Volume 598 Issue 7881, 21 October 2021

The world’s youth movements are following the science of climate change. It’s high time that world leaders did, too.

I turned down the role of adviser to a de-extinction company — that task belongs to everyone.

Study of lakes around the globe ties changes in ice coverage to human-induced warming.

Industrial fishing seems to have altered the processing of biomass in the ocean.

Illumination releases microscopic crawlers to follow a long, fibrous path.

Declassified satellite pictures expose the catastrophic damage done by a plutonium complex in the Urals.

The ancestor of living snakes lived on invertebrates, but its descendants colonized the planet by going gourmet.

Light that flows through a device made of optical fibres behaves like the form of matter called a superfluid.

A derelict oil tanker in the waters of the Middle Eastern nation is at high risk of rupturing, which would imperil millions of people already in crisis.

The latest science news, in brief.

People who have previously recovered from COVID-19 have a stronger immune response after being vaccinated than those who have never been infected. Scientists are trying to find out why.

As pandemic restrictions ease, other respiratory viruses are returning in unexpected ways.

Committee found that University of Chile neuroscientist Claudio Hetz did not deliberately alter published images — but some researchers fear his practices set a poor precedent.

The earliest evidence that Stone Age hunter-gatherers chewed or smoked the plant have been discovered among the remains of an ancient fire.

Billions of shots of China’s CoronaVac and Sinopharm vaccines have been given globally, but studies have questioned the length of protection they offer.

At Glasgow’s COP26 summit, countries will argue for more money to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change.

Behind the struggle to stop governments propping up the coal, oil and gas industries.

Tobacco companies still profit from decades of marketing to Black Americans.

An expansive survey of the hopes and fears, hypes and fails of genetic manipulation.

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

The world’s second-largest rainforest is key to limiting climate change — it needs urgent study and protection.

Two organizations that support at-risk academics offered funding, fellowship and language support at a critical time.

Hatching season on the Caribbean island of Barbados is a busy time for Carla Daniel.

The prefrontal cortex of the human brain is larger than that of other species. Comparisons of mouse, macaque and human brains uncover some of the genetic and molecular factors behind these differences.

Superconductivity and magnetism have been observed in layered graphene in which the sheets are twisted with respect to each other. But a simpler, more stable graphene system also exhibits these phases.

Finding a treatment for dengue, the most prevalent mosquito-borne viral disease in humans, has been difficult. A compound called JNJ-A07 displays promising activity against dengue virus in mouse models of infection.

A set of electromagnets has been used to move metal objects without touching them, even though the objects are not magnetic. This method could potentially be used like a ‘tractor beam’ to move hazardous objects in space.

High-throughput analyses of how sleeping fruit flies respond to a variety of odours show that the brains of these insects continue to process the value of the signals conveyed by sensory information during sleep.

A carbon monoxide gas ring co-orbiting with dusty debris is observed in the outer terrestrial planet region of the star HD 172555, which indicates that a planetary-scale impact took place.

A study shows that rhombohedral graphene is an ideal platform for well-controlled tests of many-body theory and reveals that magnetism in moiré materials is fundamentally itinerant in nature.

Superconductivity is observed in rhombohedral trilayer graphene in the absence of a moiré superlattice, with two distinct superconducting states both occurring at a symmetry-breaking transition where the Fermi surface degeneracy changes.

Time-varying magnetic fields can be used to manipulate the position and orientation of conductive non-magnetic objects.

An atomically coherent interlayer between the electron-transporting and perovskite layers in perovskite solar cells enhances charge extraction and transport from the perovskite, enabling high power conversion efficiency.

A metallaphotoredox-based cross-coupling platform is capable of activating a wide range of free alcohols using N-heterocyclic carbene salts, cleaving C–O bonds to form free carbon radicals that are then used to form new C–C bonds.

New proxy data for ocean pH and an ocean–atmosphere model show that a radically different ocean circulation led to decoupling of ocean productivity and upwelling in the equatorial Pacific Ocean 3–6 million years ago.

Preliminary modelling of airborne microplastics suggests that they may be exerting a minor cooling influence on the present-day atmosphere, and continued production could have increasing effects on the climate system in future.

Three key axes of variation of ecosystem functional changes and their underlying causes are identified from a dataset of surface gas exchange measurements across major terrestrial biomes and climate zones.

Whole-genome sequencing analysis of somatic mutations in liver samples from patients with chronic liver disease identifies driver mutations in metabolism-related genes such as FOXO1, and shows that these variants frequently exhibit convergent evolution.

The authors develop a paradigm to study sensory discrimination during sleep in Drosophila melanogaster.

Studies in mice, humans and macaques show that retinoic acid signalling has an important role in the development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in primates and may also underlie the evolutionary diversification of the PFC.

The authors identify deletions in a retinoic acid signalling responsive genetic element that leads to disproportionate increase of dendritic spines on neurons of the human prefrontal cortex.

The authors provide mechanistic insights into the crosstalk between signalling components of pattern-triggered immunity and effector-triggered immunity and their molecular linkers.

A study reveals that activation of Toll/interleukin-1 receptor signalling is an important mechanism for boosting plant defence during pattern-triggered immunity.

The small molecule JNJ-A07 interferes with the interaction between the NS3 and NS4B proteins of dengue virus and reduces the viral load in mice even when first administered at peak viraemia.

The rarity of tumour formation despite the high proportion of cancer-driver mutations in epithelia is explained by the competitive fitness of tumour cells relative to that of surrounding mutant epithelial cells.

Structures of the Cas4–Cas1–Cas2 complex from Geobacter sulfurreducens show that a 3′-overhang in the protospacer adjacent motif is required for complex assembly and spacer insertion into the CRISPR array.

Crystal structures of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) glycoprotein E2 in complex with CD81 reveal the conformational changes that occur in E2 after binding of CD81 and the effects of pH on binding affinity.