Volume 595 Issue 7865, 1 July 2021

To help planners adapt to a warming world, find ways to make predictions practical.

Experiments in mice show promise for drugs that modify the integral process called RNA splicing.

Use of the toxic pollutant in fuel was curbed in the 1980s, but it lingers in airborne particles.

Humidity on summer days has declined since 1950, threatening water supplies and increasing the risk of wildfires.

Natural selection tends to shrink large animals living in places with limited food.

Artificial lighting thought to be more wildlife-friendly than white light could encourage algal blooms.

Death cults in early medieval Europe included inspections of mortal remains.

People living in poor neighbourhoods often lack access to running water and plumbing.

The latest science news, in brief.

Investigations at Lund University found the high-ranking pair guilty of bullying, but staff members say stronger action is needed to repair the damage.

The rapid rise of the highly transmissible strain in the United Kingdom has put countries in Europe, North America and Africa on watch.

Proof-assistant software handles an abstract concept at the cutting edge of research, revealing a bigger role for software in mathematics.

Fossilized bones found in Israel and China, including a specimen named ‘Dragon Man’, could belong to new types of ancient human. But the findings have sparked debate.

Complacency and a coronavirus variant help to explain why the country, once a pandemic success story, couldn’t withstand the surge now rocking South America.

SARS-CoV-2 is just one of nonillions of viruses on our planet, and scientists are rapidly identifying legions of new species.

Crop scientist whose high-yield hybrid rice fed billions.

Studies are skewed towards resilient places and people: improve data, metrics, inclusion and more.

Too few resources exist to help early-career scientists deal with the stresses encountered in today’s ‘publish or perish’ culture.

Group leaders say these tools keep their research groups running smoothly.

Kate Quigley is part of an Australian collaboration that aims to create corals that can survive warming ocean waters.

A technological platform has been developed in which millimetre-scale cubes are assembled into 3D structures that control capillary action — enabling programmable fluid flows and modelling of a range of fluidic processes.

Understanding how diet affects gut microbes and thereby influences human health might lead to targeted dietary strategies. A clinical trial now provides some steps on the path towards this goal.

Birds that travel long distances can disperse seeds far and wide. An assessment of the timing and direction of European bird migration reveals how these patterns might affect seed dispersal as the planet warms.

A technique reveals how folded chromosomal DNA interacts in the nucleus, providing information at the level of single base pairs. The achievement offers an unprecedented level of detail about how gene activity is regulated.

A binary star merger has produced a white dwarf with a spin period of under 7 minutes, a magnetic field of 600 to 900 million gauss and a radius only slightly larger than that of our Moon.

Operating in space, NASA’s Deep Space Atomic Clock, a trapped-ion clock, is shown to have long-term stability and drift that are an order of magnitude better than current space clocks.

Optical signatures reveal correlated insulating Wigner crystals—electron solids—in a bilayer of a two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide, MoSe₂, with hexagonal boron nitride between the layers.

The signature of a Wigner crystal—the analogue of a solid phase for electrons—is observed via the optical reflection spectrum in a monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide.

Cellular fluidics provides a platform of unit-cell-based, three-dimensional structures for the deterministic control of multiphase flow, transport and reaction processes.

A revised date for the Laacher See eruption using measurements of subfossil trees shifts the chronology of European varved lakes relative to the Greenland ice core record, synchronizing the onset of the Younger Dryas across the North Atlantic–European sector.

Thirty years of geothermal heat production at Coso in California depleted shear stresses within the geothermal reservoir, which changed its faulting style and inhibited aftershocks from the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake.

Interactions between European bird and plant species show that fruiting period has a major effect on seed dispersal by migrating birds, which will influence plant adaptations to climate change through latitudinal dispersal.

The hippocampus geometrically represents both physical location and abstract variables on a neural manifold in mice performing a decision-making task in virtual reality.

Whole-genome sequencing of haematopoietic colonies from human fetuses reveals the somatic mutations acquired by individual progenitors, which are used as barcodes to construct a phylogenetic tree of blood development.

Fibre snacks that target distinct features of the microbiomes of donors with obesity transplanted into gnotobiotic mice also lead to fibre-specific changes in the microbiome and physiology when used in controlled-diet human studies.

Systemic genome-led vaccinology and a mouse model of Trypanosoma vivax infection identify protective invariant subunit vaccine antigens, and demonstrate the possibility of generating effective vaccines that induce long-lasting protection against trypanosome infections.

Mouse genetic studies and single-cell transcriptome analysis demonstrate that TIM-3 on dendritic cells has a key role in regulating antitumour immunity via inflammasome activation and is a potential target for anticancer therapy.

Single-cell analysis of lung, heart, kidney and liver autopsy samples shows the molecular and cellular changes and immune response resulting from severe COVID-19 infection.

Lung samples collected soon after death from COVID-19 are used to provide a single-cell atlas of SARS-CoV-2 infection and the ensuing molecular changes.

A proximity-dependent biotinylation technique defines the location of more than 4,000 proteins in a human cell, and almost 36,000 proximal interactions between proteins, including those at the interface of the mitochondria and ER.

Micro Capture-C allows physical contacts to be determined at base-pair resolution, revealing that transcription factors have an important role in the maintenance of the contacts between enhancers and promoters.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of PCFT in a substrate-free state and bound to the antifolate drug pemetrexed provide insights into how this protein recognizes folates and mediates their transport into cells.