model infection risks and explain infection disparities.

The factors affecting how and why supernovae occur are discussed, and the current status of core-collapse supernova explosion theory is reviewed.

A bilayer Fermi–Hubbard model is realized in two coupled two-dimensional layers of fermionic ultracold atoms by tuning the interlayer coupling strength to create a crossover between magnetic orderings.

An optical vector convolutional accelerator operating at more than ten trillion operations per second is used to create an optical convolutional neural network that can successfully recognize handwritten digit images with 88 per cent accuracy.

An integrated photonic processor, based on phase-change-material memory arrays and chip-based optical frequency combs, which can operate at speeds of trillions of multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations per second, is demonstrated.

Machine learning models enable atomistic simulations of phase transitions in amorphous silicon, predict electronic fingerprints, and show that the pressure-induced crystallization occurs over three distinct stages.

State-of-the-art electron energy-loss spectroscopy in a transmission electron microscope maps the detailed phonon spectra of single defects in silicon carbide

Analysis of dust from marine sediments in the North Pacific shows that warm periods during the Pliocene witnessed weaker and more poleward westerlies than during subsequent glacial periods.

Analyses of molecular, anatomical, pigmentation and ecological characteristics of nearly all of the approximately 240 species of cichlid fishes in Lake Tanganyika show that the massive adaptive radiation occurred within the confines of the lake through trait-specific pulses of accelerated evolution.

An epidemiological model that integrates fine-grained mobility networks illuminates mobility-related mechanisms that contribute to higher infection rates among disadvantaged socioeconomic and racial groups, and finds that restricting maximum occupancy at locations is especially effective for curbing infections.

The neuronal diversity of the Drosophila optic lobe is described throughout pupal development by single-cell sequencing, leading to the discovery of transient extrinsic neurons and a dorsoventral asymmetry of the visual circuits.

Studies using multi-structure recordings in macaque monkeys show that distinct phasic pontogeniculooccipital waves modulate hippocampal network events similar to those that underlie the learning and formation of memories during sleep.

Experiments in mouse pluripotent embryonic and epiblast stem cells show that TRF2 is dispensable for telomere protection specifically specifically in the pluripotent cells that form during early embryonic development, when cells form T-loops independently of this protein.

Depletion of TRF2—an essential mediator of telomere protection in most mammalian cells—in mouse embryonic stem cells activates a compensatory transcriptional program that renders TRF2 dispensable for their survival and proliferation.

Genes encoding the class A auxin-response factor group of plant transcriptional activators reside in constitutively open chromatin, enabling their continual regulation by transcriptional repressors to modulate auxin signalling throughout development.

Eukaryotic viperins originated from a clade of bacterial and archaeal proteins that catalyse the production of antiviral molecules.

A high-resolution map of coding regions in the SARS-CoV-2 genome enables the identification of 23 unannotated open reading frames and quantification of the expression of canonical viral open reading frames.

The authors show that zonation extends to hepatic immune cells and that this spatial patterning is mediated by microbiome sensing by liver sinusoidal endothelial cells, and provide evidence that immune zonation is required to protect the host from the dissemination of blood-borne pathogens.

Dosage compensation in Drosophila involves nucleation of the dosage compensation complex at the X chromosome by MSL2 and the non-coding RNA roX.

Structures of Mycobacterium smegmatis ATP synthase provide insights into how the enzyme conserves energy by autoinhibition of ATP hydrolysis and the mechanism of action of bedaquiline, a drug used in treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.

A cryo-electron microscopy structure of the yeast pheromone receptor Ste2, a class D G-protein-coupled receptor, in its active state reveals that Ste2 is a homodimer that couples to two G proteins.