Volume 608 Issue 7924, 25 August 2022

Twelve months after their takeover, Afghanistan’s rulers have slammed the door on educational opportunities and leadership roles for girls and women. But is isolating the country the right response?

To break the vicious cycle of patchy understanding and poor virus control, we need to talk about privacy.

The world’s record holders are in Antarctica, regardless of how ‘glacier’ is defined.

An asteroid that travels inside the orbit of Venus probably wandered there from further afield.

Device can bridge a nerve damaged by motor-neuron disease or spinal-cord injury.

The biting insects have an odour-sensing set-up superior to that of many other animals.

Scraps of DNA show that living things of all kinds thrive in the thin air above 4,000 metres.

Artefacts exposed by penguins are the remnants of a hunting camp on Hornos Island off Chile.

An algorithm trained on the properties of more than 35,000 compounds can identify novel cancer-causing substances.

The latest science news, in brief.

Prolonged contact, especially with a person’s skin lesions, is emerging as the top transmission route.

The henipavirus can cause respiratory symptoms and is related to Nipah and Hendra viruses, but cannot spread easily in people.

Researchers worry that a protracted stand-off could slow progress on tackling global warming and hamper research collaborations.

Although Jonathan Pruitt, the researcher at the centre of a retractions scandal, has resigned, former lab members and collaborators continue dealing with the fallout.

The accelerator would smash together this heavier version of the electron and, researchers hope, discover new particles.

A pall of smoke from burning cities would engulf Earth, causing worldwide crop failures, models show.

Scientists debate evidence for a micro-clot hypothesis that has some people pursuing potentially risky treatments.

Mary Sears led a mostly female research team that was crucial to US operations in the Pacific theatre in the 1940s.

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

Four international scientists explain how a grant debacle stemming from Brexit has affected their research and career plans.

Dinesh Kabra is working with the next generation of optoelectronic materials for solar cells and display technologies.

Precise optical experiments reveal that quantum excitations in semiconductors share similarities with a host of growing interfaces. The parallels inspire a fresh approach to studying the dynamics of diverse systems in a controllable way.

In 1987, two independent groups cloned a gene that encoded the potassium-ion-channel protein Shaker, enabling functional and structural studies that have transformed ion-channel research.

Porous solids have been dispersed in water to produce suspensions that can carry much more oxygen than blood can. Such ‘porous water’ opens the way to water-based formulations for biomedical use.

The identity of the enzyme that enables vitamin K to combat the adverse side effects of a drug called warfarin has been long sought. Analysis of a type of cell death called ferroptosis has now unexpectedly solved the mystery.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

A close look at the cells that drive cancer growth after chemotherapy, and thereby contribute to fatal tumour progression, provides new insights into the identity of the cells that manage to survive treatment.

Using a single memory atom in a cavity, a deterministic protocol is implemented to efficiently grow Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger and linear cluster states by means of single-photon emissions.

By using three silicon spin qubits to construct a phase-correcting code, quantum error correction is implemented and protection of the three-qubit state against any phase-flip error on one of the three qubits is demonstrated.

Experiments show that the dynamics of phase fluctuations  in a one-dimensional polariton condensate falls in the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang universality class, and theoretical analysis supports this finding revealing the key signatures of this universality class.

A photonic crystal cavity arranged in a hexagonal pattern shows unconventional losses that allow single-mode lasing operation to be maintained as the cavity is scaled up in size.

A mechanical integrated circuit material based on Boolean mathematics and reconfigurable electrical circuits is created to demonstrate scalable information processing in synthetic, engineered soft matter.

An aluminium–chalcogen battery operating with a molten-salt electrolyte composed of NaCl–KCl–AlCl₃ is presented, which allows rapid charging at up to 200C for hundreds of cycles, and is scalable, fire-resistant and low cost.

Modification of the internal and external surface chemistry of microporous zeolite and metal–organic framework nanocrystals leads to a generalizable strategy to aqueous porous liquids and impart high gas-carrying capacities to liquid water.

An integrated ozone depletion metric indicates the impact of any new emission and provides a useful complementary metric of the impact of specific emissions of an ozone depleting substance for both the scientific and policy communities.

Sequencing of individual human lymphocyte clones shows that they are highly prone to mutations, with higher burdens in memory cells than in naive cells arising from mutational processes associated with differentiation and tissue residency.

Live-seq, a single-cell transcriptome profiling approach that preserves cell viability during RNA extraction using fluidic force microscopy, can address a range of biological questions by transforming scRNA-seq from an end-point to a temporal analysis approach.

BNSTpr^Esr1 activity is required to gate the transition from appetitive to consummatory male social behaviours towards both sexes, by controlling sex- and behaviour-specific representations in VMHvl and MPOA, respectively.

Spatial and single-cell transcriptomic characterization of microglia in the mouse somatosensory cortex show that the state of these cells is determined by signals from diverse surrounding neurons.

Experiments in mice show that a LINE-1 transposable element, Lx9c11, has a functional role in immunity by negatively regulating the response to viral infection to protect the host from an over-reactive immune response.

A time-resolved high-resolution map of human cardiac remodelling after myocardial infarction, integrating single-cell transcriptomic, chromatin accessibility and spatial transcriptomic data, provides a valuable resource for the field.

Biochemical and lipidomic analyses identify an anti-ferroptotic function of vitamin K and reveal ferroptosis suppressor protein 1 (FSP1) as the enzyme mediating warfarin-resistant vitamin K reduction in the canonical vitamin K cycle.

A genetic lineage-tracing system in human colorectal organoids identifies a population of dormant cancer cells that persists during chemotherapy and enables cancer regrowth, and the cell-adhesion molecule COL17A1 has a key role in the process of breaking dormancy.

 Malignant evolution enabled by p53 inactivation in mice proceeds through an ordered and predictable pattern of Trp53 loss of heterozygosity, accumulation of deletions, genome doubling and the emergence of gains and amplifications.

Through structural analysis of the activation of bacterial STING, the molecular basis of STING filament formation and TIR effector domain activation in antiphage signalling is defined.

A bacterial antiviral defence system generates a cyclic tri-adenylate that binds to a TIR–SAVED effector, inducing formation of a superhelical structure with adjacent TIR domains organizing into an active site, allowing NAD⁺ degradation.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of Tetrahymena thermophila telomerase-bound Ctc1–Stn1–Ten1 and DNA polymerase α–primase provide insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying telomere replication and maintenance.

The Polα–primase-associated CST complex organizes telomeric C-strand DNA synthesis, and, in combination with telomerase, it carries out complete replication of the single-stranded DNA overhang found at human telomeres.

A structural analysis demonstrates how the single-stranded DNA-binding accessory protein complex CST physically organizes the human DNA polymerase-α–primase complex for efficient primer synthesis during telomere replication.