Volume 599 Issue 7883, 4 November 2021

The pan-African science academy is in turmoil. Funders and fellows must jointly own the crisis, and work to stop it happening again.

From climate to COVID, naivety about how science is hijacked promotes more of the same.

Dryness begets heat, and atmospheric moisture in the tropics is expected to be low on the hottest days in a warmer world.

Findings suggest that people lived on the islands earlier than thought — and could have imported the canid called the warrah.

When pain relief is expected, specific circuits in the brainstem become more active.

Jetties, docks and other artificial structures are fast replacing the natural ecosystems where sea meets land.

Small galaxies seem to be forming stars the old-fashioned way: in splendid isolation.

Research on slumbering volunteers reveals the surprising stage when we feel most deeply asleep.

Fruit-bat pups can send short echolocation clicks — and sense those of others — from day zero.

The latest science news, in brief.

Despite 30 years of climate diplomacy, urgent and aggressive action is needed to halt global warming. Nature explains what success looks like, and what’s on the line.

As the US Food and Drug Administration authorizes shots for children aged 5 to 11, researchers predict what this might mean for populations.

The genomes of 13 remarkably preserved 4,000-year-old mummies from the Tarim Basin suggest they weren’t migrants who brought technology from the west, as previously supposed.

Radio signal seemed to originate from the star Proxima Centauri, and provided a helpful drill for future searches.

A Nature survey reveals that many authors of the latest IPCC climate-science report are anxious about the future and expect to see catastrophic changes in their lifetimes.

In a bid to stave off looming disaster, scientists are trying to repurpose drugs used for malaria and other diseases, but infrastructure and recruitment challenges stymie progress.

Two books follow key runners in the historic race to immunize the world against COVID.

Materials scientist behind Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons business.

Struggling with your principal investigator’s bias towards academia? Here are some workarounds.

Antibodies and other reagents for glycans have lagged behind those for proteins and nucleic acids, but the field is catching up.

Danielle Bruna Leal de Oliveira tracks pathogens for Brazil’s public-health system.

Reaching a deeper understanding of the ocean ecosystems that maintain whales might aid conservation efforts. Measurements of the animals’ krill intake indicate that previous figures were substantial underestimates.

Optimizing the testing of incoming travellers for COVID-19 involves predicting those who are most likely to test positive. A machine-learning algorithm for targeted testing has been implemented at the Greek border.

Entering your personal identification number using the keypad of a cash machine is notoriously insecure. A clever application of the special theory of relativity could make identification safer.

In mice, the ovarian hormone oestradiol sensitizes neurons in a brain region called the hypothalamus to a melanocortin hormone that signals an energy surplus. Their dual activation increases physical activity.

Efforts to generate nanoscale-resolution images of cell interiors have gained ground through the development and refinement of a microscopy method. The data sets are publicly available as resources for further discoveries.

In this Perspective, a group representing a range of stakeholders makes the case for a set of five proposed globally applicable ethical guidelines for ancient human DNA research.

A zero-knowledge proof, which can be used to verify secret information, is reported here with security that is enforced by the laws of special relativity.

Using torque magnetometry, the thermodynamic signatures of bosonic Landau level transitions are observed in a layered superconductor, owing to the formation of Cooper pairs with finite momentum.

Bloch wavefunctions of two types of hole in gallium arsenide are reconstructed by measuring the polarization of light emitted by collisions of electrons and holes accelerated by a terahertz laser.

Amorphous–amorphous phase transitions in silicon dioxide are shown to proceed through a sequence of percolation transitions, a process that has relevance to a range of important liquid and glassy systems.

Electron doping of organic semiconductors is typically inefficient, but here a precursor molecular dopant is used to deliver higher n-doping efficiency in a much shorter doping time.

Through an idealized set of simulations, with a model that incorporates key physics, research reveals dramatic swings between massive rainfall events and extended dry periods in hothouse climates.

Here the non-linear relationship is revealed between carbon emissions reductions and oil demand reductions, which depends on the magnitude of demand drop and the global oil market structure.

A combination of 3D whale locations and acoustic measurements of prey density is used here to show that whales’ consumption of krill is several times larger than often thought.

A new computational method, EVE, classifies human genetic variants in disease genes using deep generative models trained solely on evolutionary sequences.

Experiments in mice identify the medial septum as an extrahippocampal input region that is critical for social memory formation, and show that modulation of the medial septum by serotonin regulates the stability of social memories.

Astrocytes can respond to diseases and injuries of the central nervous system by driving the death of neurons and mature oligodendrocytes through the delivery of long-chain saturated fatty acids contained in lipoparticles.

A study reports the design and performance of a reinforcement learning algorithm that enabled efficient and targeted SARS-CoV-2 testing of passengers travelling to Greece in the summer of 2020.

A study of SARS-CoV-2 variants examining their transmission, infectivity, and potential resistance to therapies provides insights into the biology of the Delta variant and its role in the global pandemic.

This study systematically profiles the activity of several classes of antibiotics on gut commensal bacteria and identifies drugs that mitigate their collateral damage on commensal bacteria without compromising their efficacy against pathogens.

Enteric glial cells have tissue-wide immunoregulatory roles through the upregulation of IFNγ-dependent genes both at steady state and after parasite infection, promoting immune homeostasis and CXCL10-mediated tissue repair after pathogen-induced intestinal damage in mice.

A subset of oestrogen-sensitive neurons integrate melanocortin and oestrogen signalling to rebalance energy allocation in female mice leading to reduced sedentary behaviour and decreasing obesity in oestrogen-depleted female mice

SLC25A39 and its paralogue SLC25A40 have redundant roles in the import of glutathione into mitochondria of mammalian cells.

Focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) combined with deep-learning-based segmentation is used to produce three-dimensional reconstructions of complete cells and tissues, in which up to 35 different organelle classes are annotated.

Open-access 3D images of whole cells and tissues with combined finer resolution and larger sample size are enabled by advances in focused ion beam-scanning electron microscopy.

Interface mutations in the GTPase switch protein Gsp1 (the yeast homologue of human RAN) allosterically affect the kinetics of the switch cycle, revealing a systems-level mechanism of multi-specificity.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the voltage-gated potassium channel Kv4.2 alone and in complex with auxiliary subunits (DPP6S and/or KChIP1) reveal the distinct mechanisms of these two different subunits in modulating channel activity.