Volume 591 Issue 7849, 11 March 2021

The idea that ecosystems have monetary value now has global support — and creates a route to protecting Earth’s endangered regions.

Incompatible research designs will obscure essential answers about vaccine effectiveness. It’s time to plan together.

Researchers enlist bacteria to make a synthetic composite material that is more damage-resistant than its natural counterparts.

Participants in a tête-à-tête often misjudge when the other person is ready to call it quits.

An immune molecule props up cells that make insulin, thereby restoring production of the crucial hormone.

The ten-limbed molluscs can defer gratification — and those that hold out the longest score best on learning performance.

At some stations, stored water absorbs enough sunlight to offset the station’s carbon savings.

Modelling of Neanderthal ear canals reveals they were tuned to certain sounds that are common in modern speech.

Astronomers might have spotted the long-sought debris of a famous stellar explosion.

The latest science news, in brief.

A Nature poll shows that a year of online research conferences has brought big benefits, but blending them with in-person meetings in future will be a challenge.

The American Physical Society’s new criteria for conference venues seem to be unique among scientific societies.

In the wake of the World Health Organization’s investigation, there are still key questions about when, where and how the pandemic began.

Thousands of scientists and volunteers have charted the way governments have responded to COVID-19.

Ramped-up sequencing efforts are helping to identify mutations that might boost transmission or help a virus evade immune responses.

The contested allegations highlight how political tensions could be affecting research.

Pregnant women fare worse than others, although the risks to the fetus are slight.

Thorny ethical questions and bitter scientific competition drive new accounts of the genome-editing story.

Amid the urgent need to decarbonize, the industry that delivers one-tenth of global electricity must consult the public on reactor research, design, regulation, location and waste.

Just 1% of scientists capture more than one-fifth of all citations globally — and the inequality is growing.

Institutions need experts in racial justice and queer liberation to shoulder the burden of advocating for scientists from under-represented groups, says Robin Aguilar.

Molecular biologist Desireé Leach studies the mechanisms of heart disease, the leading cause of death among Black people in the United States.

Technological advances offer new ways to investigate the contribution that changing climate and genes have made in shaping past migrations by peregrine falcons. Can this help to predict the fate of future migrations?

Cancer can evade destruction by the immune system if aided by immunosuppressive regulatory T cells. These cells depend on a lipid-production pathway in the tumour environment, a vulnerability that might be used to target them.

Evidence of a rare neutrino-interaction process called the Glashow resonance has been observed by a detector buried deep in the Antarctic ice — opening up a way to probe neutrino formation in astrophysical sources.

DNA has been retrieved from mammoth specimens that are more than one million years old. Comparing the genomes of these animals and their descendants provides insights into the changes that occurred as one species evolved into another.

An experiment shows that Newton’s law of gravity holds even for two masses as small as about 90 milligrams. The findings take us a step nearer to measuring gravitational fields that are so weak that they could enter the quantum regime.

An updated set of reporting standards for the development, interpretation and evaluation of polygenic risk scores is presented, which should aid the translation of these scores into clinical applications.

A particle shower detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the very high energy of the Glashow resonance demonstrates its potential for the study of high-energy particle physics and astrophysics.

A direct measurement of the gravitational coupling between two 1-mm-radius gold spheres with masses below 100 mg using a torsional pendulum is reported.

A reinforcement learning experiment using a programmable integrated nanophotonic processor shows that a quantum communication channel with the environment speeds up the learning process of an agent.

A deep-learning-based approach using a convolutional neural network is used to synthesize photorealistic colour three-dimensional holograms from a single RGB-depth image in real time, and termed tensor holography.

A large electronic display textile that is flexible, breathable and withstands repeated machine-washing is integrated with a keyboard and power supply to create a wearable, durable communication tool.

Highly active but durable perovskite-based solid oxide fuel cell cathodes are realized using a thermal-expansion offset, achieving full thermo-mechanical compatibility between the cathode and other cell components.

Numerical simulations indicate that seismological observations of large megathrust earthquakes are better matched by crack-like ruptures on persistently weak faults than by self-healing pulse-like ruptures on stronger faults.

The routes and lengths of migrations of Eurasian Arctic peregrine falcons have probably been shaped by climate change across the Last Glacial Maximum–Holocene transition and by selection for long-term memory acting on ADCY8, respectively.

Siberian mammoth genomes from the Early and Middle Pleistocene subepochs reveal adaptive changes and a key hybridization event, highlighting the value of deep-time palaeogenomics for studies of speciation and long-term evolutionary trends.

The primate medial frontal cortex has a key role in mediating the ability to choose between new options based on little or no direct experience.

Studies using mouse and non-human primate models identify the innate immune regulator STING—acting via type I interferons—as a key regulator of nociception, suggesting new targets for the treatment of chronic pain.

Specific macrophage populations provide a transient niche that activates muscle stem cells after muscle injury and supply proliferation-inducing cues that govern the repair process mediated by these cells in both zebrafish and mouse injury models.

In Arabidopsis, phosphorylation of EIN2 by TOR kinase in the presence of glucose prevents the nuclear localization of EIN2, showing that the glucose–TOR–EIN2 axis regulates the transcriptome independently of ethylene signalling pathways.

Experimental deletion of the furin cleavage site of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein highlights an important role for this site in infection and the need to consider this site when evaluating the neutralization activities of antibodies.

The inflammasome receptor AIM2 acts independently of the inflammasome to reduce autoimmunity and stabilize regulatory T cells.

Identification of a metabolic checkpoint involving lipid signalling that is specific to regulatory T cells (T_reg cells) in the tumour microenvironment raises the possibility of targeting this checkpoint for treatment of cancer.

A CRISPR screen in mouse embryonic stem cells shows that transcripts derived from endogenous retroviruses are destabilized by m⁶A RNA methylation.

Binding of METTL3 to chromatin is enriched over IAP family endogenous retroviral elements in mouse embryonic stem cells, helping to ensure the integrity of heterochromatin at these elements.

N⁶-methyladenosine RNA and its reader YTHDC1 serve as a bridge to silencing retrotransposons through the RNA derived from these retrotransposons in mouse ES cells.

Glutamate transporters conduct chloride ions through an aqueous channel with hydrophobic gates that forms during the glutamate transport cycle.