Volume 603 Issue 7900, 10 March 2022

United Nations resolution on greening plastics is a positive step. As negotiations begin, they must be evidence-based.

Successful policy and preparedness require more diverse evidence than researchers often encounter.

Dust from deserts and plains drives the formation of cirrus clouds, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere.

Sturdy 3D-printed objects can be broken down into materials that can be used to print new objects.

Bees and butterflies prefer sodium-spiked nectar to plain, according to experiments conducted in a flowery meadow.

Gargantuan object is roughly 140 kilometres across — making it by far the largest comet from the farthest reaches of the Solar System.

An outbreak of mange among a population of the llama-like beasts kicked off a cascade of ecological effects in the high Andes.

In a trial in 73 workplaces, the tests detected hundreds of people with asymptomatic COVID-19 and generated very few false positives.

Travel is a sleep-balancing activity: the tired catch up, and the well-rested become less so.

The latest science news, in brief.

Rebuke against Russian science grows as the deadly conflict enters its sixth day.

Researchers tell Nature about their experiences of the Russian invasion.

The emergence of a new variant is just a matter of time, scientists say.

Fears of excessive interference cloud proposal for protecting children whose genomes were edited, as He Jiankui’s release from jail looks imminent.

The US Department of Justice has announced major changes to the espionage-detection programme. But scientists hope for further acknowledgement of the damage done.

Researchers are giving drugs to healthy people in hope of clearing away toxic proteins in the brain and warding off neurodegeneration.

An informative guide takes in archaea, birds, primates and more — overconfidently.

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

Virologist who won a Nobel prize for discovering HIV.

A foundation that turns private land into national parks is reintroducing native species to restore ecosystems and build ecotourism.

Conservationist Charlie Gardner explains why he joined Scientists for Extinction Rebellion and its civil-disobedience protests.

María Constanza Meza Elizalde wants to change fire laws and attitudes.

Christin Godale campaigns for bigger research budgets and better care for people with epilepsy.

Bioinformatician Lucía Spangenberg is helping to make genetic sequencing available to anyone who needs it.

The options for controlling molecular self-assembly processes have been limited. A fresh approach uses electrons to facilitate self-assembly, and thereby provides precise external control over the process.

Understanding factors that lead to the development of multiple sclerosis might aid efforts to develop new therapies. Clinical data now implicate a viral culprit and immune-system dysfunction as underlying factors in this condition.

An optical device enables high-speed, high-resolution distance measurements to be made over a large field of view. Clever switching gives the integrated design a tiny footprint and keeps its power consumption low.

A combination of Internet-based and field experiments suggests that being given personal information about a stranger leads people to believe that they themselves are known to that person — and to change their behaviour accordingly.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming many areas of research. A new AI tool helps to fill in missing text and estimate the timeframe and geographical origin of ancient inscriptions.

The accretion disk environments surrounding active galactic nuclei are potential locations where there is an excess of eccentric mergers of large black holes, which have different spin–orbit tilts compared with circular mergers.

A study reports europium molecular crystals with optically addressable spin states that exhibit ultra-narrow linewidths, demonstrating the use of rare-earth molecular crystals as a platform for photonic quantum technologies.

Imaging the electron and hole that bind to form interlayer excitons in a 2D moiré material enables direct measurement of its diameter and indicates the localization of its centre of mass.

A large focal plane switch array is constructed to steer the laser beam of a LiDAR system, leading to 3D imaging with 16,384 pixels, improving the resolution and coverage of solid-state LiDARs.

Ultra-scaled transistors based on two-dimensional MoS₂ with physical gate lengths of 0.34 nm are reported, which show relatively good electrical characteristics and can be switched off.

A simple and versatile strategy is established to facilitate molecular recognition by extending electron catalysis for use in supramolecular non-covalent chemistry.

‘Cooperative redox enhancement (CORE) effects, which arise through the coupling of oxidative dehydrogenation and oxygen reduction reactions, can lead to increased rates of reaction over spatially separated bimetallic heterogeneous catalysts.

At temperatures and pressures typical of the Earth’s lower mantle, cubic CaSiO₃ perovskite is found to have lower strength and viscosity compared to bridgmanite and ferropericlase, providing clues to its role in subduction regions.

Ithaca—a deep neural network for textual restoration, geographical attribution and dating of ancient Greek inscriptions—collaboratively aids historians’ study of damaged texts.

A cultural assembly of traits at a 40,000-year-old archaeological site at Xiamabei, China supports a model of repeated early human expansions, cultural exchange and innovation in east Asia.

DNA analysis of 6 individuals from eastern and south-central Africa spanning the past approximately 18,000 years, and of 28 previously published ancient individuals, provides genetic evidence supporting hypotheses of increasing regionalization at the end of the Pleistocene.

When people learn more about a stranger, they think a stranger knows more about them, and when tested in a field experiment, this shifted residents’ perceptions of police officers’ knowledge of illegal activity.

Trace and delay conditioning experiments in Drosophila reveal the different neurons and signalling mechanisms that underlie this behaviour and highlight similarities with observations of learning experiences in mammals.

A transcriptomics study demonstrates cell-type-specific responses to differentially aged blood and shows young blood to have restorative and rejuvenating effects that may be invoked through enhanced mitochondrial function.

The bacterial genotoxin colibactin triggers prophage-mediated lysis of neighbouring bacteria, a finding that provides insight into the dynamics of microbial communities and relationships between bacterial metabolite production and phage behaviour.

The identification of high-affinity molecular mimicry between the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) transcription factor EBNA1 and the CNS protein GlialCAM provides a mechanistic link between multiple sclerosis and EBV.

A trispecific antibody targeting HER2 and T cells stimulates CD4 T cell-dependent inhibition of of breast cancer cell proliferation in vitro and tumor regression in a humanized mouse model.

A translationally silent KRAS^G60G mutation, preventing the formation of a cryptic splice donor site and  enabling expression of KRAS(Q61K), reveals a vulnerability in RAS^Q61 cancers that are therapeutically exploitable in a mutant-selective manner.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of Cas9 during mismatch cleavage provide insight into the mechanisms that control off-target effects of Cas9, which will aid in the future design of high-fidelity Cas9 variants with reduced off-target cleavage.