Volume 592 Issue 7855, 22 April 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken too many lives, and has set back efforts to tackle other infectious diseases.

Africa needs reliable energy infrastructure, not rich-world hypocrisy.

A glacier on Mont Blanc provides a decades-long record of the use of bromine, which corrodes the ozone layer.

Despite extraordinary challenges, scientists managed to sequence a high percentage of Ebola virus genomes from a deadly wave of infections.

Brain volume plummets in ‘gamergate’ ants that gain the ability to reproduce, but rises again with a fall in fertility.

One simple measurement provides a quantitative description of hunger.

Twenty-first-century sleuthing details the distortions of an early imaging technique.

A vast radio observatory on Earth detects signals similar to those generated by the aurora on Jupiter.

Once in the Americas, foxgloves swiftly evolved under pressure by pollinating hummingbirds.

The latest science news, in brief.

As safety concerns delay the use of two COVID-19 vaccines, Nature looks at the questions that scientists want answered.

The chimaeras lived up to 19 days — but some scientists question the need for such research.

US president’s first budget proposal emphasizes applied research and public health, and aims to tackle climate change and racial injustice.

How an explosion of coronavirus cases in India is putting global vaccine supplies at risk.

As the National Institutes of Health begins implementing Trump-era guidelines, researchers voice concerns over transparency and racial profiling.

Campaigns to battle tuberculosis, measles and polio have all been set back.

How data restrictions shaped nuclear discovery, energy research and more.

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

Kevin Boehnke and Richard E. Harris introduced a course in meditation, yoga and mindfulness to the neuroscience programme at their institution.

Unpicking how cancer stem cells divide and spread could help to explain how tumours grow and evade treatments.

Instrument engineer Cristina Sans Coll flies the polar skies to help measure climate change.

In the eye, the transparent lens focuses light on the retina. This transparency is achieved during lens development by a newly identified mechanism — whole organelles are destroyed by the degradation of their lipid membranes.

Inflatable, metre-scale origami structures have been designed to transform from flat structures into expanded forms and then to lock into their new shape. This technology opens the way to the use of large origami structures for engineering.

An artificial-intelligence tool called Trial Pathfinder can run clinical-trial emulations using health-care data from people with cancer, and can learn how to optimize trial-inclusion eligibility criteria, while maintaining patient safety.

An analysis of the costs of climate change caused by adding one tonne of methane to the atmosphere finds that high-income regions of the world should spend much more on efforts to lower such emissions than should low-income regions.

Ongoing global warming is likely to cause tipping point thresholds to be passed, but an abrupt system change can still be avoided if the warming is reversed quickly relative to the timescale of the tipping element.

This Review discusses recent research that has transformed our understanding of the biology of atherosclerosis, and examines its implications for the treatment of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

The detection of structure in the distribution of giant stars in the outer Galactic halo shows the substantial global impact of the Magellanic clouds on our Galaxy.

The abundances of stable Ti and Cr relative to Fe observed in the Cassiopeia A core-collapse supernova remnant reveal that Ti and Cr must have formed in neutrino-driven plumes that helped to drive the explosion.

The orientation of a rotating para-xylene molecule in the nanochannel of a zeolite framework can be visualised by electron microscopy to determine the host–guest van der Waals interaction inside the channel.

Origami-inspired multistable structures that can be inflated from flat to three dimensions have been designed; a library of foldable shapes is created and then combined to build metre-scale functional structures.

Flexible, stable and energy-dense solid-state Li–air batteries are realised using ultrathin, chemically inert ion-conductive zeolite membranes as a solid electrolyte.

Nanoscopic dispersion of enzymes with deep active sites enables chain-end-mediated processive biodegradation of semi-crystalline polyesters with programmable latency and material integrity.

Accounting for equity influences the social cost of methane more than climate model uncertainty does and produces results that differ by over an order of magnitude between low- and high-income regions.

Analysis of the InvaCost database shows that the costs of biological invasions have markedly increased between 1970 and 2017 and show no sign of slowing down, highlighting the importance of evidence-based and cost-effective management actions.

Fossiomanus sinensis and Jueconodon cheni, a newly described Early Cretaceous tritylodontid and eutriconodotan, respectively, show convergence on a fossorial body plan and provide insights into the evolution of the axial skeleton in mammaliamorphs.

Genomic analyses of human populations in the Pacific provide insights into the peopling history of the region and reveal episodes of biological adaptation relating to the immune system and lipid metabolism through introgression from archaic hominins and polygenic adaptation.

Surveys and a field experiment with Twitter users show that prompting people to think about the accuracy of news sources increases the quality of the news that they share online.

In a mouse model of Rett syndrome, intensive training during the presymptomatic period markedly improves the performance of motor and memory tasks and delays the onset of symptoms, providing a rationale for the genetic screening of newborn babies.

The prefrontal cortex in monkeys controls working memory in a similar way to attention, by selectively transforming the representations of remembered items.

A subset of intestinal stromal cells that is regulated by the kinase MAP3K2 protects intestinal stem cells against injury by producing the WNT agonist R-spondin 1.

In Staphylococcus epidermidis and Staphylococcus aureus, non-specific DNase activity of the type III-A CRISPR–Cas system increases the rate of mutations in the host and accelerates the evolution of resistance to antibiotics and to phage.

The Moderna (mRNA-1273) and Pfizer–BioNTech (BNT162b2) vaccines elicit anti-RBD antibodies similar to those elicited through natural infection with SARS-CoV-2, but their potent neutralizing activity was reduced or abolished by new viral variants of concern.

A nanoparticle influenza vaccine candidate is shown to induce broad cross-reactive antibody responses in animal models.

Trial Pathfinder uses data from electronic health records of patients with cancer to evaluate eligibility criteria and broaden restrictive criteria, which facilitates the design of more-inclusive trials while maintaining safeguards for patient safety.

In the eye lens of zebrafish and mice, the phospholipases Plaat1 and PLAAT3, respectively, are essential for macroautophagy-independent organelle degradation that produces an organelle-free zone and achieves optimal transparency.

Plasmodium antigens called RIFINs bind to specific antibodies that incorporate the inhibitory receptor LILRB1 through its D3 domain, illustrating the principle of receptor-containing antibodies.