Volume 599 Issue 7886, 25 November 2021

Many organizations are ready to help threatened scholars and professionals — but those in peril often struggle to locate them.

Helping every scientist to improve is more effective than ferreting out a few frauds.

The oldest known monumental adobe structure in the Americas provides clues to the origins of this versatile material.

Bacteria that cause hospital infections can process copper into an effective antibiotic.

Experiments with various types of glove identify the factors behind a successful finger click.

A neural network can use the surface roughness of a painting to tell one person’s brushstrokes from another’s.

A keystone aquatic species develops resistance to compounds used to treat organic fields near its ponds.

The silk that whizzes out of jumping spiders mid-bound is of superior quality.

A battery system could power a train for hundreds of kilometres before needing a charge of renewable energy.

The latest science news, in brief.

Evaluation of death certificates from national database paints grim picture for pregnant women.

A mechanism known as ‘original antigenic sin’ protects some people from flu; whether it helps immune reactions to coronaviruses is still unclear.

But IBM’s latest quantum chip and its competitors face a long path towards making the machines useful.

Immune cells might ‘abort’ SARS-CoV-2 infection, forestalling a positive PCR or antibody test.

Eli Lilly and other pharma firms have begun submitting their anti-amyloid drug hopefuls for approval. But questions linger over the controversial precedent set by Biogen’s aducanumab.

Vaccines reduce the risk of developing COVID-19 — but studies disagree on their protective effect against long COVID.

As fires get bigger and rage for more of the year, scientists are racing to understand the lingering impacts.

A lively tale of evolution, domestication, migration and fellowship.

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

Child psychiatrist who transformed understanding of autism.

Most scientists love what they do, but job satisfaction levels hit a new low, Nature’s survey finds.

Deep-learning algorithms such as AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold can now predict a protein’s 3D shape from its linear sequence — a huge boon to structural biologists.

Victor Chaumeau collects mosquitoes in Myanmar to better understand how to control malaria.

A triangulation of linguistic, archaeological and genetic data suggests that the Transeurasian language family originated in a population of grain farmers in China around 9,000 years ago, and that agriculture underpinned its spread.

Mice in which organelles called mitochondria are disrupted in vulnerable neuronal cells provide a new model of Parkinson’s disease. The pattern of neurodegeneration challenges long-held ideas about the disease’s motor symptoms.

Experiments on electrons interacting with atomic nuclei have shown that the models used to measure neutrino oscillations — and thereby possibly to understand the formation of the Universe — are less accurate than we thought.

The protein-coding portions of more than 450,000 individuals’ genomes have been sequenced, and analysed together with the individuals’ health data, revealing rare and common gene variants linked to various health-related traits.

A diamond shatters easily, despite it being the hardest natural material. Atomically disordered forms of diamond made from buckyballs might not only overcome this problem, but also allow other properties to be optimized.

Electron scattering measurements are shown to reproduce only qualitatively state-of-the-art lepton–nucleus energy reconstruction models, indicating that improvements to these particle-interaction models are required to ensure the accuracy of future high-precision neutrino oscillation experiments.

Existing techniques for high-resolution imaging of trapped quantum gases are limited to two-dimensional systems, but the approach described here works in three dimensions by magnifying the quantum gas with matter wave optics.

A study reports a colossal angular magnetoresistance in the topological magnet Mn₃Si₂Te₆, resulting from a metal-to-insulator transition caused by controlled lifting of a topological band degeneracy, and discusses the key parameters involved.

A study demonstrates the synthesis and characterization of a two-dimensional van der Waals heterostructure hosting artificial heavy fermions, providing a tunable platform for investigations of heavy-fermion physics.

Engineering of the coupling between optical modes in a lithium niobate chip enables the realization of tunable, bi-directional and low-loss electro-optic frequency shifters controlled using only continuous and single-tone microwaves.

The efficiency and operating lifetimes of perovskite light-emitting diodes is improved by using a fluorinated triphenylphosphine oxide additive to control the cation diffusion during film deposition and passivate the surface.

Preparing amorphous phases of carbon with mostly sp³ bonding in bulk is challenging, but macroscopic samples that are nearly pure sp³ are synthesized here by heating fullerenes at high pressure.

A study describes the synthesis, structural characterization and formation mechanism of a paracrystalline state of diamond, adding an unusual form of diamond to the family of carbon-based materials.

The core North American monsoon arises through topographic steering of the jet stream, and should be considered as convection-enhanced orographic rainfall produced by a mechanically forced stationary wave.

A ‘triangulation’ approach combining linguistics, archaeology and genetics suggests that the origin and spread of Transeurasian family of languages can be traced back to early millet farmers in Neolithic North East Asia.

Whole-genome sequencing of 3,171 cultivated and 195 wild chickpea accessions is used to construct a chickpea pan-genome, providing insight into chickpea evolution and enabling breeding strategies that could improve crop productivity.

Whole-exome sequencing analysis of 454,787 individuals in the UK Biobank is used to examine the association of protein-coding variants with nearly 4,000 health-related traits, identifying 564 distinct genes with significant trait associations.

In male zebra finches, song practice and courtship song performance are associated with distinct patterns of neural activity in the basal ganglia, resulting in reduced vocal variability during performance.

The human-specific gene duplication SRGAP2C is identified as a modifier of structural and functional features of cortical circuits leading to improved behavioural performance that may have allowed the emergence of cognitive properties characterizing the human brain.

Indirect striatal projection neurons in the basal ganglia modulate activity in the superior colliculus, thereby controlling selection and exploration of actions in response to a  reward omission.

Dysfunction of mitochondrial complex I in mice is sufficient to cause progressive parkinsonism in which the loss of nigral dopamine release critically contributes to motor dysfunction.

In Arabidopsis thaliana, downregulation of the floral repressor FLC in response to cold occurs through a mechanism in which the FLC activator FRIGIDA is sequestered into biomolecular condensates away from the FLC promoter.

Herpes simplex virus type I and pseudorabies virus assimilate kinesin from host epithelial cells and repurpose the motor to traffic to the nuclei of neurons in the peripheral nervous system.

Time-limited skin inflammation in neonatal mice promotes a reciprocal interaction between type 2 helper T cells and fascial fibroblasts that regulates wound repair in later life.

In mouse models of triple-negative breast cancer, the extracellular domain of the collagen receptor DDR1 has a role in tumour defence against the immune system, by aligning collagen fibres to obstruct immune infiltration.

Multiple treatment-emergent alterations appear in patients with advanced-stage cancer who were treated with a KRAS inhibitor.

A new technique called immunoGAM, which combines genome architecture mapping (GAM) with immunoselection, enabled the discovery of specialized chromatin conformations linked to gene expression in specific cell populations from mouse brain tissues.

The RNA-directed nuclease TnpB from Deinococcus radiodurans can be reprogrammed to cleave DNA target sites in human cells.

Serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) has provided significant understanding of time-resolved processes of various systems in biology, for example, rhodopsin, which underlies our vision. The approach involves femtosecond-length X-ray pulses directed at protein crystals and has been used to study various photoactive proteins. However, the function of proteins such as rhodopsin requires trans–cis isomerization of a chromophore, which involves crossing of a conical intersection—a funnel separating potential energy surfaces—at timescales faster than what can be achieved experimentally. Here, Ourmazd and colleagues report a machine learning analysis of SFX data of photoactive yellow protein, which resolves the protein passing through a conical intersection, providing information about the potential energy surfaces involved and achieving time resolution of less than 10 fs. This approach offers an opportunity to understand some of the fastest processes in biology by extracting even more information from SFX datasets.