Volume 603 Issue 7902, 24 March 2022

To live with the coronavirus, we cannot be blind to its movements.

Russia’s war highlights the fragility of the global food supply — sustained investment is needed to feed the world in a changing climate.

Moonlit nights lure the northern black swift to altitudes of more than 4,000 metres — much higher than they soar on nights when the Moon is new.

Massive sleep database also uncovers four new types of insomnia.

Protocol for freezing structures called beta islets allows them to be safely stored for months at a stretch.

The silicon in solar cells is difficult to reuse in new cells, but it can be converted into useful materials.

The planet TOI 1227b is big — but might be in the process of deflating.

Re-examination of an artificial body of water uncovers its true purpose as a ritual pool dedicated to the god Ba’al.

Much of the loss is due to thinning of ice that lasts through the summer.

The latest science news, in brief.

Infectious diseases are likely to spread as Russia’s invasion displaces people and disrupts health services.

Most publications are still considering manuscripts irrespective of nationality — but Russia plans to remove a requirement for scientists to publish in foreign titles.

The liberal Gabriel Boric campaigned on a promise to invest in research and fight climate change, and has given scientists prominent positions in his administration.

Samples collected by Chang’e-5 are revealing exciting insights into the Moon’s evolution.

Modelling suggests that by the end of 2021, some 18 million people had died because of the pandemic.

Many countries have started relaxing rules and scaling back testing. Researchers are divided over whether this return to normality is too fast, too soon.

Data dashboards have been an important part of pandemic response and planning. What have their developers learnt about communicating science in a crisis?

An emerging movement aims to push researchers to pay more heed to inequities in scholarly citations.

Co-discoverer of messenger RNA who advanced French life sciences.

It is possible — and crucial — to green the building blocks of the modern world.

After two years of COVID-related delays, five doctoral candidates share lessons they learnt.

Researchers are blending tools from developmental biology with technologies such as cell sorting and CRISPR to gain fresh insight into cancer.

Juan-Carlos Jiménez Castellanos is helped in his work by an assay-stacking robot.

An understanding of how wing shape affects a bird’s agility requires parameters relating mass and geometry to aerodynamic performance. Analysis of one aspect of flight, inertial characteristics, fills a gap in our knowledge.

A brief stage in stellar evolution offers a precise means of dating stars in the Milky Way. The ages, compositions and motions of these stars all pinpoint the dynamical processes involved in the Galaxy’s formation.

Cancer cells make proteins in which the amino acid phenylalanine is swapped for tryptophan when immune cells trigger a tryptophan shortage. This finding reveals unexpected dynamics of genetic decoding.

Compounds that form reversible covalent bonds with lysine amino-acid residues in proteins have high potential for drug discovery. A chemical group has been reported that prolongs the time for which such compounds bind to their targets.

A hybrid design combines sensitivity and flexibility to create an acoustic single-fibre sensor that can be knitted into fabric. The future of tracking our health and fitness looks wearable — and perhaps even implantable.

The COVID Human Genetic Effort examines the molecular, cellular and immunological determinants of the various SARS-CoV-2-related disease manifestations by searching for causal errors of immunity.

A sample of approximately 250,000 subgiant stars enables an alternative view of the Milky Way’s assembly history, especially the early formation history of the old disk and halo.

A new approach to generating quantum sensors with close-to-optimal performance is demonstrated experimentally through Ramsey interferometry with (up to) N = 26 entangled atoms on a trapped-ion quantum computer, without a priori knowledge of the device or its noise environment.

Magnetic splitting in an antiferromagnetic state of cubic NdBi gives rise to Fermi arcs with bands that have opposing curvature.

A piezoelectric fibre woven into a machine-washable fabric converts tenuous sound pressure into electric signals and is used to listen to cardiac sound, determine the source direction of a sound, and record and play back audio.

A material design strategy and fabrication process is described to produce all-polymer light-emitting diodes with high brightness, current efficiency and good mechanical stability, with applications in skin electronics and human–machine interfaces.

A metastable palladium hydride is synthesized where the unique environment in the liquid cell, namely the limited quantity of Pd precursors and the continuous supply of H, resulted in the formation of the hcp phase.

The superchaotropic nature of globular boron cluster anions enables direct passage of a wide range of molecules across lipid membranes.

High-resolution images derived from airborne geophysical data reveal critical aspects of the Yellowstone hydrothermal system, which can be used to assess geochemical models of the evolution of thermal fluids worldwide.

Analysis of inertial characteristics across 22 bird species shows that evolution has selected for avian manoeuvrability using both stable and unstable flight dynamics.

Combined data from three large studies, with a total sample size of around 50,000 individuals, indicate that many previous studies linking the brain to complex phenotypes have been statistically underpowered, producing inflated and irreproducible effects.

Wireless tracking of neuronal activity in social groups of mice identifies neurons in the anterior cingulate that hold representations of an animal’s social rank and can influence the competitive effort that the animal exerts.

Analyses of neural activity of mice competing in a social competition assay monitored by a computer vision tool reveal a neural circuit with a role in dynamically modulating social dominance.

Genetically diverse Candida albicans strains in patients with inflammatory bowel disease secrete a toxin and aggravate IL-1β-dependent intestinal inflammation.

The genomic profile and early transmission dynamics of the Omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2.

A collaborative study demonstrates that, compared with previous SARS-CoV-2 variants, B.1.1.529 isolates cause less infection and disease in mice and hamsters, in agreement with preliminary data from studies in humans.

The replication and pathogenicity of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is attenuated compared with the original strain and other variants.

In vitro studies in human cell lines and in vivo studies in a hamster model show that the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant is less pathogenic than both the Delta variant and an ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2.

The spike protein of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 has a higher affinity for ACE2 than Delta, and a marked change in its antigenicity increases Omicron’s evasion of therapeutic and vaccine-elicited neutralizing antibodies.

Omicron replicates faster than the wild-type, D614G, Alpha, Beta and Delta SARS-CoV-2 variants in the bronchi but less efficiently in the lung parenchyma.

Tryptophan depletion, which occurs in tumours, results in in-frame translation across tryptophan-encoding codons by phenylalanine substitution.

A genome-scale gain-of-function screen using overexpression of nearly 12,000 open reading frames (ORFs) identifies positive regulators of human T cell function and suggests that ORF-based screens could be applied clinically to improve T cell therapies.

Detailed reconstruction using enhanced focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy imaging and deep-learning-based automated segmentation demonstrates that hepatocyte subcellular organelle architecture regulates metabolism.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of ligand-free, agonist-bound and antagonist-bound Ste2 show that this class D1 G protein-coupled receptor has a distinct mechanism of activation compared with other receptor classes.