Volume 596 Issue 7873, 26 August 2021

Racist ideas of categories for human identity continue to warp research and medicine.

A switch to spuds in a country where rice is prominent could cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

Cuttlefish, an octopus relative, retain their cognitive powers as they grow older.

The inexpensive and lightweight prosthesis also provides feedback akin to a sense of touch.

Atmospheric levels of two powerful heat-trapping gases are rising quickly — and are higher than official emissions records suggest.

Modelling work shows that crustal groundwater accounts for more water than the world’s ice caps and glaciers.

A simple model suggests that there’s no fast way to rid hands of virus-sized particles.

Chimpanzees are not the only great apes to develop tools without tutoring.

The latest science news, in brief.

Many words common to science have never been written in African languages. Now, researchers from across Africa are changing that.

Dramatic antibody production in people infected during the 2002–04 outbreak furthers hopes of a vaccine against many coronaviruses.

A key amino-acid change might underlie the coronavirus variant’s ferocious infectivity.

Scientists and environmentalists say the road, slated to pass through Iguaçu National Park, could harm research projects and precious ecosystems.

Nature talks to vaccine developer Kayhan Azadmanesh about efforts in Iran to develop ten or more COVID jabs, two of which have been approved for use.

Australian scientists are rushing to develop new technologies — such as ways to block sunlight — to help preserve corals in the face of climate change.

Scientists are trying to understand why a small number of people develop a mysterious clotting disorder after receiving a COVID jab.

Authors of the March WHO report into how COVID-19 emerged warn that further delay makes crucial inquiry biologically difficult.

Addressing weaknesses and limitations in your science will reassure potential funders, say grant-writing coaches Jennifer L. Wilson and Crystal M. Botham.

Diagnostics that rely on bacterial movements, genomics and machine learning could help to address a global crisis.

Fabio Deelan Cunden draws inspiration for his studies of randomness from ancient books and artefacts in a mathematics museum.

The full might of a world-leading artificial-intelligence laboratory has been brought to bear on protein-structure prediction. The resulting method, AlphaFold2, promises to transform our understanding of proteins.

The inaccessibility of African montane forests has hindered efforts to quantify the carbon stored by these ecosystems. A remarkable survey fills this knowledge gap, and highlights the need to preserve such forests.

Laser-cooled ions have been used to substantially lower the temperature of a proton located several centimetres away. This technique could be useful in ultraprecise measurements of the properties of antimatter particles.

Understanding how resistance to chemotherapy occurs could lead to better anticancer treatments. Persister cells in tumours can contribute to this resistance. A method to characterize these cells in detail sheds light on their origins.

An innovative algorithm provides a way of fairly selecting representative individuals for citizens’ assemblies to learn about and deliberate on certain topics. Such groups hold promise for closing the gap between democracy and expertise.

This Perspective discusses possible future patterns of SARS-CoV-2 infection, the development of variants, potential changes in the patterns of spread and the implications for vaccine deployment and the potential consequences of these issues for the development of policy.

The fast radio burst FRB 20180916B repeats with a periodicity of 16 days, and is now found to emit down to a frequency of 120 MHz, much lower than previously observed.

Directly coupling cavity photons to the photo-association resonances of pairs of atoms in a strongly interacting Fermi gas generates pair polaritons—hybrid excitaions coherently mixing photons, atom pairs and molecules.

A single electromagnetically trapped proton is sympathetically cooled to below ambient temperature by coupling it through a superconducting LC circuit to a laser-cooled cloud of Be⁺ ions stored in a spatially separated trap.

Restricting the initial growth temperatures used for chemical vapour deposition of graphene on metal foils produces optimum conditions for growing large areas of fold-free, single-crystal graphene.

Rechargeable Na/Cl₂ and Li/Cl₂ batteries are produced with a microporous carbon positive electrode, aluminium chloride in thionyl chloride as the electrolyte, and either sodium or lithium as the negative electrode.

Liquid ultrafast electron scattering measures structural responses in liquid water with femtosecond temporal and atomic spatial resolution to reveal a transient hydrogen bond contraction then thermalization preceding relaxation of the OH stretch.

The aboveground carbon stock of a montane African forest network is comparable to that of a lowland African forest network and two-thirds higher than default values for these montane forests.

The palaeogenomic analysis of a pre-Neolithic skeleton associated with a Toalean burial context from Wallacea.

Principles from the field of fair division are used to develop selection algorithms for citizens’ assemblies that produce panels that are representative of the population while simultaneously selecting individuals with near-equal probabilities.

Behavioural studies and neural recordings in mice show that virgin mice can acquire maternal behaviour through an oxytocin-dependent mechanism.

A proteomics-based strategy is used to examine how three different RNA viruses (polio, Zika and dengue) remodel translation in the host to recruit host machineries necessary for the production of viral proteins.

Alanine-scanning mutagenesis is used to identify the PF4 epitope that is recognized by anti-PF4 antibodies in patients with vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopaenia, revealing that the epitope corresponds to the heparin-binding site on PF4.

The lysosomal protein Niemann–Pick type C1 (NPC1) is identified as a cofactor in the trafficking of STING, and loss of NPC1 is shown to both ‘prime’ and ‘boost’ STING signalling leading to neurological disease.

Lineage tracing by barcoding of individual cells using a lentivirus library shows that cycling and non-cycling drug-tolerant persister cells in cancer arise from different lineages with distinct transcriptional and metabolic programs.

AlphaFold predicts protein structures with an accuracy competitive with experimental structures in the majority of cases using a novel deep learning architecture.

AlphaFold is used to predict the structures of almost all of the proteins in the human proteome—the availability of high-confidence predicted structures could enable new avenues of investigation from a structural perspective.

Structural and mechanistic data of the ADP-ribosyltransferase DarT demonstrate the role of ADP-ribosylation of DNA by this enzyme in generating toxicity and regulating cellular signalling processes in bacteria.

Cryo-electron microscopy has been used to determine the structure of the Tetrahymena ribozyme (a catalytic RNA) at sufficiently high resolution to model side chains and metal ions.