Volume 593 Issue 7860, 27 May 2021

Wealthier countries must join the United States, Russia and China in recognizing that everyone benefits if vaccine manufacturing is distributed evenly around the world.

New oversight criteria aim to reassure the public and permit progress in contentious research, such as growing human embryos in the lab.

Parasite-ridden ants don’t venture out of the nest, which might help to prolong their lives.

Humanity’s imprint on plant species and abundance began roughly 4,000 years ago, when agriculture took off.

Chemists take a cue from bacterial enzymes that degrade perchlorate, a contaminant found in drinking water.

Data from the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt suggest that floating seaweed farms are no climate panacea.

Fed on the regimen known as the Western diet, intestinal microbes unleash changes that make the gut more prone to infection.

The father of microbiology surreptitiously relied on widely known formulae — including a protocol written by his arch-rival — when making lenses.

Views on vaccination are coloured by an individual’s stance on science — and by their society’s stance, too.

The latest science news, in brief.

From Sri Lanka to Nepal, scientists with limited resources are working feverishly to discover which variants are driving outbreaks.

Their structures were once controversial. Now researchers have discovered quasicrystals in the aftermath of a 1945 bomb test.

Poll on vaccine hesitancy demonstrates the extraordinary predicament researchers face in transmitting risk information during a pandemic.

The publisher will launch five new journals, and has introduced a new business model that aims to spread the cost of publishing more fairly.

Institutional affiliations of panellists seem to skew European Research Council decisions — especially in the life sciences.

Preliminary results from a trial of more than 600 people are the first to show the benefits of combining different vaccines.

Virologists have infected millions of miniature organs with SARS-CoV-2, to learn how the virus wreaks havoc and how to stop it.

With COVID rates dropping and vaccinations on the rise, the United States and other places are removing some requirements for face coverings. Are they moving too fast?

Two books offer complementary insights into how artificial intelligence is shaping society.

CERN experimentalist offers sweeping history of the Universe, in science and culture.

Focusing only on cases and deaths hides the pandemic’s lasting health burden on people, societies and economies.

COVID has shown we must study immunity in the whole body — let’s sort the logistics to acquire the right samples.

It could take years to reveal the true impact of closed borders, cancelled travel plans and vaccine delays.

Detecting the coronavirus in samples from treatment plants could give early warning of outbreaks and new variants.

Nicolás Jodal codes software solutions for navigating pandemics and other obstacles.

Cells called fibroblasts can boost health yet also drive disease. Cell-lineage analysis has unveiled the first comprehensive atlas of fibroblasts from various healthy and diseased tissues, a result that has major clinical implications.

Nanocrystals with tailored shapes and compositions have been shown to form ‘superlattice’ arrays analogous to the ionic lattices of perovskite compounds. One such superlattice exhibits a phenomenon called superfluorescence.

Ferroptosis is a type of cell death driven by oxidative damage to lipid membranes. The discovery that organelles called mitochondria have an antioxidant system that counteracts ferroptosis might lead to new anticancer therapies.

An analysis of mobile-phone tracking data has revealed a universal pattern that describes the interplay between the distances travelled by humans on trips and the frequency with which those trips are made.

Hydrogen and helium mixtures can be compressed to the extreme temperature and pressure conditions found in the interior of Jupiter and Saturn, and the immiscibility revealed supports models of Jupiter that invoke a layered interior.

Using large-scale mobility data from diverse cities around the globe, a simple and robust scaling law that captures the temporal and spatial range of population movement is revealed.

Nanoscale imaging of edge currents in charge-neutral graphene shows that charge accumulation can explain various exotic nonlocal transport measurements, bringing into question some theories about their origins.

Through precise structural engineering, perovskite nanocrystals are co-assembled with other nanocrystal materials to form a range of binary and ternary perovskite-type superlattices that exhibit superfluorescence.

Using a global mass-balance approach to calculate evapotranspiration, it is shown that global land evapotranspiration increased by 10% between 2003 and 2019, driven mainly by warming land temperatures.

Halving average drainage depths in agricultural peatlands could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 1 per cent of all anthropogenic emissions.

Comparative analysis of 162 genomes of Asgard archaea results in six newly proposed phyla, including a deep branch that is provisionally named Wukongarchaeota, and sheds light on the evolutionary history of this clade.

Fast temporal dynamics of the olfactory environment can be perceived by mice and used to perform scene segmentation.

Imaging mass cytometry of the human lung reveals the cellular composition and spatial architecture during COVID-19 and other acute injuries, enabling the characterization of lung pathophysiology from structural, immunological and clinical perspectives.

In Drosophila, an amino acid deficit triggers the expression of the neuropeptide CNMamide in gut enterocytes, which promotes a compensatory appetite for essential over non-essential amino acids, and this process is modulated by the microbiome.

Single-cell and genetic tools are used to characterize the diversity of fibroblasts across healthy and perturbed tissues in mice and humans.

Tissue nonspecific alkaline phosphatase (TNAP) within mitochondria hydrolyses phosphocreatine to initiate a futile cycle of creatine dephosphorylation and phosphorylation in thermogenic fat cells.

DHO dehydrogenase regulates ferroptosis by preventing mitochondrial lipid peroxidation and its inhibition suppresses growth in tumours with low levels of GPX4.

A cell-cycle checkpoint triggers the extrusion of both nematode and mammalian cells experiencing replication stress.

Treatment with a specific inhibitor of the N⁶-methyladenosine methyltransferase METTL3 leads to reduced growth of cancer cells, indicating the potential of approaches targeting RNA-modifying enzymes for anticancer therapy.

The levels of microRNAs in mouse and human cells control lipid metabolism and germ cell specification during development.

A cryo-electron microscopy study of the gasdermin D pore reveals a model of pore assembly and a charge-based mechanism for the preferential release of mature cytokines.