Volume 597 Issue 7878, 30 September 2021

Two scientists allowed Nature to chronicle their lives for three years. Their story speaks to the epic professional and personal struggles involved in establishing a career in research.

The world must work with Kabul’s new rulers to get polio and other diseases under control.

Catalyst based on nickel and iron allows electrical current to be harvested from the breakdown of urea.

Saudi Arabia’s Camel Site is a testimony to the dexterity of prehistoric sculptors.

Nanoparticles that bristle with dozens of copies of a SARS-CoV-2 protein segment could protect against a wide variety of coronaviruses.

Exposure to stronger artificial light led to greater disruption of the insects’ night music.

Cluster of tiny tube-shaped devices creates an intense, focused light source.

Methane gas that steals away from leaky fossil-fuel wells can hide underground and taint groundwater.

Remains discovered by schoolchildren on a fossil-hunting trip belonged to an extinct giant bird.

The latest science news, in brief.

Children left tracks in New Mexico around 22,500 years ago — thousands of years before most scientists thought humans settled in North America.

Studies of bats in China and Laos show southeast Asia is a hotspot for potentially dangerous viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2.

The artemisinin-based treatments are taking longer to clear infections. But they are still working — for now.

Children worldwide worry about the future and feel let down by governments, a huge study on attitudes towards climate change has found.

As debates about booster shots heat up, what’s known about the duration of vaccine-based immunity is still evolving.

Nature follows two scientists as they fight against the odds to build their careers.

In part two of a series, a pair of researchers race to secure the funding that will keep their operations going.

Just as two scientists manage to get their labs going, the COVID outbreak hits. Then comes a personal setback in part three of a series.

How innovation in drugs and surgery can take a toll on patients and public confidence.

An economist envisions a mostly cashless future, which could make finance more inclusive.

Radioastronomer who won share of Nobel for role in discovering pulsars.

Strengthen markets, measures and definitions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to fight climate change.

Combine economic, social and medical data to forecast need and design services to address the growing crisis.

As UK universities prepare to welcome new undergraduates, a study suggests ways to level the playing field between white and minority-ethnic science students.

Savannah Braden monitors how fruits ripen and rot to reduce food waste.

The misalignment of crystal lattices in stacked monolayers of materials has been shown to prevent heat flow between the layers, while retaining flow within them. This finding opens up an inventive way to control heat at the nanoscale.

An analysis of plant–pollinator interactions reveals that the presence of abundant plant species favours the pollination of rare species. Such asymmetric facilitation might promote the coexistence of species in diverse plant communities.

In 2D materials, electrons at low densities can freeze into well-defined positions and form exotic structures called Wigner crystals. A non-invasive technique has been developed to image these crystals directly.

The initial events that give rise to pancreatic cancer are not fully understood. Evidence from mice now implicates the enzyme Tert in setting the stage for the formation of this type of tumour.

The protein UTX regulates the DNA–protein complex chromatin to suppress tumour growth. Data suggest that the ability of UTX to condense into liquid-like droplets underlies its chromatin-regulating ability.

Nature’s pages feature a report from a conference about the search for extraterrestrial life, and a reflection on scientific books.

Lake breach flooding rapidly eroded almost a quarter of the volume of incised valleys on early Mars, influencing the topography of the wider Martian landscape.

So far, only indirect evidence of Wigner crystals has been reported, but a specially designed scanning tunnelling microscope is used here to directly image them in a moiré heterostructure.

An acoustic topological gallery insulator constructed from sonic crystals made of thermoplastic rods decorated with carbon nanotube films enables the out-coupling of amplified and focused sound at audible frequencies.

Extremely anisotropic thermal conductors based on large-area van der Waals thin films with random interlayer rotations are reported here.

A substantial pathway for energy loss in organic solar cells may be suppressed by engineering hybridization between non-fullerene acceptor triplet excitons and spin-triplet charge transfer excitons.

A deep generative model using radar observations is used to create skilful precipitation predictions that are accurate and support real-world utility.

Mercury deposition pathways from the atmosphere to the ocean remain uncertain, but mercury stable isotope measurements from the Atlantic and Mediterranean show that ocean uptake of gaseous elemental mercury is more important than previously thought.

The authors analyse the coordination and trade-off of the aboveground and fine-root traits of vascular plants using global trait databases.

The authors show that plant–pollinator interactions confer a fitness advantage to rare plant species in a biodiversity hotspot.

The transcriptional programs and chromatin accessibility changes that cause two related interneuronal subtypes to diverge from common developmental origins and acquire specialized properties are elucidated.

A lead-optimization strategy combining porin permeation properties and biochemical potency leads to development of a new class of antibiotic based on broad inhibition of penicillin-binding proteins from Gram-negative bacteria.

The dynamics of the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.526 suggest that resistance to neutralization by antibodies may evolve in other variants and contribute to the spread of COVID-19.

Single-nucleus transcriptomics defines a diverse set of immune and glial cells at the chronically inflamed leading edge of demyelinated white matter lesions in patients with multiple sclerosis.

A rare population of acinar cells expressing telomerase reverse transcriptase renew the acinar cell compartment during homeostasis, and are potential sources of premalignant cells in pancreatic carcinogenesis.

Cas7-11—the fusion of a putative Cas11 domain and four Cas7 subunits—cleaves RNA without detectable non-specific activity and, when optimized for RNA knockdown and editing in mammalian cells, has no effects on cell viability.

Phase separation properties are a major determinant of UTX activity in chromatin regulation in tumour suppression, and are dependent on a core intrinsically disordered region of the protein.

Structural classification of mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor causing non-small cell lung cancer is a better predictor of patient outcomes following drug treatment than traditional exon-based classification.