Volume 591 Issue 7848, 4 March 2021

Fifty years after its creation, the agency’s member states must agree to be held accountable for their green promises.

Chinese researchers are caught between Western bias and pro-government messaging.

Inside a composite structure, mechanical energy is transformed into an electron flow that powers a chemical reaction.

With its effect on the gut lining, a parasite aids another infectious agent.

Earth’s upper atmosphere cooks up a storm.

To scientists’ surprise, a 10,000-year-old bone found in an Alaskan cave belonged to a domestic dog — one of the earliest known from the Americas.

The male’s misleading alarm calls could help to keep the female in his embrace.

Black carbon from fuel combustion in South Asia bolsters the effects of climate change on northern ice and snow.

Simple one-celled organisms ‘recall’ the location of food using internal tubes made of a gel-like material.

The latest science news, in brief.

Nuclear fusion experiments with deuterium and tritium at the Joint European Torus are a crucial dress rehearsal for the mega-experiment.

Despite the widespread roll-out of several vaccines, it could be months before they can be ranked.

Studies from China suggest that the coronavirus can be transmitted on frozen surfaces — but scientists say that’s unlikely to be how the pandemic started.

Evaluations find apps are useful, but would benefit from better integration into health-care systems.

As Horizon Europe issues its first call for grants, Nature reviews some big changes — from open science to goal-oriented ‘missions’.

A remarkable AI can write like humans — but with no understanding of what it’s saying.

Scientists are monitoring pets, livestock and wildlife to work out where SARS-CoV-2 could hide, and whether it could resurge.

Ozone Nobel prizewinner who coined the term Anthropocene.

Tools, rules and incentives are buckling under the flood of coronavirus genome sequences — to help control the pandemic, researchers need new approaches.

Trapped in a holding pattern, and nostalgic for lab lunches and field trips, researchers share their hopes for a lockdown-free future.

John Tregoning reckons with gallows humour in a serious time.

Tempted to try your hand at a new technique? These tools will help you on your way.

Electro-acoustics researcher David Monacchi preserves the soundscapes of endangered forests to convey the risks they face.

A self-powered robot inspired by a fish can survive the extreme pressures at the bottom of the ocean’s deepest trench, thanks to its soft body and distributed electronic system — and might enable exploration of the uncharted ocean.

Rupture of the plasma membrane in different forms of cell death was long thought to be a passive process. The finding that it is an active one, mediated by a specific membrane protein, reveals an unexpected feature shared by dying cells.

Defects in the immune defences induced by the protein interferon are associated with some severe cases of COVID-19. An analysis of patients’ blood samples sheds light on how antibodies might contribute to these defects.

An understanding of how quickly biomolecules bind and dissociate in cells is crucial for developing quantitative models of biology, but measurements of these kinetics were possible only using purified proteins in vitro — until now.

A programmable photonic circuit has been developed that can execute various quantum algorithms and is potentially highly scalable. This device could pave the way for large-scale quantum computers based on photonic hardware.

The current status and prospects of two-dimensional transistors are reviewed, and the reliability of widely used device parameters is assessed.

A system for realizing many-photon quantum circuits is presented, comprising a programmable nanophotonic chip operating at room temperature, interfaced with a fully automated control system.

Polaritons formed by moiré excitons in heterobilayers of transition metal dichalcogenides exhibit strong nonlinearity owing to quantum confinement by the tunable moiré lattice potential.

A free-swimming soft robot inspired by deep-sea creatures, with artificial muscle, power and control electronics spread across a polymer matrix, successfully adapts to high pressure and operates in the deep ocean.

The binding of multidentate ligands to the surface of lead halide perovskite nanocrystals suppresses the formation of surface defects that result in halide segregation, yielding materials with efficient and colour-stable red emission.

Data from the ICESat-2 satellite quantifying the variability of water levels in natural and human-managed water bodies show that a disproportionate majority of global water storage variability occurs in human-managed reservoirs.

Amorphization at grain boundaries in olivine-rich rocks under stress and consequent grain-boundary sliding could explain the decrease in viscosity between the lithosphere and the asthenosphere.

Dire wolves split from living canids around 5.7 million years ago and originated in the New World isolated from the ancestors of grey wolves and coyotes, which evolved in Eurasia and colonized North America only relatively recently.

A genome-wide association study of critically ill patients with COVID-19 identifies genetic signals that relate to important host antiviral defence mechanisms and mediators of inflammatory organ damage that may be targeted by repurposing drug treatments.

The C. elegans neuropil is shown to be organized into four strata composed of related behavioural circuits, and its design principles are linked to the developmental processes that underpin its assembly.

Two complete volumetric reconstructions of the Caenorhabditis elegans main neuropil (the nerve ring) reveal multi-scale spatial organization that supports both conserved and variable circuitry, and enables the derivation of a modular structure–function model of the neuropil.

Electrophysiology combined with correlated light and electron microscopy confirms the long-standing assumption that the size of a synapse is proportional to its strength, and reveals that neocortical synapses may have greater computational capacity than thought.

Haematopoietic stem cells show progressive functional decline with age that can be reversed by stimulation of chaperone-mediated autophagy in old mice and aged humans.

Patients with mild COVID-19 show a pattern of interferon-stimulated gene (ISG) expression across all major cell types, but in patients with severe disease, antibodies block the production of these ISG-expressing cells.

The small transmembrane protein NINJ1 promotes plasma membrane rupture in lytic cell death associated with pyroptosis, necrosis and apoptosis.

Chromothripsis—a process during which chromosomes are ‘shattered’—drives the evolution of gene amplification and subsequent drug resistance in cancer cells.

A theoretical model, in vitro reconstitution and in vivo experimentation show that competition between droplet surface tension and membrane sheet instability dictates the form and function of autophagosomal membranes.

An ultra-high-throughput multiplex protein–DNA binding assay is used to assess binding of 270 human transcription factors to 95,886 noncoding variants in the human genome, providing data to improve prediction of the effects of noncoding variants on transcription factor binding and thereby increase understanding of molecular pathways involved in diverse human traits and genetic diseases.

Time-resolved RNA–protein cross-linking with a pulsed femtosecond ultraviolet laser, followed by immunoprecipitation and high-throughput sequencing, enables the determination of binding and dissociation kinetics of the RNA-binding protein DAZL within cells.

Structures of the human sodium-dependent citrate transporter NaCT in complexes with citrate or a small-molecule inhibitor reveal how the inhibitor—which binds to the same site as citrate—arrests the transport cycle of NaCT.