Volume 606 Issue 7912, 2 June 2022

Reforms to accelerated approval should focus on securing reliable information in the present and clinical evidence for the future.

An iconic rotated structure is created from hexagons of carbon atoms.

More than 95% of the 101,000 children who died in 2019 of respiratory syncytial virus lived in less wealthy countries.

The vast and unregulated global trade in arachnids includes many species scooped up directly from their native habitats.

Rising temperatures will mean that intense storms in the mid-latitudes will sprawl over a larger area.

Sampling at Chinese animal markets shows worrying mutations in some strains of Newcastle disease virus.

A bacterial colony’s diet underlies its iridescence.

The wandering salamander glides to the ground from on high by splaying its limbs and pumping its tail.

The latest science news, in brief.

Scientists are trying to understand why the virus, a less-lethal relative of smallpox, has cropped up in so many populations around the world.

The urban centres are the first to be discovered in the region, challenging archaeological dogma.

Mass infections in wild birds pose a significant risk to vulnerable species, are hard to contain and increase the opportunity for the virus to spill over into people.

Scientists hope an ambitious agreement to arrest species extinction will be finalized in China later this year, but the country’s pandemic response puts that in doubt.

Mexican researchers fear that a polarizing bill could ruin the chances of overhauling the nation’s science system.

The nervous and immune systems are tightly intertwined. Deciphering their chatter might help address many brain disorders and diseases.

A physician calls on the medical system to contextualize and personalize the treatment of pain.

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

Researchers have severed global ties before — what happened?

A wave of departures, many of them by mid-career scientists, calls attention to widespread discontent in universities.

A non-profit organization merges engineering and biology to accelerate drug development for childhood cancers.

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe researches how physical changes to soil affect how much carbon is released into the atmosphere.

An optical device uses fibre loops to improve an experiment designed to show that quantum systems have the edge on classical computers. The innovative scheme offers impressive control and potential for scaling.

Neuronal fibres have been tracked as they regrow into the skin following nerve injury in mice. The analysis reveals that mis-wiring of pain-sensing fibres generates hypersensitivity to touch in skin associated with the injury.

Next-generation wireless services will demand massive increases in data traffic, requiring access to signals at higher frequencies than are presently used. This would disrupt scientific research, but a savvy sharing protocol offers a fix.

For more than a century, scientists have pondered over mysterious fossils of an aquatic vertebrate, and argued about the type of creature this species represents. Newly analysed specimens might help to solve this puzzle.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

A method has been developed for fabricating thin films of the 2D insulator hexagonal boron nitride with a uniform crystal orientation. The advance makes this material a key contender for replacing silica substrates in future electronics.

An immune molecule has an unexpected role in memory formation — specifically, in limiting the window of time in which newly forming memories can be contextually linked.

Recent progress in computational enzyme design, active site engineering and directed evolution are reviewed, highlighting methodological innovations needed to deliver improved designer biocatalysts.

The control of light–matter interactions as a way to manipulate and synthesize strongly correlated quantum matter is discussed, highlighting a field termed ‘strongly correlated electron–photon science’.

Spectroscopy of a gravitationally lensed galaxy at a redshift of 2.7 with spatially resolved maps of two foreground damped Lyman α systems indicates a vast mass of neutral hydrogen gas, consistent with a star-forming region.

Using spin-entangled baryon–antibaryon pairs, the BESIII Collaboration reports on high-precision measurements of potential charge conjugation and parity (CP)-symmetry-violating effects in hadrons.

The polyatomic molecule calcium monohydroxide is magneto-optically trapped and cooled below the Doppler cooling limit, making it a candidate for applications in quantum simulation and computation.

Gaussian boson sampling is performed on 216 squeezed modes entangled with three-dimensional connectivity⁵, using Borealis, registering events with up to 219 photons and a mean photon number of 125.

Time-reversal symmetry breaking is combined with non-Hermitian dynamics in an optomechanical system with squeezing interactions to produce chirality in the system, and a non-Hermitian Aharonov–Bohm effect is observed.

Using a chemical vapour deposition method, it is possible to epitaxially grow wafer-scale single-crystal trilayers of hexagonal boron nitride—an important dielectric for 2D materials—on Ni (111) foils by boron dissolution.

NeuroString, a tissue-like biological interface created by laser patterning of polyimide into a graphene/nanoparticle network embedded in an elastomer, is introduced, allowing in vivo real-time detection of neurotransmitters in the brain and gut.

Carbene chemistry is used to introduce difluoromethyl groups labelled with fluorine-18 into compounds for positron emission tomography imaging, using a reagent designed for high molar activity and versatility.

Detailed structural analysis of Palaeospondylus gunni from the Middle Devonian period shows strong resemblance to Eusthenopteron and Panderichthys, indicating that it was a sarcopterygian and most probably a stem-tetrapod.

Assembly of the hexaploid oat genome and its diploid and tetraploid relatives clarifies the evolutionary history of oat and allows mapping of genes for agronomic traits.

A single-cell Poisson model is used to analyse eQTLs in memory T cells across continuous, dynamic cell states, revealing that the cell context is critical to understanding variation in eQTLs and their association with disease.

Strategically perceiving and conceiving problems facilitates the effective use of limited cognitive resources.

Longitudinal imaging of nerve fibres in mice reveals that reinnervation after nerve injury can lead to neuropathic pain, which is mediated through aberrant patterns of reinnervation in denervated areas by nociceptors.

A molecular mechanism involving CCR5 and CCL5 determines the temporal window in which a memory can be linked with subsequent memories, and in aged mice an increase in CCR5 is associated with defects in memory linking.

A study maps neuronal genomic targets of oestrogen receptor-α and shows how they coordinate brain sexual differentiation, concluding that the genome remains responsive to hormonal changes after structural dimorphisms have been established.

A fez gene cluster drives formation of ferrosomes, a distinct lipid-bounded organelle for iron storage, in diverse bacterial species.

Two populations of thymic progenitors are identified, an early bipotent progenitor type biased towards cortical epithelium and a postnatal bipotent progenitor type biased towards medullary epithelium.

A mathematical framework to estimate the fitness of cancer driver mutations by integrating mutational bias, oncogenicity and immunogenicity finds fundamental trade-offs in cancer evolution.

Common protonophores—previously known as protein-independent proton translocators—activate mitochondrial heat production due to H⁺ leak through the ADP/ATP carrier and uncoupling protein 1.

Characterization of Gibbin, encoded by AHDC1, offers insights into the epidermal and mesodermal patterning phenotypes seen in Xia–Gibbs and related syndromes in humans, which derive from abnormal mesoderm maturation as a result of gene-specific DNA methylation decisions.

Single-nucleus Hi-C of embryos, polymer simulations and single-molecule imaging collectively reveal that MCM complexes influence genome folding and gene expression by impeding DNA loop extrusion.

A biochemical reconstitution of human replisomes that provides a system for future studies of DNA metabolic processes.