Volume 590 Issue 7844, 4 February 2021

A cast of eminent science, health and climate advisers has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring a fresh, cohesive and inclusive perspective on science policy.

Barber shops, churches, libraries — that’s where researchers must go to tackle inequity.

Emissions of puzzling compounds continue to rise, apparently from factories in East Asia.

Even before their eyes open and their fur grows out, young mice can distinguish a mother figure from a stranger.

Mutations in ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses might explain why many people are re-infected time and again.

The ice that has vanished from the poles and elsewhere is just the down payment on global warming’s costs.

The stout palisaded structure helped Sitka Tlingit people to force a Russian retreat in 1804.

A cyborg Venus flytrap manipulates objects with the tap of a smartphone screen.

Emphatic movements called beat gestures play a subtle but important part in communicating a speaker’s meaning.

The latest science news, in brief.

Lineages that can evade immunity are spurring vaccine makers to explore ways to redesign their shots.

Novavax’s experimental shot is highly effective against the variant identified in Britain — but saw a worrying drop in efficacy against a lineage detected in South Africa.

From vaccines to testing, the strategy pledges to follow the science — but researchers still anticipate a tough road ahead.

New studies knock down a controversial report observing phosphine in the planet’s atmosphere.

But Cao Xuetao will be barred from applying for grants for a year after investigators found ‘misused images’ in his group’s papers.

Scientists are starting to work out how the gut microbiome can affect brain health. That might lead to better and easier treatments for brain diseases.

The coronavirus behind the pandemic can linger on doorknobs and other surfaces, but these aren’t a major source of infection.

Evidence is growing that self-attacking ‘autoantibodies’ could be the key to understanding some of the worst cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Historian Patricia Fara curates caricatures that provide snapshots of social and political debates around the emergence of modern research.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks.

National Academies report finds that graduate students are at risk in mental-health ‘crisis’ on campuses nationwide.

Referees for the US National Institutes of Health report engaging less during virtual panel meetings — but most think review quality doesn’t suffer.

The text interface is intimidating, but can save researchers from mundane computing tasks. Just be sure you know what you’re doing.

Pat Brown explains how he’s slicing into the market with plant-based steaks that are eco-friendly and good to eat.

A geochemical study of sediments suggests that, during recent glacial periods, the Arctic Ocean was completely isolated from the world ocean, with fresh water filling the basin for thousands of years.

Most SARS-CoV-2 infections are undocumented. French health-care records and modelling were used to assess the rate of documentation of COVID-19 cases. The findings highlight the need for improved identification of infections.

An accessible machine-learning tool has been developed that can accelerate the optimization of a wide range of synthetic reactions — and reveals how cognitive bias might have undermined optimization by humans.

Debilitating gut pain is common, but the underlying cause is often unclear. It emerges that gut infection triggers localized immune responses that cause normally innocuous foods to be perceived as harmful, leading to persistent pain.

A large-scale, high-resolution cell atlas of gene expression and regulation in human embryos enables innovative investigation of development through multi‑organ and multi‑modal analysis.

Immune cells called macrophages have been found to shut down major metabolic pathways during ageing. Restoring metabolism in these cells is sufficient to alleviate age-associated cognitive decline in mice.

The functional and regulatory aspects of the ‘mitochondrial divisome’ are separated into core and accessory machinery, thus providing a mechanistic understanding of the process of mitochondrial fission.

Opportunities for the application of fibrillated cellulose materials—which can be extracted from renewable resources—and broader manufacturing issues of scale-up, sustainability and synergy with the paper-making industry are discussed.

An approach called the Ramanujan Machine demonstrates the use of algorithms to find mathematical conjectures in the form of formulas of fundamental constants, some of which remain unproved.

A family of topological antiferromagnetic spin textures is realized at room temperature in α-Fe₂O₃, and their reversible and field-free stabilization using a Kibble–Zurek-like temperature cycling is demonstrated.

Introducing viscoelasticity by addition of DNA into the fluid surrounding a suspension of Escherichia coli produces a giant oscillating vortex with a period controllable through the DNA concentration.

An einsteinium coordination complex is synthesized and spectroscopically characterized using less than 200 nanograms of einsteinium, enabling examination of its structure and measurement of an einsteinium bond distance.

Bayesian optimization is applied in chemical synthesis towards the optimization of various organic reactions and is found to outperform scientists in both average optimization efficiency and consistency.

Unexpected intervals of low ²³⁰Th concentration in marine sediment cores are explained by considering that during at least two such periods, the Arctic Ocean and Nordic seas were composed entirely of fresh water and covered by a thick ice shelf.

Ancient DNA reveals genetic differences between stone-tool users and people associated with ceramic technology in the Caribbean and provides substantially lower estimates of population sizes in the region before European contact.

Live neuron imaging and electron microscopy reconstruction shows that the selectivity of cortical neuron responses to visual stimuli arises from the total number of synapses activated rather than being dominated by a small number of strong synaptic inputs.

Novel experiences in mice lead to opposing effects on inhibition of Fos-activated hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons by parvalbumin- and cholecystokinin-expressing interneurons, revealing the roles of FOS and SCG2 in neural plasticity and consolidation of memories.

In aged mice, inhibition of prostaglandin E₂ (PGE₂) signalling through its receptor EP2 improves cellular bioenergetics, reduces inflammatory responses and restores hippocampal plasticity to youthful levels, resulting in an improvement in spatial memory and cognition.

The rate of scale regeneration in zebrafish is controlled by the frequency of rhythmic travelling waves of Erk activity, which are broadcast from a central source to induce ring-like patterns of osteoblast tissue growth.

Analyses of virological and surveillance data in France show that a substantial proportion of symptomatic cases of COVID-19 have remained undetected and that easily accessible and efficient testing is required to control the pandemic.

The relative risk of COVID-19-associated death for younger individuals (under 65) is consistent across countries and can be used to robustly compare the underlying number of infections in each country.

Seropositive samples of SARS-CoV-2 were detected as early as mid-February in patients at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, and antibody positivity increased during the first wave of the pandemic and remained stable afterwards.

In mice, oral tolerance to food antigens can break down after enteric infection, and this leads to food-induced pain resembling irritable bowel syndrome in humans.

Expression of the Epstein–Barr virus protein LMP1 in B cells increases expression of—and promotes T cell responses to—tumour-associated antigens, delineating a mechanism of infection-induced anti-tumour immunity, which could inform immune-based approaches to cancer treatment.

Proteins are inserted into the outer mitochondrial membrane by the mitochondrial sorting and assembly machinery, two structural forms of which are presented here, suggesting the mechanism involved.