Volume 601 Issue 7894, 27 January 2022

Science stands to make huge gains from the James Webb Space Telescope, but there are also lessons to learn from the epic management failures that beset the project.

Rosy assumptions endanger public health — policymakers must act now to shape the years to come.

Photons of different wavelengths go their separate ways to capture images.

Levels of some immune molecules are unusually high in people with persistent symptoms after infection with SARS-CoV-2.

The outsize nerve network running from an elephant’s trunk to its brain hints at a highly developed sense of touch.

Methods to strip away the keratin coat could make immune therapies more effective.

Metal tubes dating back millennia are the oldest surviving drinking straws.

Nanometre-scale particles’ asymmetrical shape makes them easier to ‘drive’ using near-infrared light.

Ozone costs billions of dollars in yields of wheat and other staple crops in China and other East Asian nations.

The latest science news, in brief.

As the US president’s first year in office ends, Nature assesses whether he’s kept his promise to make evidence-based decisions.

After Harvard chemist’s trial, scientists report ripple effects for federal funding and research itself.

The ambitious observatory has arrived at its home — near a gravitationally special spot called L2 — for a premier view of the Universe.

The first crop of antivirals against SARS-CoV-2 is promising. But new drugs will be needed to counter the looming threat of resistance.

Powerful waves ringing through the atmosphere after the eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai are unlike anything seen before.

People abandoned thriving cities in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and farther afield at about the same time as a decades-long drought gripped parts of the planet.

To ensure food security, the world must stop letting fertile soil wash and blow away.

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

Researchers are creating grass-roots collaborative networks to tackle difficult questions in primate studies and more, but they need funding and other support.

Nervous about advising junior lab colleagues who want to switch sectors? Don’t be, say scientists who have made the move.

Our fifth annual round-up of the tools that look set to shake up science this year.

Abdullah Gohar studies fossils from the Faiyum Depression, which occurred where he grew up.

An innovative microstructure design distributes water to rapidly cool a hot surface without interference from the steam that is created in the process. This approach could enable safer and more efficient power generation.

An investigation into the nature of genetic connections between individuals interred in the same chambers of an ancient tomb in Britain about 5,700 years ago sheds light on kinship in an early society.

The genomes of hundreds of individuals who lived in Great Britain and in continental Europe during the Bronze Age provide evidence for a migration of people from the continent to southern Britain between 1000 and 875 bc.

Experiments have validated a way of producing nuclear energy known as laser-driven fusion, in which a plasma is heated and compressed. The milestone offers crucial evidence that the plasma can supply its own heat.

The production of blood cells, including some immune cells, relies heavily on the bone-marrow microenvironment. Cardiovascular diseases are now found to corrupt this niche, leading to imbalances in blood-cell production.

The economic, technical, environmental and safety requirements of battery-powered aircraft are considered, and promising technologies and future prospects for battery innovation are discussed.

Analysis of archival low-frequency radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array reveals a periodic transient with an unusual periodicity of 18.18 min, the source of which is localized to our Galaxy and could be an ultra-long-period magnetar.

A study establishes a scalable approach to engineer and characterize a many-body-localized discrete time crystal phase on a superconducting quantum processor.

Entangled pairs of fermionic atoms in an optical lattice array have long-lived motional coherence, and the motion of each pair results in a robust qubit, protected by exchange symmetry.

A burning plasma, a critical step towards self-sustaining fusion, is achieved at the US National Ignition Facility, with a subset of experiments demonstrating fusion self-heating beyond radiation and conduction losses.

A hybrid algorithm that applies backpropagation is used to train layers of controllable physical systems to carry out calculations like deep neural networks, but accounting for real-world noise and imperfections.

The vibrational states emerging at the interface in oxide superlattices are characterized theoretically and at atomic resolution, showing the impact of material length scales on structure and vibrational response.

A high-precision angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) study on the superconductor Bi2212 resolves the spectroscopic singularity associated with the superconducting transition temperature, and indicates that the transition is driven by phase fluctuations.

Structured thermal armours on the surface of a solid inhibit the Leidenfrost effect, even when heated to temperatures in excess of 1,000 °C, pointing the way towards new cooling strategies for high-temperature solids.

Perovskite solar cells including charge transport material fabricated using a reverse-doping process have the highest certified efficiency for cells of 1-cm² active area and the highest fill factor reported so far.

Geochemical analyses correlating the stratum that overlies the sediments containing the Omo fossils with material from a volcanic eruption suggest that these fossils (the oldest known modern human fossils in eastern Africa) are over 200,000 years old.

Archaeological and ancient DNA analyses of 35 individuals entombed at Hazleton North long cairn approximately 5,700 years ago are used to reconstruct kinship practices in Early Neolithic Britain.

Genome-wide ancient DNA data from individuals from the Middle Bronze Age to Iron Age documents large-scale movement of people from the European continent between 1300 and 800 bc that was probably responsible for spreading early Celtic languages to Britain.

Studies using neural ensemble recordings in rats show that cells in the piriform cortex carry a spatial representation of the environment and link locations to olfactory sensory inputs.

Blastoids derived from naive PXGL-cultured human pluripotent stem cells in which Hippo, TGF-β and ERK pathways are inhibited closely recapitulate aspects of blastocyst development, form cells resembling blastocyst-stage cells and thus provide a model system for implantation and development studies.

The discovery and synthesis of a colistin congener provide a promising clinical lead against mcr-1-encoding colistin-resistant pathogens, which are responsible for an increasing number of deaths from antibiotic-resistant infections.

A single dose of a small-molecule HIV capsid inhibitor provides long-term protection from repeated simian–human immunodeficiency virus challenges in macaques and might serve as a novel strategy for HIV prevention in humans.

A phase I open-label trial evaluating the immunogencity, reactogenicity and safety of a peptide-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate to induce SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses.

Integration of pre-treatment tumour features in predictive models using machine learning could inform on response to therapy.

A chromatin accessibility atlas of 240,919 cells in the adult and developing Drosophila brain reveals 95,000 enhancers, which are integrated in cell-type specific enhancer gene regulatory networks and decoded into combinations of functional transcription factor binding sites using deep learning.

Ageing alters the kinetics of translation elongation in both Caenorhabditis elegans and Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of DNA-dependent protein kinase catalytic subunit bound to ATPγS and four inhibitors (wortmannin, NU7441, AZD7648 and M3814) provide molecular details and insights useful for drug design.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the photosystem I–NADH dehydrogenase-like supercomplex in barley provide structural details to elucidate the functions and regulation of photosystem I-dependent cyclic electron transport in chloroplasts.