Volume 608 Issue 7921, 4 August 2022

To make the most of artificial intelligence, data and software must be freely shared, and computational, theoretical and experimental researchers must work together closely.

Retraction Watch has witnessed a retraction boom since its founding 12 years ago. But the scientific community must do much more.

Current prices for lithium batteries mean that electrified vessels would be economical along short shipping routes.

Primates given an experimental jab against the virus are less susceptible to illness after only a few days.

The powerful compound tetrodotoxin, made by a variety of animals, has stubbornly resisted scientists’ attempts to streamline its synthesis.

The latest science news, in brief.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold tool has determined the structures of around 200 million proteins.

Those with SARS-CoV-2 are often advised to isolate for only a few days. But evidence is mounting that some people can continue to pass on the virus for much longer.

Astronomers are rapidly analysing spectacular snapshots of the faraway Universe.

US scientists evaluate their options after failing to replicate record-setting experiment from 2021.

Immunologist Neelika Malavige’s study of a massive dengue-fever outbreak is being hampered by fuel shortages and power cuts.

Transplanting human cells into animal brains brings insights into development and disease along with new ethical questions.

Some studies suggest that the risk of cardiovascular problems, such as a heart attack or stroke, remains high even many months after a SARS-CoV-2 infection clears up. Researchers are starting to pin down the frequency of these issues and what is causing the damage.

COVID-19 is just the latest disease to expose persistent racism and poverty.

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

Procedures used in life support and to preserve organs in deceased human donors might one day need to be re-evaluated in the wake of a study that restored some cell function in pigs one hour after death.

A growing interest in cannabis has led to new career opportunities.

Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are powerful and widely used. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to use them, data scientists say.

Clayton Lamb tracks bears to help reduce conflict with humans.

Data on 21 billion Facebook connections reveal that a new measure of social capital — childhood friendships between people of high and low socio-economic status — is linked to economic mobility later in life.

A metallochaperone protein that ensures that zinc ions are delivered to a crucial cellular enzyme has now been discovered. The finding underscores the subtleties of controlling cellular zinc allocation when the metal is scarce.

A phenomenon known as quantum phase slip has been used to generate a current by moving pairs of electrons through an ultrathin wire. The feat is good news for efforts to pin down the standard unit of current.

An analysis of floods or droughts that hit the same place twice shows that using risk management alone does not reduce the effect of extreme events. Addressing the social drivers of hazard impact, equitably, is essential.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Mutated forms of the protein Akt can be central drivers of cancer metabolism. A mechanism by which Akt promotes synthesis of the metabolic molecule coenzyme A broadens our understanding of the protein’s activity.

Direct observation of the physical dual a.c. Josephson effect, a series of quantized current steps in a superconducting nanowire, is reported and may offer a way to establish new metrological standards for currents.

It is experimentally demonstrated that the non-Hermitian skin effect can convert localized topological modes into extended modes of unconventional shapes while preserving the topological characteristics, which presents opportunities for topological manipulations of waves and light.

Using a sol–gel passivation method, the fabrication of blue InGaN nanorod-LEDs with the highest external quantum efficiency value ever reported for LEDs in the nanoscale is demonstrated.

An additive manufacturing strategy is used to produce dual-phase nanolamellar high-entropy alloys that show a combination of enhanced high yield strength and high tensile ductility.

The PiezoMem membrane responsive to hydraulic pressure is introduced, showing the ability to convert pressure pulses into electroactive responses for in situ self-cleaning and enabling broad-spectrum antifouling action towards a range of membrane foulants.

A simplified synthesis strategy for stereo- and site-selective glycosylations, using minimally protected mono- and disaccharides and thiourea small-molecule catalysts, enables highly selective functionalization of carbohydrates.

Unprecedented floods and droughts bring new challenges for risk reduction, as is clear from this analysis of the drivers of changing impacts in many cases worldwide, with implications for efficient governance and investment in integrated management.

Analysis of inherited zircons and sanidines from Miocene ignimbrites in the Central Andes shows that plutons were emplaced for up to 4 million years prior to onset of volcanism and that disruption of plutonic rock occurs a few decades or less just before or during super-eruptions.

The discovery of a male-specific sex hormone in the mosquito <em>Anopheles gambiae</em> may allow new strategies for the control of this notorious disease vector.

A DNA memory device, DNA Typewriter, uses sequential prime editing to record the order of multiple cellular events.

Analyses of data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook in the United States reveal associations between social capital and economic mobility.

Social disconnection across socioeconomic lines is explained by both differences in exposure to people with high socioeconomic status and friending bias—the tendency for people to befriend peers with similar socioeconomic status even conditional on exposure.

The difference between the number of men and women listed as authors on scientific papers and inventors on patents is at least partly attributable to unacknowledged contributions by women scientists.

A tectothalamic pathway for social affiliation in developing zebrafish dissociates neuronal control of attraction from repulsion during affiliation, revealing a circuit underpinning of collective behaviour

Longitudinal imaging and functional perturbations during behaviour identified a brain region that represents constituent features of a contextual memory and enables feature-mediated memory recall.

Cryptococcus neoformans secretes CPL1 protein, which induces alternative activation of macrophages via Toll-like receptor 4 in mice and is essential for fungal virulence.

Overall, this study describes the molecular mechanism of a druggable pathway that recapitulates in cellular assays the immunomodulatory effects associated with Akkermansia muciniphila, a prominent member of the gut microbiota.

Single-nuclear transcriptomic and proteomic analyses identify molecular characteristics shared by multiple classes of congenital heart disease, including phenotypes associated with insulin resistance.

The PI3K–PANK4 axis regulates coenzyme A synthesis, the abundance of acetyl-CoA, and CoA-dependent processes such as lipid metabolism, and these regulatory mechanisms coordinate cellular CoA supplies with the demands of hormone and growth-factor-driven or oncogene-driven metabolism and growth.

Deep whole-genome sequencing of serial blood samples and matched metastatic tissue reveals that circulating tumour DNA profiling enables detailed study of treatment-driven subclone dynamics, epigenomics and genome-wide somatic evolution in metastatic human cancers.

Fruitflies require Sestrin to regulate mTORC1 signalling in response to dietary leucine, survive a diet low in leucine, and control leucine-sensitive physiological characteristics, which establishes Sestrin as a physiologically relevant leucine sensor.

Retro-Cascorder, a system for time-ordered recording of transcriptional output, uses retrons as a tag to mediate DNA barcode acquisition in a CRISPR array.