Volume 597 Issue 7875, 9 September 2021

Universities hold the majority of CRISPR patents. They are in a strong position to ensure that the technology is widely shared for education and research.

Grass-roots action against bad behaviour has spurred reform — and should keep going.

Prosperous people in the United States tend to consume food that requires large amounts of land and water to produce.

A remote operator can use a magnetic system to control the highly capable limb.

Skeletal remains suggest that men and women in Herculaneum, which was destroyed by the same eruption that buried Pompeii, had distinct diets.

Even youngsters less than 10 years old were not spared in a spate of gruesome violence in central Europe more than 6,000 years ago.

The Goffin’s cockatoo joins chimpanzees and others in the small club of animals that can make implements.

Radio signals help to provide evidence for a type of supernova triggered by a black hole or neutron star on the rampage.

Two sheets of boron, each only one atom thick, are coaxed to take shape on crystals of silver.

The latest science news, in brief.

Intelligence investigation is inconclusive on virus’s origins, but finds SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t weaponized and is unlikely to have been engineered.

The ZyCoV-D vaccine heralds a wave of DNA vaccines for various diseases that are undergoing clinical trials around the world.

The self-targeting antibodies attack type 1 interferons that play a key role in fighting infection.

Scientists are hopeful that the National Ignition Facility’s recent success will advance understanding of thermonuclear reactions.

Models suggest that distortions in polar-vortex winds can send chilly air hurtling southwards. But some climate scientists remain unconvinced.

Innate immunity might be the key to why children have fared better with the virus. But the Delta variant poses fresh unknowns.

Governments have failed to slow climate change quickly enough, so activists are using courts to compel countries and companies to act — increasingly with help from forefront science.

From California’s deadliest blaze to a new planetary fire regime, how wildfires are reshaping our climate-changed planet.

To provide individual care and prevent disease, we need to go beyond genetics in risk scores and include metrics that follow a person’s changing environment and health.

A global career move left one member of a scientist couple unemployed during the pandemic. Here’s what he learnt.

Effective sharing of experimental methods is crucial to ensuring that others can repeat results. An abundance of tools is available to help.

Joel Berger braves freezing temperatures and charging musk oxen to learn how melting sea ice is affecting mammalian encounters.

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a social animal. Flies kept in chronic social isolation have now been found to show dysregulated sleep and feeding patterns, casting light on how prolonged absence of social contact affects health.

Feeding mice high-fructose corn syrup, a widely used sweetener in human diets, has been found to drive an increase in the surface area of the gut that is associated with enhanced absorption of dietary nutrients and weight gain.

How ageing contributes to bone loss is unclear. In ageing mice, skeletal stem cells lose their ability to generate bone-forming cells called osteoblasts, and instead promote the generation of bone-resorbing cells called osteoclasts.

In stressed cells, proteins and RNA molecules cluster together to form stress granules. It emerges that the small protein modifier ubiquitin is needed to disassemble stress granules in recovering cells.

Tiny flakes of metal suspended in a solution have been observed to self-assemble into pairs separated by a narrow gap — offering a tunable system for studying combinations of light and matter known as polaritons.

This Review discusses the state of the art of interface optics—including refractive optics, meta-optics and moiré engineering—for the control of van der Waals polaritons.

This Perspective outlines the Human Developmental Cell Atlas initiative, which uses state-of-the-art technologies to map and model human development across gestation, and discusses the early milestones that have been achieved.

The metallicity of the interstellar medium measured towards 25 stars relatively near the Sun shows large variations, suggesting that infalling pristine gas is not efficiently mixed in the interstellar medium.

Laser-free universal control of two trapped-ion qubits using a combination of radiofrequency and microwave magnetic fields achieves some of the highest fidelities ever reported for two-qubit maximally entangled states.

Gold nanoflake pairs form by self-assembly in an aqueous ligand solution and offer stable and tunable microcavities by virtue of equilibrium between attractive Casimir forces and repulsive electrostatic forces.

Hollow colloidal capsules, each with a single micropore, act as artificial cell-like structures that can capture and release payloads such as solid particles or bacteria from the external environment.

Woody plants across the continental United States make extensive use of water stored in bedrock across diverse climates and biomes.

A global energy system model finds that planned fossil fuel extraction is inconsistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, because the majority of fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground.

Taytalura alcoberi, represented by a three-dimensionally preserved skull from the Late Triassic epoch of Argentina, is phylogenetically inferred as the earliest known lepidosauromorph, and reveals that sphenodontian skull architecture is plesiomorphic for lepidosaurs.

Behavioural and transcriptomic analyses show that chronic social isolation of Drosophila causes perturbed sleep and increased feeding, and induces a starvation-like brain state.

A population of hypothalamic dopamine neurons sustains mating drive in male mice through a persistent mode of biochemical signalling in target neurons.

Cells from embryonic, fetal, paediatric and adult human intestinal tissue are analysed at different locations along the intestinal tract to construct a single-cell atlas of the developing and adult human intestinal tract, encompassing all cell lineages.

An analysis of skeletal stem cells in mice reveals that bone ageing occurs at the level of local niches affecting skeletal and haematopoietic lineage output, which may influence systemic aspects of multi-organ physiological ageing.

A high-fructose diet in mice improves the survival of intestinal epithelial cells, which leads to an increase in gut surface area, enhanced absorption of lipids and the promotion of tumour growth and obesity.

Longitudinal analyses of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine-elicited epitope-specific CD8⁺ T cell responses shows that CD8⁺ T cells are rapidly induced after prime vaccination and stably maintained after boost vaccination.

Detailed analyses of B cells in the tumour microenvironment of human papilloma virus (HPV)-linked head and neck cancers reveal strong humoral immune responses to HPV antigens and the secretion of HPV-specific antibodies in situ.

An analysis of human papillomavirus (HPV)-specific CD8 T cells in patients with head and neck cancer identifies functional PD-1⁺TCF-1⁺CD8 T cells in the tumour with implications for therapeutic vaccination and PD-1 directed immunotherapy.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of a PIWI–piRNA complex provide insight into how piRNAs recognise target RNAs and reveal differences from the target mechanisms of microRNAs.