Volume 606 Issue 7913, 9 June 2022

We are leading Nature on a journey to help decolonize research and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation.

The country has been increasing research funding for decades, but its rigid, time-bound approach to research assessment is stifling basic science.

Defenceless-looking ribbon worms are anything but, according to a study of the many toxins that they produce.

Drug-carrying gels that are easy to swallow could make treatment easier for children — and parents.

An unconventional motor design allows a body scanner to guide a robotic device through precise manoeuvres.

Animal experiments reveal the molecular effects of caffeine on neurons and other brain cells.

Ponds built by beavers in one of central Europe’s largest forests are biodiversity hotspots.

The skeleton of a man aged 35–40 held enough DNA for scientists to sequence his genome.

Rivers that change course, sometimes in just a few days, can expose large numbers of people to deadly floods.

The latest science news, in brief.

The decline might be another sign of politics affecting cross-country scientific collaborations.

SpaceX and other companies are still struggling to make their satellites darker in the night sky.

Scientists are racing to understand the latest monkeypox outbreaks — from their origins to whether they can be contained.

A newly described species of ancient giraffoid had a thick helmet designed for fierce headbutting.

Female representation among mathematicians is improving. But the field’s most prestigious awards are still going almost exclusively to men.

Researchers with the World Health Organization explain mistakes in high-profile mortality estimates for Germany and Sweden.

Covering 10% of the world’s hydropower reservoirs with ‘floatovoltaics’ would install as much electrical capacity as is currently available for fossil-fuel power plants. But the environmental and social impacts must be assessed.

Researchers of size say weight bias is harming their careers and well-being. Workplace changes can reduce the stigma.

Julián Fernández Barcellona provides affordable, space-based connectivity for companies looking to monitor remote assets in real time.

From frogs remaining airborne using their webbed feet to lizards and snakes gliding by expanding their ribcages, biologists might have thought they had seen every unusual aerial strategy — but now they report flying salamanders.

The collective vibrations of atoms at the interface between two semiconducting materials have been imaged with nanometre-scale resolution. Their dynamics depends sensitively on the abruptness of the boundary.

An aerial technique that can capture hidden signs of human modifications of ancient landscapes has provided data that will prompt a rethink about the types of settlement inhabited by early societies in the Amazon region.

Two studies of the mutations acquired by blood-forming cells over time provide insights into the dynamics of blood production in humans and its relationship to ageing.

A genome sequence for the flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea reveals a chromosome that might be primed to become a sex chromosome. The finding offers a remarkable chance to study the evolution of sex determination.

Analysis of data from astrophysical and terrestrial sources offers a promising way of narrowing the range of parameters that describe the extreme properties of neutron stars.

The highlights of a wide range of studies using data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton) are reviewed.

Binarity and multiplicity in general strongly affect the properties of emerging stars, as well as the physical and chemical structures of protoplanetary disks and therefore potentially any emerging planetary systems.

The physics of dense matter extracted from neutron star collision data is demonstrated to be consistent with information obtained from heavy-ion collisions, and analyses incorporating both data sources as well as information from nuclear theory provide new constraints for neutron star matter.

Bubbles of ultracold atoms have been created, observed and characterized at the NASA Cold Atom Lab onboard the International Space Station, made possible by the microgravity environment of the laboratory.

Precise control over the quantum state of a two-dimensional Fermi gas together with single-particle-resolved fluorescence imaging enables the direct observation of the formation of Cooper pairs at the Fermi surface.

A method for mapping phonon momenta reveals non-equilibrium phonon dynamics at nanoscale interfaces enabling study of actual nanodevices and aiding understanding of heat dissipation near nanoscale hotspots.

Electrically controlled quantum confinement of excitons to below 10 nm is achieved in a 2D semiconductor by combining in-plane electric fields with interactions between excitons and free charges.

Diffractive imaging of an important class of battery electrodes during cycling shows that lattice strain is a crucial yet overlooked factor that contributes to voltage fade over time.

An Ni-electrocatalytic system can couple two different carboxylates using doubly decarboxylative cross-coupling, tolerating a range of functional groups, being scalable, used for the synthesis of 32 known compounds and reducing overall step counts by 73%.

A deep learning model trained on prompt elastogravity signal (PEGS) recorded by seismometers in Japan predicts in real time the final magnitude of large earthquakes faster than methods based on elastic waves.

Two remarkably large sites in southwest Amazonia, belonging to the Casarabe culture, include complex civic-ceremonial architecture and large water-management infrastructure, representing a type of tropical low-density urbanism that has not previously been described in Amazonia.

Assembly and analysis of the Schmidtea mediterranea genome indicate that this planarian’s chromosome 1 may be evolving into a sex chromosome.

A long-term study of 385 human donors reports that driver gene mutations and age determine the lifelong dynamics of clonal haematopoiesis

Haematopoiesis has high clonal diversity up to about 65 years of age, after which diversity drops precipitously owing to positive selection acting on a handful of clones that expand exponentially throughout adulthood.

Experiments measuring light-evoked responses in postmortem mouse and human retinas are used to quantify decay of photoreceptors following death and optimise conditions for reviving trans-synaptic transmission.

The host blood-type-associated ABO genotype affects the abundance of specific bacteria in the pig intestine.

A clinical study shows that immunotherapy with anti-HIV-1 antibodies maintains prolonged viral suppression after anti-retroviral treatment is discontinued and affects the size and composition of the intact but not the defective proviral reservoir.

Combination therapy of broadly neutralizing monoclonal antibodies can provide long-term virological suppression in individuals infected with HIV without antiretroviral therapy.

A multiomics resource characterizing human mitochondrial proteins enables identification of biological functions and supports genetic diagnosis of mitochondrial pathologies.

The human immune system naturally edits cancers of high-quality neoantigens.

Changes in the microenvironment of the aged lung relative to younger lung tissue can lead to the reactivation of dormant melanoma cells through a mechanism that involves a decrease in WNT5A and AXL signalling and an increase in MERTK.

The systematic categorization of human enhancers by their cofactor dependencies provides a conceptual framework to understand the sequence and chromatin diversity of enhancers and their roles in different gene-regulatory programmes.

Chimeric triterpene synthases are identified that catalyse non-squalene-dependent triterpene biosynthesis.