Volume 609 Issue 7928, 22 September 2022

The textiles industry urgently needs input from researchers to help it to embrace the circular economy.

Scientists identify a neuronal pathway in rats that drives ‘social grooming’, a behaviour that helps to hold animal communities together.

As high-level winds shift, heat and heavy rain can persist.

Crystalline device could be used to visualize voltages with high resolution, speed and stability.

The trees that provide the raw material for chocolate have a higher yield when the groves are accessible to certain species.

A family tree of sea cows suggests that the dugong traversed an ocean to reach its present habitat.

Remodelling a bacterial enzyme allows it to capture an industrial pollutant under challenging conditions.

Jupiter-sized planets orbiting massive stars were probably stolen from other stars or captured from somewhere else.

The latest science news, in brief.

Huge advances in artificial intelligence mean researchers can design completely original molecules in seconds instead of months.

Symptoms of severe disease differ from those seen during past outbreaks, causing researchers to re-evaluate their assumptions.

The mega rocket and capsule must wait until engineers can resolve tricky hydrogen leaks.

A mutation present in modern humans seems to drive greater neuron growth than does an ancient hominin version.

Most of the people mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth II were not close to her — research can shed light on the nature of their grief.

Staff members at one university are providing urgent medical care, particularly to pregnant people and newborn babies.

Some companies offer tests that rank embryos based on their risk of developing complex diseases such as schizophrenia or heart disease. Are they accurate — or ethical?

Radioastronomer who hunted for alien signals and penned the eponymous equation.

Efficiency and clean fuels won’t be enough. Governments and industry must experiment with other approaches to bring the climate impact of aviation close to zero.

Conservation biologist Kay Van Damme works with locals on the Socotra archipelago to help save ancient trees and colourful invertebrates.

Being open about being gay allows me to reach my full intellectual potential.

From connectomics to behavioural biology, artificial intelligence is making it faster and easier to extract information from images.

Ana Saez García uses hydroponics to grow the crop using barely any soil — and to boost its yield sustainably.

The global tsunami and atmospheric waves that followed the eruption of the Tongan volcano Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai were observed around the world. Analysing the data could reshape our understanding of such events.

Specialized neurons that are activated after infection have been identified in the brain. These neurons orchestrate an array of sickness behaviours that help the body to cope with disease and to fight infection.

A structure with precisely engineered layers produces a giant strain in an electric field. The interplay between structural distortions and electric dipoles at the interfaces between layers could aid material and device design.

When combined, two drugs alter the activity of a protein complex called target of rapamycin complex 1 such that it is inhibited in the brain but not the body, enabling the treatment of brain tumours in mice without systemic toxicity.

Analysis of early human embryos reveals that DNA duplication after fertilization is highly inefficient. This causes DNA damage, chromosome breaks and abnormal numbers of chromosomes, impairing embryo development.

Analysis of a set of 1,863 bursts from the repeating source FRB 20201124A provides evidence of a complicated magnetized site within about an astronomical unit from the source in a barred galaxy.

An elementary quantum network of two entangled atomic clocks is demonstrated; the high fidelity and speed of entanglement generation show that entangled clocks can offer practical enhancement for metrology.

A system consisting of alternating thin films of two dielectrics is used to produce greatly enhanced electrostriction derived from coherent strain imparted by interfacial lattice discontinuity.

The work presents a reprogrammable metasurface, constructed from a matrix of filamentary metal traces, that can precisely and rapidly morph into a wide range of target shapes and dynamic shape processes.

An additive manufacturing method using a team of autonomous aerial robots allows for scalable and adaptable three-dimensional printing, and is used to deposit building materials during flight.

A macroscopic and scalable pyroelectric energy harvester in the form of multilayer capacitors produces 11.2 J of electrical energy, with a pyroelectric material generating up to 4.43 J cm⁻³ per cycle.

A high-efficiency, robust process using a high-concentration imide-based lithium-salt electrolyte enables the electroreduction of nitrogen with stabilized ammonia yield rates of 150 ± 20 nmol s⁻¹  cm⁻² and a current-to-ammonia efficiency that is close to 100%.

January 2022 saw the first observations of a tsunami resulting from a large emergent volcanic eruption (Hunga Tonga) captured using modern instrumentation, with broad implications for hazard management in similar geophysical settings.

By analysing sea-level, atmospheric and satellite data captured after eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai volcano, as well as numerical and analytical models, it is shown that global tsunamis can be triggered by acoustic-gravity waves.

The Hunga Tonga eruption represents a natural experiment, being a clearly identifiable near-point source producing gravity waves across a broad range of spatiotemporal and frequency scales, observed by a diverse array of instruments worldwide.

Detailed ancestral gene content reconstruction shows that the large phenotypic differences between Metazoa and Fungi are the outcome of sharply contrasting trajectories of genomic changes that predated the origin of both groups.

A genome-wide association study highlights a variant in DOCK2, which is common in East Asian populations but rare in Europeans, as a host genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19.

A studying using a set of unbiased methodologies shows that a specific subpopulation of neurons in the brainstem can regulate the diverse responses to a bacterial endotoxin that induces sickness behaviours.

Astrocytes can encode an expected reward location in familiar spatial contexts.

In fetal liver, the structure of the differentiated haemapoietic progenitor cell population is established directly from precursor cells, independently of haemapoietic stem cells.

Coronaviruses exploit the host caspase-6 to cleave coronavirus nucleocapsid protein into fragments with interferon-antagonizing activity to facilitate virus replication.

Reconstitution of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA 5′ cap reveals the unconventional mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 caps its RNA genome, providing a new target in the development of antiviral agents to treat COVID-19.

The ketone body β-hydroxybutyrate can be used as an alternative carbon source by T cells to maintain their function during severe respiratory viral infections, including infection with SARS-CoV-2.

Cryo-electron microscopy studies of Escherichia coli complex I suggest a conserved mechanism of coupled proton transfers and electrostatic interactions that result in proton ejection from the complex exclusively at the distal NuoL subunit.

Lysosomal membrane damage triggers a lipid signalling pathway that repairs lysosomes via lipid transport at newly established endoplasmic reticulum–lysosomal membrane contact sites.

The combination of the brain-permeable mTOR inhibitor RapaLink-1 and the brain-impermeable FKBP12 ligand RapaBlock enable brain-specific inhibition of mTOR.

CDK11 associates with SF3B1 and phosphorylates threonine residues at the N terminus of SF3B1 during spliceosome activation, and the inhibition of CDK11 blocks the activation and leads to widespread intron retention and the accumulation of non-functional spliceosomes on pre-mRNAs and chromatin.

Cryogenic electron microscopy structures of the Synechocystis phycobilisome—alone and bound with orange carotenoid protein—reveal detailed information regarding the biophysical basis of the control of cyanobacterial light harvesting.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the thyrotropin receptor reveal the basis for the activation of the receptor by autoantibodies in patients with Graves’ disease.

Thyroid-stimulating hormone and autoantibody M22 push the extracellular domain of the thyrotropin receptor into an upright active conformation, revealing a universal activation mechanism of glycoprotein hormone receptors and providing the molecular basis of Graves’ disease, hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s disease.