Volume 605 Issue 7908, 5 May 2022

One of the world’s most ambitious plans to restore degraded land needs a more meaningful way to measure its achievements.

Developers of artificial intelligence must learn to collaborate with social scientists and the people affected by its applications.

A high-pressure, high-heat method produces a long-sought crystal.

After a sexual encounter, the male of an Asian spider species vaults off the female at a rate that can exceed 80 centimetres per second.

A microscopic vehicle can go forwards, backwards, left or right on command under the control of light of various wavelengths and polarizations.

A web of canals originating in the sixteenth century actually recharged an essential aquifer in India and Pakistan.

An iridescent purple glaze on German Meissen ware from the eighteenth century is traced to minute specks of gold.

After inadequate slumber, the layer of tears on the eye’s surface contains high levels of damaging molecules.

Saltwater crocodiles in northern Australia have thrived after adding feral pig to the menu.

The latest science news, in brief.

But some question whether a statement from the government will deter scientists from carrying out research that violates ethical norms.

NASA and the German space agency ground the telescope on a plane, citing the astronomy community’s concerns over cost and productivity.

Rather than excitement, the discovery of the species set off a Latin American movement to stop colonial palaeontology.

Modelling study is first to project how global warming will increase virus swapping between species.

Shobita Parthasarathy warns that software designed to summarize, translate and write like humans might exacerbate distrust in science.

From innovation to workforce diversity, scientists are eager for change at the world’s largest funder of biomedical research.

The sixth and latest IPCC assessment weights climate models according to how well they reproduce other evidence. Now the rest of the community should do the same.

Closed networks and ingrained biases can make women’s collaborations a balancing act.

Medical records can be tricky to access because of confidentiality and variability, but data-sharing efforts are helping to overcome these hurdles — without compromising patient privacy.

Kristine Bohmann has invented a sampler that collects genetic information from the air.

Analysis of zebrafish larvae reveals that epithelial cells in their skin undergo tension-driven division without DNA replication. This allows rapid expansion, enabling the cells to cover the fast-growing organism.

Fatty structures called plaques can form in arteries, and are separated from nerves by the artery walls. But this is no barrier to communication — it seems that nerves interact with plaques and immune cells to drive cardiovascular disease.

Would environmental damage be reduced by replacing beef with mycoprotein produced in cell culture? Modelling shows that this change could greatly cut global deforestation, pasture area and greenhouse-gas emissions.

While rats pause to eat or rest during navigation tasks, neuronal sequences in the brain are replaying routes around moving obstacles, allowing the animals to reach their goals even in changing environments.

The beating of hair-like structures that enable microorganisms to swim has been replicated in a polymer material that bends and twists with the help of light-sensitive molecular machines.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Experiments and fieldwork show that teams working together online produce fewer ideas than those collaborating in person — a first step towards answering the question of which modes of communication are generally best for creativity.

ZTF J1406+1222 is a wide hierarchical triple system that hosts a low-metallicity subdwarf star and a ‘black widow’ millisecond pulsar that has a highly varying optical flux and a 62-minute period.

A solid-state single-electron qubit platform is demonstrated based on trapping and manipulating isolated single electrons on an ultraclean solid neon surface in vacuum, which performs near the state of the art for a charge qubit.

Three tunable quantum Hall broken-symmetry states in charge-neutral graphene are identified by visualizing their lattice-scale order with scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy.

A tuneable platform using twisted WTe₂ stacks is described in which an electronic phase in the two-dimensional moiré lattice array is shown to resemble one-dimensional Luttinger liquids.

Two new plasmon modes are observed in macroscopic twisted bilayer graphene with a highly ordered moiré superlattice, the first being the signature of chiral plasmons and the second a slow plasmonic mode around 0.4 electronvolts.

The epitaxial growth of bilayer molybdenum disulfide on sapphire enables the fabrication of field-effect transistor devices with improved performance in carrier mobility and on-state current over traditional monolayer films.

Micropillars made of liquid crystal elastomers and exposed to light exhibit diverse stroke-like motions, leading to complex dynamic pattern evolution and collective communication  in arrays.

The development of confined organocatalysts for the enantioselective cyanosilylation of small, unbiased substrates, including 2-butanone, is shown to lead to catalysts that are as selective as enzymes, with excellent levels of control.

Replacing 20% of per-capita ruminant consumption with microbial protein can offset future increases in global pasture area, cut annual deforestation and related CO₂ emissions in half, and lower methane emissions.

Interaction between climate warming and intensive agricultural land use is associated with reductions in insect abundance and species richness, which can be mitigated by nearby natural habitats in low-intensity agricultural settings.

Using a combined before–after control–impact approach shows that existing studies using either before–after or control–intervention methods incorrectly estimate the effectiveness of protected areas in maintaining waterbird populations.

Videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas, but videoconferencing groups are as effective as (or perhaps even more effective than) in-person groups at deciding which ideas to pursue.

Experiments in yeast show that introns have a role in inducing phenotypic heterogeneity and that intron-mediated regulation of ribosomal proteins confers a fitness advantage by enabling yeast populations to diversify under nutrient-scarce conditions.

Terminally differentiated superficial epithelial cells continue dividing in the absence of DNA replication to quickly expand epithelial coverage during rapid growth.

Organoids originating from human multipotent ocular surface epithelial stem cells are similar to native lacrimal glands and undergo functional maturation when transplanted adjacent to the eyes of recipient rats, developing lumina and producing tear-film proteins.

In situ experiments have demonstrated chemotaxis of marine bacteria and archaea towards specific phytoplankton-derived dissolved organic matter, which leads to microscale partitioning of biogeochemical transformation in the ocean.

A survey of T cell populations in human and mouse tumours identifies a population of cancer-sensing IL-15-activated αβ T cell receptor-positive FCER1G-expressing innate-like T cells with high cytotoxic potential.

A study reports the isolation and characterization of mouse-adapted SARS-CoV-2, demonstrates asapiprant to protect aged mice from its most severe effects, and identifies the PLA₂G2D–PGD₂/PTGDR pathway as a therapeutic target.

The peripheral nervous system uses neuroimmune cardiovascular interfaces to assemble a structural artery–brain circuit, and therapeutic intervention in the artery–brain circuit attenuates atherosclerosis.

The growth of colorectal cancer is reduced by ketogenic diet consumption, the properties of which are mediated by the ketone body β-hydroxybutyrate.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the 12-member PBAF complex provide insights into nucleosome recognition by the complex and the role of mutations in human disease.

Cryo-EM structures of AMPA receptor with the subunit γ2 in non-desensitizing conditions at low glutamate concentrations disprove the one-to-one link between the number of glutamate-bound subunits and ionotropic glutamate receptor conductance.