Volume 601 Issue 7892, 13 January 2022

The focus on a narrow set of metrics leads to a lack of diversity in the types of leader and institution that win funding.

How can we make sure that medical trials reported in the scientific literature are real? It is surprisingly hard — but not impossible.

Genes that control limb development are looped into the process for generating fingerprint patterns.

Seismic waves reveal unexpectedly cool temperatures for certain volcanoes classified as hot.

Potent immune molecule could be used to treat COVID-19 and infections caused by viruses related to SARS-CoV-2.

Giant hydrogen filament is one of the longest features of its type in the Galaxy.

Dagger and arrows interred in a grave 3,000 years ago provide evidence of female warriors.

Ultraviolet light controls the emergence of solid particles from a fluid, creating coral- and blossom-shaped structures.

As global temperatures rise, parts of the Gulf of Mexico are undergoing less acidification than expected — for now.

The latest science news, in brief.

Theranos case highlights the importance of peer review for biotech entrepreneurs, scientists say.

Scientists worry that pools of unvaccinated people could be a source of new variants, such as Omicron.

Deaths caused by university lab blasts have some scientists in China concerned about a lack of oversight and standardized safety protocols, especially in teaching labs.

Mounting evidence from animal studies suggests that Omicron does not multiply readily in lung tissue, which can be badly damaged in people infected with other variants.

A re-run of a 100-year-old, US-led bird survey will inform future conservation efforts — but be helmed by local researchers.

Child-development researchers are asking whether the pandemic is shaping brains and behaviour.

Regions that never used to burn are now suffering from forest fires — and that raises the risks of dangerous mudslides that are hard to forecast.

‘Focused research organizations’ can take on mid-scale projects that don’t get tackled by academia, venture capitalists or government labs.

Scientists and funders with close links to local communities outline how Western teams can collaborate fairly and effectively with those groups.

Sergey Zimov is rewilding a remote part of northeastern Siberia to help fight climate change.

Excessive rainfall can cause catastrophic socio-economic losses to a community or nation. An analysis of changes in gross regional product identifies ways in which extreme precipitation affects global economic productivity.

Proteins spanning the membranes of cells of the intestine and kidney use sodium-ion gradients to take up glucose, enabling water absorption, too. The structures of these transporter proteins have now been observed in detail.

A microorganism that dwells in an underground oil reservoir has been found to degrade various petroleum compounds and use them to produce methane through a previously unreported biochemical pathway.

The curious electrical resistance that gives strange metals their name has been seen in a failed superconductor, in which disorder interferes with the material’s ability to achieve zero resistance below a critical temperature.

Beads made from ostrich eggshells, produced by people over the past 50,000 years, provide evidence for a long period of social connection between eastern and southern Africa, followed by isolation and then reconnection.

Observations of the supernova SN 2019hgp, identified about a day after its explosion, show that it occurred within a nebula of carbon, oxygen and neon, and was probably the explosion of a massive WC/WO star.

Strange metallicity—in particular, resistance that is linear in temperature and magnetic field—is observed in a nanopatterned YBa₂Cu₃O_7−δ bosonic system.

A crossbar array of magnetic memory to execute analogue in-memory computing has been developed, and performs image classification and facial detection at low power.

An elastomeric solid-state electrolyte shows desirable mechanical properties and high electrochemical stability, and is used to demonstrate a high-energy solid-state lithium battery at ambient temperature.

A global assessment shows that increases in the number of wet days and extreme daily rainfall adversely affect economic growth, particularly in high-income nations and via the services and manufacturing sectors.

Different racial/ethnic populations and income groups are found to have been exposed to different levels of air pollution in the USA during the years 2000 to 2016.

By tracing the changing size of ostrich eggshell beads, climate is shown to have an important role in influencing when and where regional African populations interacted.

In memory consolidation, the hippocampus has a unique way to preferentially amplify behaviour-relevant information that entails ‘replaying’ this information during periods of rest.

The deubiquitinase PICI1 is identified as part of an immunity hub that coordinates pattern- and effector-triggered immunity and is involved in conferring broad-spectrum resistance to blast across different subspecies of rice.

A survey of species-level genes from 13,174 publicly available metagenomes shows that most species-level genes are specific to a single habitat, encode a small number of protein families and are under low positive (adaptive) pressure.

‘Candidatus Methanoliparum’ overexpresses genes encoding alkyl-coenzyme M and methyl-coenzyme M reductases—markers of archaeal multicarbon alkane and methane metabolism—and thrives on a variety of long-chain alkanes and n-alkylcyclohexanes, and n-alkylbenzenes with long n-alkyl (C_≥13) moieties.

An analysis of cancer mortality data for zoo mammals highlights marked differences across mammalian orders and an influence of diet, and shows that mortality risk is largely independent of body mass and life expectancy across species.

HELQ is differentially regulated by RAD51, which stimulates helicase activity, and RPA, which inhibits helicase activity and stimulates annealing.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the sodium–glucose cotransporter SGLT1 and a related transporter SMCT1 define the architecture of this protein family and provide insights into substrate binding and transport function.

Using cryogenic electron microscopy, the structure of the human SGLT2–MAP17 complex captured in the empagliflozin-bound state reveals the inhibitory mechanism of these anti-diabetic drugs.