Volume 589 Issue 7841, 14 January 2021

COVAX is key to both immunizing the world’s poorest people and ending the pandemic.

It’s time to apply research on in-person public deliberation to the virtual world.

A strange and unstable astronomical object seems to have formed from the merger of two white dwarfs.

Bottom trawling not only erodes the sea bed, but also reduces its carbon-storage capacity.

Dwarf planet on the Solar System’s outer fringes might have particles of frozen organic matter in its atmosphere.

A mouse sharing a companion's fear has different neural patterns to one sharing another animal’s pain.

The expertise of local people could help to protect an extremely rare Philippine species.

Zapping helium ‘dimers’ with lasers allows a glimpse into a fleeting relationship.

DNA barcodes help to detail the genomic architecture and sequence of an unbroken cell or even an entire embryo.

The latest science news, in brief.

Researchers race to determine why lineages identified in Britain and South Africa spread so quickly and whether they’ll compromise vaccines.

Scientists seek guidance on exploring frozen caches at the lunar poles responsibly.

Researchers worry that efforts to free up limited vaccine doses are driven by desperation rather than data.

Models estimate that travel restrictions worked early in the pandemic, but became less effective throughout the year.

The eleventh-hour trade agreement between Britain and the European Union came as a relief to UK researchers because it means that they can be funded by EU programmes.

Scientists are getting to grips with the role of mechanical forces in the body, from embryo to adult.

The technology could revolutionize efforts to immunize against HIV, malaria, influenza and more.

Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell fought to be doctors in the mid-nineteenth century, and to train more women as physicians.

Particle physicist who shared Nobel for discovering muon neutrinos.

Improve materials and architectures to shrink microscopic devices.

Researchers from Native American and Indigenous communities explain how colleagues and institutions can help them to battle marginalization.

Computers trained to reduce the noise in micrographs can now tackle fresh data by themselves.

Materials scientist Clara Barker praises the University of Oxford for creating a welcoming space.

Celestial eruptions known as giant magnetar flares have been seen in our cosmic backyard, but were so bright they blinded observational instruments. The discovery of a more distant flare finally reveals details of these emissions.

A link has been found between repetitive stretches of DNA called tandem repeats and autism spectrum disorder. The discovery might inform approaches to studying tandem repeats in a wide range of other human disorders.

An analysis of more than 6 million YouTube videos finds that people around the world make similar facial expressions in similar social contexts. The study brings data science to the debate about the universality of emotion categories.

In some materials, the absorption of a single photon can trigger a chain reaction that produces a large burst of light. The discovery of these photon avalanches in nanostructures opens the way to imaging and sensing applications.

Observations of a giant flare associated with the starburst galaxy NGC 253 suggest that the flare is probably associated with relativistic plasma in the magnetic field of a magnetar.

The γ-ray burst GRB 200415A is probably a giant flare emitted from a magnetar in the nearby starburst galaxy NGC 253.

A quantum network that combines 700 fibre and two ground-to-satellite links achieves quantum key distribution between more than 150 users over a combined distance of 4,600 kilometres.

Two logical qubits are encoded in ensembles of four physical qubits through the surface code, then entangled by lattice surgery, which is a protocol for carrying out fault-tolerant operations.

Pronounced quantum oscillations in magnetoresistance, a phenomenon that was only expected in metals with highly mobile carriers, are observed in the strongly insulating state of two-dimensional WTe₂.

Room-temperature photon avalanching realized in single thulium-doped upconverting nanocrystals enables super-resolution imaging at near-infrared wavelengths of maximal biological transparency and provides a material platform potentially suitable for other optical technologies.

Iceberg-trajectory models along with multi-proxy evidence from sediment cores from the Indian Ocean show that northward shifts in Antarctic iceberg melt redistributed freshwater in the Southern Ocean during the Pleistocene.

Analysis of humeri from fossils that span the fin-to-limb transition reveal that the change in the humerus shape is driven by both ecology and phylogeny, and is associated with functional trade-offs related to locomotor performance.

A bioinformatics pipeline to identify tandem repeat mutations is developed and used to characterize precise changes in repeat copy number associated with autism spectrum disorder.

An analysis of 16 types of facial expression in thousands of contexts in millions of videos revealed fine-grained patterns in human facial expression that are preserved across the modern world.

Ultrasonic vocalizations of male mice distinguish aggressive, male-directed mounting from reproductive, female-directed mounting behaviours, which are represented by distinct ESR1-expressing populations of neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus and medial preoptic area, respectively.

Eight transcription factors are identified that, when overexpressed, are sufficient to grow oocyte-like cells from mouse pluripotent stem cells.

The use of lung and colonic organoid systems to assess the susceptibility of lung and gut cells to SARS-CoV-2 and to screen FDA-approved drugs that have antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2 is demonstrated.

A mathematical algorithm for population-wide screening of SARS-CoV-2 infections using pooled parallel RT–PCR tests requires considerably fewer tests than individual testing procedures and has minimal delays in the identification of individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2.

A range of techniques are used to investigate the molecular landscape of chronic kidney disease, and the results suggest that distinct populations of pericytes and fibroblasts are the main source of myofibroblasts in kidney fibrosis.

An autoantibody found in a mouse model of atherosclerosis recognizses ALDH4A1, and infusion of the antibody delays plaque formation in mice.

Experiments using a conditional triple-knockout mouse strain show that histone H1 regulates the activity of chromatin domains by controlling chromatin compaction, genome architecture and  histone methylation.

Mutations in histone H1 induce the remodelling of chromatin architecture to a more relaxed state, which leads to malignant transformation through changes in histone modifications and the expression of stem cell genes.

The RNA polymerase from the crAss-like bacteriophage phi14:2, which is translocated into the host cell with phage DNA and transcribes early phage genes, is structurally most similar to eukaryotic RNA interference polymerases, suggesting that the latter have a phage origin.

Time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography is used to reveal the structural changes that stabilize the charge-separation steps of electron-transfer reactions in the photosynthetic reaction centre of Blastochloris viridis on a timescale of picoseconds.