Volume 605 Issue 7909, 12 May 2022

The Artemis mission plans to send astronauts to the Moon in 2025 — a worthy goal for science and humanity in bleak times. The US Congress should cough up the cash.

Adaptation plans must heed those who face water insecurity.

An unconventional method promises to ease chocolate-making — and to turn out a product that’s less astringent than the ordinary stuff.

Some 40% of the floating objects that certain fisheries use to attract schools of tuna become drifting rubbish.

A huge fang suggests that the biggest of the extinct marine creatures called ichthyosaurs could be either toothy or toothless.

Ice masses flowed into valleys and grew thick enough to remain frozen during warm spells.

Male ‘mouth almighty’ fish rear not just their own small fry, but sometimes those with different paternity.

Technique reveals engravings more than 2 metres tall in an underground cavern in Alabama.

Differences in SARS-CoV-2 emission could account for why some individuals trigger superspreading events.

The latest science news, in brief.

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams will be the first to produce and analyse hundreds of isotopes crucial to physics.

After a delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, US biosecurity board revisits policies governing risky pathogen experiments.

Omicron relatives called BA.4 and BA.5 are behind a fresh wave of COVID-19 in South Africa, and could be signs of a more predictable future for SARS-CoV-2.

The World Health Organization’s long-awaited estimate of excess COVID deaths is in line with other studies.

Study shows that infections in very young children doubled during the Omicron wave.

Japan, South Korea, Russia, India, the United Arab Emirates and the United States aim to send missions to the Moon in the next year. But will they all make it?

The world’s most powerful rocket will make a trip around the Moon in 2022 — a step towards landing people there in 2025, and part of the US Artemis programme.

Thomas Insel advocates better social policy, not just more brain research.

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

Russian sanctions highlight how network analysis is urgently needed to find and protect vulnerable parts of the global economy.

In the age of big data, it is time to ensure that units are routinely documented for easy, unambiguous exchange of information.

Employers in some countries are stepping up efforts to support staff through this life stage. Others need to follow suit.

Scientists are fusing sequencing, chemistry and imaging techniques to probe interactions between pathogens and their host cells.

Marcelo Hill works to understand the body’s immune system and how it responds to cancer.

Protein fibrils accumulate in the brain during neurodegeneration. Cryo-electron microscopy has now uncovered fibrils of a protein not previously thought to accumulate.

It has long been thought that two enzymes, the kinases CDC7 and CDK2, are both needed to trigger DNA replication in mammalian cells. This view is challenged by evidence that offers a revised view of which kinases are essential.

A rare event has been identified in a brief detection of X-rays. Serendipity only pays off when you know what to do with it, and researchers have used the finding to verify a long-standing theory about a class of exploding star.

How did the biological machinery for protein synthesis evolve from simple chemicals on ancient Earth? Experiments suggest an intriguing role for modified RNA nucleotides in directing stepwise peptide synthesis.

Experiments on the mouse brain reveal that neuronal signals from the midbrain to the cortex act as a switch that transforms the dynamics of cortical neuronal activity and, in turn, initiates movement.

In an impressively thorough study, phosphorylation in the core of a transfer RNA molecule has been described for the first time, and the enzymes that add and remove the phosphate group have been characterized.

Standards and recommendations for transitioning organizations to quantum-secure cryptographic protocols are outlined, including a discussion of transition timelines and the leading strategies to protect systems against quantum attacks.

A study reporting optical and near-infrared observations of quasars at redshifts 5.8–6.6 shows that about half have strong winds, up to 17% the speed of light, suppressing black-hole growth.

Novae are caused by runaway thermonuclear burning in the hydrogen-rich envelopes of accreting white dwarfs, which leads to a rapid expansion of the envelope and the ejection of most of its mass^1,2. Theory has predicted the existence of a ‘fireball’ phase following directly on from the runaway fusion, which should be observable as a short, bright and soft X-ray flash before the nova becomes visible in the optical^3–5. Here we report observations of a bright and soft X-ray flash associated with the classical Galactic nova YZ Reticuli 11 h before its 9 mag optical brightening. No X-ray source was detected 4 h before and after the event, constraining the duration of the flash to shorter than 8 h. In agreement with theoretical predictions^4,6–8, the source’s spectral shape is consistent with a black-body of 3.27^+0.11_−0.33 × 10⁵ K (28.2^+0.9_−2.8 eV), or a white dwarf atmosphere, radiating at the Eddington luminosity, with a photosphere that is only slightly larger than a typical white dwarf.

Light-field control of real and virtual charge carriers in a gold–graphene–gold heterostructure is demonstrated, and used to create a logic gate for application in lightwave electronics.

A study realizes a photonic emulator to probe the temporal evolution of light in a non-Hermitian system, and reports the observation of chiral state transfer without encircling an exceptional point.

Single-crystalline perovskite membranes with an ultrahigh dielectric constant show potential as a gate dielectric for two-dimensional field-effect transistors.

Surface treatments for the passivation of defects in perovskite solar cells have a detrimental side effect that limits the maximum stability improvement.

Pressures of up to 900 gigapascals (9 million atmospheres) are achieved in a laser-heated double-stage diamond cell, enabling the synthesis of Re₇N₃, and materials characterization is performed in situ using single-crystal X-ray diffraction.

Peptide synthesis can take place directly on RNA, which suggests how a nucleic acid–protein world might have originated on early Earth.

An extinction-risk assessment of reptiles shows that at least 21.1% of species are threatened by factors such as agriculture, logging, urban development and invasive species, and that efforts to protect birds, mammals and amphibians probably also benefit many reptiles.

Psychosocial measures improve the cost-effectiveness of multi-faceted interventions against extreme poverty.

Tbx2 is a master regulator of cochlear inner hair cells.

Amyloid fibrils extracted from brains of patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration with TAR DNA-binding-protein immunoreactivity (FTLD-TDP) are made up of transmembrane protein 106B.

A study using structure determination by cryogenic electron microscopy identifies and characterizes TMEM106B amyloid filaments in human brain, and suggests that their formation is age dependent, with no obvious association with disease.

The development of a transgene-free, rapid and controllable method for producing eight-cell-like cells from human pluripotent stem cells provides a valuable resource to study early human embryogenesis.

Human somatic cells were reprogrammed to human chemically induced pluripotent stem cells that demonstrate key features of embryonic stem cells.

A plant endogenous peptide-receptor signaling pathway termed SCREW–NUT is described; it counteracts microbe-associated molecular pattern (MAMP)- and abscisic acid-induced stomatal closure to regulate the reopening of stomata after biotic and abiotic stresses.

A small-molecule inhibitor of TMPRSS2 is effective against SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in human lung cells and in donor-derived colonoids, and also shows prophylactic and therapeutic benefits in a mouse model of COVID-19.

The missense TLR7^Y264H gain-of-function genetic variation causes systemic lupus erythematosus in humans and mice.

In addition to CDC7, the cell cycle kinase CDK1 has a pivotal role in the G1/S transition of cells, a finding that revises our current understanding of cell cycle progression.

The CO₂-concentrating mechanism of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is dependent on pH gradients generated by both cyclic electron flow and O₂ photoreduction.

Reversible internal RNA phosphrylation contributes to thermal stability and nuclease resistance of tRNA, and cellular thermotolerance of hyperthermophiles.