Volume 597 Issue 7877, 23 September 2021

Congress has eviscerated the US president’s pledge to upgrade research infrastructure at universities that serve underrepresented communities.

US President Joe Biden’s environmental-justice adviser says: tackle inequality and global warming together.

Scientists create millions of mutant viruses to find those that excel at ferrying genome-editing tools into muscle tissue.

The chances of heavy rain and high heat within one week are higher now than in the past two millennia, records suggest.

Scientists borrow features of the body’s receptor for tetrodotoxin to create a useful synthetic structure.

Data on more than 60,000 workers at Microsoft show that remote working led to more ‘siloed’ work groups and the sending of more e-mails.

Exoskeleton-clad volunteers show that adapting to an energy-saving pace requires almost no attention.

Fossils of a monkey-like animal that lived tens of millions of years ago furnish the earliest evidence of a mammal with cavities.

Cyclones could make it difficult for seabirds such as little auks and puffins to hunt, which can lead to their starvation.

The latest science news, in brief.

Drug companies and wealthy countries are facing increased pressure to partner with firms in the global south but are reluctant to relinquish control.

A preliminary analysis of viral genomes suggests the COVID-19 pandemic might have multiple animal origins — but the findings still have to be peer reviewed.

The 2019–20 wildfires generated 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — but a lot of that might have been mopped up by phytoplankton in the ocean.

Hints of a previously unknown, primordial form of the substance could explain why the cosmos now seems to be expanding faster than theory predicts.

The newly formed government organization tackled 46 research-fraud investigations in 2020 — three times as many as expected.

The United Nations forecasts that nearly 11 billion people will be living on Earth at the end of the century, but other demographic research groups project that population will peak earlier and at a much lower level.

An unusual lake in central Africa could one day release a vast cloud of greenhouse gases that suffocates millions of people. But it’s not clear whether the threat is getting worse.

A cosmologist reflects on barriers to diversity of thought in dark-matter and dark-energy research.

Of hearts, and myriad other ways natural selection has hit on to sustain multicellular life.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks.

Adrienne Nugent’s postdoctoral programme at Hampton University showed her what it felt like to be a member of a minority group on a committee.

Legal wins and federal budget proposals could address years of underfunding.

Deducing the full protein complement of individual cells has long played second fiddle to transcriptomics. That’s about to change.

Museum curator Douglas Russell catalogues and maintains specimens that offer a glimpse into the breeding behaviours of birds both living and extinct.

A genome-wide analysis of modern populations in Polynesia suggests the direction and timing of ancient Polynesian migrations. This model bears consistencies and inconsistencies with models based on archaeology and linguistics.

A genomic comparison of Ebola virus from the 2021 outbreak in Guinea with sequences from the West African outbreak that ended in 2016 suggests that the virus can remain latent in human survivors for an extended period of time.

Many plant seeds have shapes that aid their efficient dispersal by wind. Inspired by these seeds, a range of fliers have been constructed that could have applications from environmental monitoring to wireless communication.

Analysis of the ranges of nearly 15,000 plant and vertebrate species in the Amazon basin reveals that, from 2001 to 2019, a majority were affected by fire. Drought and forest policy were the best predictors of fire outcomes.

Organic molecules are increasingly crucial in quantum-optics technologies. An experiment shows how the strong coupling between confined organic molecules and light can improve photon detection at room temperature.

The authors report 1.3 mm observations of dust emission from strongly lensed galaxies where star formation is quenched, demonstrating that gas depletion is responsible for the cessation of star formation in some high-redshift galaxies.

Two serendipitously detected dust-obscured galaxies are reported at z = 6.7 and 7.4, with estimates that such galaxies provide an additional 10–25% contribution to the total star formation rate density at z > 6.

Nonlinearity induced by a single photon is desirable because it can drive power consumption of optical devices to their fundamental quantum limit, and is demonstrated here at room temperature.

In a tiny chip-based particle accelerator, phase-space control of the emerging electron beam demonstrates guiding over a length of nearly 80 micrometres and an indispensable prerequisite to electron acceleration to high energies.

With a design inspired by wind-dispersed seeds, a series of three-dimensional passive fliers at the macro-, meso- and microscale are realized that can bear active electronic payloads.

A record of Earth’s magnetic field constructed from near-bottom magnetization observations and oriented samples provides three-dimensional imaging of magnetic stripes in fast-spread crust, and suggests slow cooling off-axis, as opposed to deep hydrothermal cooling close to the spreading ridge.

Remote-sensing estimates of fires and the estimated geographic ranges of thousands of plant and vertebrate species in the Amazon Basin reveal that fires have impacted the ranges of 77–85% of threatened species over the past two decades.

Analysis of genomic networks from 430 modern individuals across 21 Pacific island populations reveals the human settlement history of Polynesia.

The authors analyse rare protein-coding genetic variants for association with 18,780 traits in the UK Biobank cohort.

An analysis of the interactions between 15 drugs and 25 gut bacterial strains shows that bioaccumulation of drugs within bacterial cells is another mechanism through which gut microorganisms can alter drug availability and efficacy.

The viral lineage responsible for the February 2021 outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Guinea is nested within a clade that predominantly consists of genomes sampled during the 2013–2016 epidemic, suggesting that the virus might have re-emerged after a long period of latency within a previously infected individual.

H9T, an engineered IL-2 partial agonist, promotes the expansion of T cells while maintaining a stem-cell-like state, leading to improved efficacy of adoptive cell therapy in mouse models of melanoma and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

CRISPR-mediated gene knockout and activation are used to identify molecules in cancer cells and macrophages that regulate antibody-dependent cancer cell phagocytosis.

A robust, cost-effective technique based on whole-exome sequencing data can be used to characterize immune infiltrates, relate the extent of these infiltrates to somatic changes in tumours, and enables prediction of tumour responses to immune checkpoint inhibition therapy.

Highly sensitive ribosome profiling of single cells at single-codon resolution enables identification of distinct cell cycle-dependent translational dynamic states in individual cells.

Crystal structures reveal the catalytic mechanism through which the radical S-adenosylmethionine enzyme MiaB adds a methylthio group onto tRNA.

MIPS521, a positive allosteric modulator of the adenosine A₁ receptor, has analgesic properties in a rat model of neuropathic pain through a mechanism by which MIPS521 stabilizes the complex between adenosine, receptor and G protein.