Volume 609 Issue 7926, 8 September 2022

Too often, researchers who share their expertise on contentious topics such as COVID-19 are subjected to abuse. Their institutions must step in to defend and protect them.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the value of pooling animal-tracking data — a global tag registry would facilitate data discovery and collaboration.

Funders and investigators must demand appropriate metadata standards to take data from foul to FAIR.

Archived data from Landsat 5, launched in 1984, and two newer sensors allow scientists to chart dangerous flows in Afghanistan.

Reptiles that perished during a severe drought 250 million years ago are preserved as spreadeagled and mummified fossils.

Flies and mice benefit from even a brief regimen of rapamycin.

North America’s largest land mammal can double the diversity of native grasses through its grazing.

Tide gauges and tsunami buoys help scientists to estimate the amount of water displaced by the eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai volcano.

High-resolution imaging reveals the strong rebound of a water drop striking a liquid-repellent surface.

A combination of complex liquids — one suspended in the other — serves as a factory for nanostructures with sought-after properties.

The latest science news, in brief.

Report heralds what’s to come from the landmark observatory, which is set to explore 76 worlds during its first year.

Two research teams grew synthetic embryos using stem cells for long enough to see some organs develop.

Updated COVID jabs have been approved in the United States and United Kingdom, but they offer roughly the same protection as existing vaccines, a study suggests.

The research funder’s admission has been largely welcomed, but experts say many institutions need to do much more to implement anti-racism pledges.

Biden administration instructs all US agencies to require immediate access to federally funded research after it is published, starting in 2026.

The country has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into research on induced pluripotent stem cells to treat diseased organs.

Restrictions on social contact stemmed disease spread, but weighing up the ultimate costs and benefits of lockdown measures is a challenge.

Vaccines inhaled through the mouth or nose might stop the coronavirus in its tracks, although there’s little evidence from human trials so far.

Researchers in the country have often shown creativity and resilience under threat. These strengths will be key to the future of science in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.

Most international scholars do not report experiences of bullying because they fear retaliation, including threats to cancel visas. But they can take action.

Working out how a cell is wired lets researchers find key regulators of behaviour.

Leonel Malacrida hopes that his lab’s imaging technology will advance cancer diagnosis and research in Uruguay and across Latin America.

Experiments conducted in Earth’s orbit have probed the complicated dynamics of moving droplets by circumventing the size limits imposed by gravity. The findings could lead to improved microchip fabrication techniques.

Activation of the RAF protein is key to the RAS–MAPK signalling pathway, and involves the SMP protein complex. Structures for SMP shed light on the process, and suggest fresh targets for anticancer drug discovery.

The enzymatic pathway has been characterized for the production of ketocarotenoids: the red pigment in some birds’ feathers and in eye cells that detect red light.

Global-warming projections that rely on bioenergy strategies to offset carbon dioxide emissions could be unduly optimistic, according to a study that accounts for how climate change affects crop yields.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Brown fat in the body converts energy into heat. The discovery that inosine molecules are released from dying brown fat and induce heat production in nearby brown fat cells could point to a way of combating obesity.

A solid catalyst has been prepared in which pairs of active sites work synergistically to promote an industrial chemical reaction, and the mechanism has been determined — a breakthrough for ‘pair site’ catalysis.

The physical principles of capillarity, including how capillary forces can influence biological processes, are discussed.

Analysis of the optical and γ-ray flux monitoring of the blazar BL Lacertae during its outburst in 2020 shows the existence of quasi-periodic oscillations in the relativistic jet with cycles as short as 13 h.

A magnetic confinement regime established at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research device enables the generation of plasmas over 10⁸ kelvin for 20 seconds with the aid of fast ions without plasma edge instabilities or impurity accumulation.

At elevated temperatures, electron hydrodynamics efficiently eliminate the ‘bulk Landauer–Sharvin’ resistance, demonstrating that hydrodynamics can dramatically modify the well-established rules obeyed by ballistic electrons.

Excitons in the electronvolts range are found to couple strongly to coherent magnons in hundreds of microelectronvolts in an atomically thin two-dimensional antiferromagnetic semiconductor.

Catalysts consisting of oxide-supported pair sites can enable bifunctional reaction mechanisms with high activity and selectivity for reactions and so overcome the limitations in industry imposed by the use of homogeneous catalysts.

A homochiral rotary molecular motor shows autonomous unidirectional rotation around a single bond driven by a chemical fuel.

Simulations of historical and future periods of climate change showed that delayed mitigation to limit global warming might reduce the capacity of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and threaten climate stability and food security.

Analysis of atmospheric data on two enantiomerically separated forms of monoterpene from a controlled drought and rewetting experiment in an enclosed tropical rainforest ecosystem showed distinct diel emission peaks, regulated by different production pathways.

A new Triassic dinosaur assemblage from Zimbabwe reveals that the earliest dinosaurs were confined to a temperate region in the far south of Pangaea.

In vivo two-photon calcium imaging analyses of sensory inputs from the gastrointestinal tract and upper airways in mice reveal spatial organization and coding principles of the interoceptive nervous system.

Fos-expressing hippocampal neurons form highly correlated ensembles that contribute to spatial coding by forming reliable, long-lasting and spatially unbiased maps of an environment.

The Csu pili of the multidrug-resistant nosocomial pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii assemble into an ultrathin zigzag architecture secured by a clinch mechanism that provides the pilus with high mechanical stability and superelasticity.

De novo microbial biosynthesis of vindoline and catharanthine using a highly engineered yeast and in vitro chemical coupling to vinblastine is carried out, positioning yeast as a scalable platform to produce many monoterpene indole alkaloids.

Findings suggest that l-ornithine could serve as a novel nutraceutical to ameliorate LACC1-associated immunological dysfunctions.

CD62L⁺ precursors of exhausted T cells retain long-term proliferative potential, multipotency and repopulation capacity, and the transcription factor MYB is essential for the development and function of this population of cells.

Untargeted metabolomics demonstrate that apoptotic brown adipocytes release a specific pattern of metabolites with purine metabolites being highly enriched, and inosine is identified as a metabolite released during apoptosis regulating thermogenic fat and counteracting obesity.

Non-viral CAR-T cells with gene-specific targeted integration are safe and effective in patients with lymphoma.

Spatial-ATAC-seq—spatially resolved chromatin accessibility profiling of tissue sections using next-generation sequencing—delineated tissue-region-specific epigenetic landscapes in mouse embryos and identified gene regulators involved in the development of the central nervous system and the lymphoid tissue.

CRISPR-associated transposons exploit a proofreading checkpoint to ensure high-fidelity selection of genomic sites for DNA insertion through specific recruitment of TnsC oligomers by the Cascade complex.

The structures of single COOLAIR RNA isoforms change in abundance and shape in response to external conditions; structural mutation of these isoforms altered FLC expression and flowering time, consistent with a regulatory role of the COOLAIR structure in FLC transcription.

Cryo-electron microscopy structure, molecular dynamics and biochemical analyses of the SHOC2–PP1C–MRAS complex demonstrate the dependence of the complex formation on RAS–GTP and identify the determinants of RAS isoform preference for SHOC2–PP1C and specificity of the complex for RAF dephosphorylation.

A structure of the MRAS–SHOC2–PP1C complex supports a RAS-driven and multi-molecular model for RAF activation in which individual RAS–GTP molecules recruit RAF–14-3-3 and SHOC2–PP1C to activate the downstream pathway.