Volume 598 Issue 7880, 14 October 2021

Researchers are facing harassment for speaking out during the pandemic. Their institutions must do more to support them.

When governments assume that people will panic, that exacerbates the pandemic.

Galaxies were busy joining forces one billion years after the birth of the Universe.

Hygromycin A doesn’t work well against most bacteria, but it shines as a treatment for Lyme disease.

Atmospheric rivers, which carry moisture towards the poles, are expected to intensify unless greenhouse-gas emissions are curbed.

Off the Alaskan coast, scientists find dense beds of algal cysts from a species that make marine animals poisonous to eat.

Geochemical analysis suggests that an obsidian mirror owned by a confidant of the English Tudor queen was made in Mexico.

Scientists have developed a material whose magnetic properties change when it’s deformed — and that is also soft enough to respond to small movements.

Now a dusty hole, Jezero Crater hosted a lake billions of years ago.

The latest science news, in brief.

The rare example of a government research agency facing criminal charges after a natural disaster underlines the perils of communicating and managing risk.

The programme’s director has resumed his post after being investigated — but some staff are not happy with the way the case was handled.

David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian share the award for identifying receptors that allow the body’s cells to sense temperature and touch.

Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi split the award for their work on complex systems — including modelling Earth’s climate and global warming.

Benjamin List and David MacMillan share the award for developing cheap, environmentally friendly organic catalysts.

Nobel prize insiders and observers say timing and politics meant vaccine technology was an unlikely winner — but science’s most prestigious prize shouldn’t be far off.

The agency found no evidence that the flagship observatory’s namesake was involved in anti-LGBT+ activities, but some say that Webb bears responsibility.

Dozens of researchers tell Nature they have received death threats, or threats of physical or sexual violence.

Tax heavy cars and shrink batteries to consolidate the gains from electrifying transport.

For objective careers advice, talk to those who left science as well as those who stayed.

It’s time to tackle the cumulative barriers and biases faced by scientists who aren’t from wealthy countries.

Around 100 active scientists have collaborated with the Vatican Observatory, says Brother Guy Consolmagno, its director.

A sophisticated climate model suggests that liquid-water oceans never formed on Venus, and that some planets outside the Solar System that were thought to be habitable might not be.

What role might seafood have in boosting human health in diets of the future? A modelling study that assesses how a rise in seafood intake by 2030 might affect human populations worldwide offers a way to begin to answer this.

How will global energy usage change as Earth warms? Modelling now suggests that there will be a modest net decrease in energy consumption — but probably at the expense of human well-being in many regions.

In diseases called tauopathies, misfolded tau proteins form aggregates called fibrils. Fibrils from nine different tauopathies show that tau misfolds in many ways, enabling the diseases to be classified according to fibril structure.

A feeding schedule of prolonged overnight fasting periods extends healthy lifespan in fruit flies by promoting night-time autophagy, a process in which material in cells is degraded and recycled.

For FRB 121102, 1,652 burst events are detected over 47 days, with a peak burst rate of 122 per hour, a bimodal burst rate energy distribution, and no periodicity or quasi-periodicity.

The authors show not only that planetary bodies around white dwarfs can survive but also that more than half of white dwarfs might have Jovian planetary companions.

Global climate model simulations of early Venus and Earth show that differences in the cloud regimes prevented ocean formation on Venus but not on Earth.

Fault-tolerant circuits for the control of a logical qubit encoded in 13 trapped ion qubits through a Bacon–Shor quantum error correction code are demonstrated.

Using scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy, fractional edge excitations are observed in nanographene spin chains, enabling the potential to study strongly correlated phases in purely organic materials.

The physics of oriented topological graphs produces anomalous non-reciprocal topological edge states that have greater robustness to disorder and defects than the best performers at present: namely, Chern states.

A rubber-like, metal–organic crystal is reported with a mechanically interlocked catenane backbone, which could allow for easy guest molecule uptake and release.

Carbon-neutral hydrogen can be produced through photocatalytic water splitting, as demonstrated here with a 100-m² array of panel reactors that reaches a maximum conversion efficiency of 0.76%.

Using global data, econometrics and climate science to estimate the damages induced by the emission of one ton of carbon dioxide, climate change is projected to increase electricity spending but reduce overall end-use energy expenditure.

Data on the nutrient content of almost 3,000 aquatic animal-source foods is combined with a food-systems model to show that an increase in aquatic-food production could reduce the inadequate intake of most nutrients.

Cell-type-specific electrophysiological recording, fibre photometry and optogenetic manipulations in mice show that dopamine signals from the ventral tegmental area to the lateral entorhinal cortex have a key role in cue–reward associative learning.

A single-cell atlas of human fetal bone marrow in healthy fetuses and fetuses with Down syndrome provides insight into developmental haematopoiesis in humans and the transcription and functional differences that occur in Down syndrome.

A single sulfatase produced by a bacterium found in the human colon is essential for degradation of sulfated O-glycans in secreted mucus.

Data-driven modelling including numbers of cases and population movements is used to simulate the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States in 2020, providing insights into the transmission of the disease.

C-type lectins and SIGLEC1 function as attachment receptors for SARS-CoV-2 and enhance ACE2-mediated infection.

A biologically informed, interpretable deep learning model has been developed to evaluate molecular drivers of resistance to cancer treatment, predict clinical outcomes and guide hypotheses on disease progression.

Circadian-regulated autophagy contributes to the health benefits of intermittent time-restricted feeding in Drosophila.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of tau filaments from progressive supranuclear palsy and other tauopathies reveal new filament conformations, and suggest that tauopathies can be classified on several different levels according to their filament folds.

SCAF1 is solely required for supercomplex CIII₂CIV assembly and is not involved in the formation of the respirasome (supercomplex CICIII₂CIV)

The authors resolve the structure of five complexes containing RNA polymerase II and the CSA and CSB proteins, offering insight into how the repair of DNA lesions is coupled to transcription.