Volume 593 Issue 7859, 20 May 2021

A focus on specific diseases has derailed efforts to achieve health care for all before. The world must not repeat that mistake with COVID-19.

Linguistic analyses show that powerful sources and sensationalist terms have long dominated coverage of civil-rights protests.

Gunk on ancient teeth yields bacterial DNA, allowing scientists to trace the oral microbiome’s evolution.

The part of the brain that assesses tool usage is normally more focused on hands than on tools.

Quantum and ordinary clocks alike gain accuracy as they give off more heat.

The first spacecraft to visit interstellar space has now become the first to make continuous measurements of waves in that remote realm.

Blue-flowered plants get the most scientific love; those with green or brown flowers, not so much.

Stem cells carrying corrective genes offer hope for a devastating immune disorder.

Laboratory experiments provide a glimpse of what happens when rocks fail.

The latest science news, in brief.

Variants including B.1.617 have been linked to India’s surge in infections. Researchers are hurrying to determine how much of a threat they pose.

The Zhurong landing was the biggest test yet of China’s deep-space exploration capabilities. Within days, the rover could start to make geological discoveries.

Space agency aims to breathe new life into its Earth-science programme as US President Joe Biden pushes an ambitious climate agenda.

Data from Qatar provide strongest evidence yet that COVID-19 vaccines can stop strains thought to pose a threat to immunization efforts.

Even after mass vaccinations, some hospitalizations and deaths from the coronavirus are inevitable — but opinions differ on how many is too many for a return to relative normality.

As scientists learn more about enigmatic archaea, they’re finding clues about the evolution of the complex cells that make up people, plants and more.

The pandemic is teaching us key lessons about crisis, communication and misinformation, and is spurring changes in the way scientists study public-health questions.

From desert to gold mine — Frederick Reines was a larger-than-life physicist who did larger-than-life experiments.

Visionary explorer of glasses and the limits of the liquid state.

Universities and museums must catalogue the remains of Black Americans in their collections, and pause research pending consultation with descendant communities.

Six years after a statue of Cecil Rhodes was toppled, students and staff at the South African university are still working to improve equity and representation.

Nanoparticles carrying chemotherapeutic drugs could help people with cancer escape some of the drugs’ side effects, hopes Silvia Giordani.

Molecular crosslinks known as disulfides stabilize the 3D structures of many proteins, and sometimes regulate protein function. But disulfides are not alone — another type of regulatory protein crosslink has been discovered.

Quantum chemistry is challenging to model computationally. An ultracold chemical reaction has now been used to test models with great precision, providing a benchmark for future quantum-chemistry calculations.

Organelles called mitochondria divide in at least two contexts: during cell growth and in response to mitochondrial damage. The finding that division is different in these two contexts sheds light on the regulatory pathways involved.

How we feel about the duration of our conversations has rarely been studied. New research has asked people about the lengths of their conversations, and whether they end when they want them to.

The detection of iron and nickel vapours in a broad range of Solar System comets, and of nickel vapour in a comet from outside the Solar System, provides a glimpse into the organic chemistry of young planetary systems.

This Review outlines the gene and protein expression strategies used by viruses to expand the efficiency of their coding and regulatory sequences, and the implications of these mechanisms for developing antiviral agents.

This Perspective discusses how high-energy-density physics could tap the potential of AI-inspired algorithms for extracting relevant information and how data-driven automatic control routines may be used for optimizing high-repetition-rate experiments.

High-resolution ultraviolet and optical spectra of a large sample of comets show that Fe i and Ni i lines are ubiquitous, even when the comets are far from the Sun.

Atomic nickel vapour is found in the cold coma of the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov at a distance of 2.3 astronomical units, equivalent to an equilibrium temperature of 180 kelvin.

The chemical reaction 2KRb → K₂ + Rb₂ is studied under ultralow temperatures at the quantum state-to-state level, allowing unprecedented details of the reaction dynamics to be observed.

High-harmonic generation from the Dirac-like surface state of a topological insulator is separated from bulk contributions and continuously tuned by the carrier-envelope phase of the driving lightwave.

A family of enzymes—coronafacic acid ligases, involved in the synthesis of bacterial phytotoxins—are found to catalyse amide bond formation with a wide range of substrates.

Large forest fires in Alaska and the Northwest Territories can ‘overwinter’ and then reignite in the following fire season, contributing up to one-third of the burned area in individual years.

NanoSeq is used to detect mutations in single DNA molecules and analyses show that mutational processes that are independent of cell division are important contributors to somatic mutagenesis.

Neurons in the mouse medial prefrontal cortex acquire category-selective responses with learning.

The anti-leprosy drug clofazimine inhibits coronavirus replication in several cell models and shows potent antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2 infection in a hamster model, particularly when used in combination with remdesivir.

The bispecific IgG1-like CoV-X2 prevents SARS-CoV-2 spike binding to ACE2, neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 and its variants of concern, protects against disease in a mouse model, whereas the parental monoclonal antibodies generate viral escape.

In a cynomolgus macaque model, CRISPR base editors delivered in lipid nanoparticles are shown to efficiently and stably knock down PCSK9 in the liver to reduce levels of PCSK9 and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol in the blood.

Mitochondrial fission at the organelle periphery generates small daughter mitochondria that are removed by mitophagy whereas fission at the midzone leads to proliferation.

DNA single-strand breaks in neurons accumulate at high levelsin functional enhancers.

A cryo-electron microscopy structure of the inner membrane complex of the ESX-5 type VII secretion system of Mycobacterium tuberculosis reveals an important role of interactions with MycP₅ protease for complex integrity.

A high-resolution structure of human telomerase bound to telomeric DNA reveals details of telomerase assembly and its active site, and sheds light on how mutations alter telomerase function.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of Tetrahymena telomerase with telomeric DNA at several steps of nucleotide addition provide insights into the structural basis of telomere repeat synthesis.

A NOS bridge between cysteine and lysine residues serves as an allosteric redox switch in the transaldolase enzyme of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, demonstrating the existence of protein regulatory switches that contain covalent crosslinks other than disulfides.