Volume 580 Issue 7804, 23 April 2020

The coronavirus has shown what happens when there’s a large shock to the world economy. That’s why efforts to combat climate change must not slow down.

Reducing your own carbon footprint is not as powerful as calling governments and companies to account.

These primates advertise their breeding status with a fruity, floral wrist scent.

The rare jewel alexandrite outwits the human eye’s colour-correction system.

Exceptionally well-preserved clothing — and even horse dung — line a path that travellers trod for more than 700 years.

An ordinary storm generated extraordinary hail that pounded an Argentine city.

The latest science news, in brief.

Some scientists welcome government vetting because it could stop poor-quality COVID-19 papers being published – others fear it is an attempt to control information.

As climate- and ecological-monitoring projects go dark, data that stretch back for decades will soon contain coronavirus-associated gaps.

Researchers at London’s Francis Crick Institute have repurposed equipment, reagents and software in response to the pandemic.

Without enough test kits, the 1.3-billion-person country is using a gigantic surveillance network to trace and quarantine infected people.

Climate researchers are studying a fresh set of scenarios to model the future of the planet.

The world’s most contagious virus has killed thousands in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and 23 countries have suspended measles vaccination campaigns as they cope with SARS-CoV-2.

From the start, racism has shaped the care of people with mental illness in the United States. By Mical Raz.

How to live in the face of death — Mark O’Connell’s personal journey. By Caspar Henderson.

Car owners underestimate total vehicle costs. Giving consumers this information could encourage the switch to cleaner transport and reduce emissions.

Staying at home is not an option for scientists working on potential vaccines or caring for research animals.

Artificial-intelligence methods are moving into cancer research.

Andrew Digby works to protect the kakapo, a critically endangered and charismatic New Zealand species of parrot.

Early 2018 saw unusually heavy rainfall in Hawaii. Modelling now suggests that groundwater pressure increased owing to rainfall: this might have triggered changes in the eruption of the island’s Kīlauea volcano.

The development of low-power methods for controlling a property of electrons known as spin could help to maintain the historic rates of progress that are occurring in computational power. Just such a method has now been reported.

The timing of disruptions to biodiversity associated with global warming is a key, but little-explored, dimension of change. Will losses in biodiversity occur all at once, or be spread out over time?

Evolutionary-tree diagrams, which show the branching relationships between species, are widely used to estimate the rates at which new species arise and existing ones become extinct. New work casts doubt on this approach.

The high obliquity and low rotation period of the Kuiper belt object (2014) MU₆₉ and other similar contact binaries is successfully reproduced from the collision and post-collision characteristics of initially wide binaries.

Unidirectional radiation is achieved in a photonic crystal slab without the use of mirrors by merging a pair of topological defects carrying half-integer charges.

Optical spectroscopy is used to probe correlated electronic states in a moiré heterostructure, showing many-body effects such as strong layer paramagnetism and an incompressible Mott-like state of electrons.

Enhanced switchable ferroelectric polarization is achieved in doped hafnium oxide films grown directly onto silicon using low-temperature atomic layer deposition, even at thicknesses of just one nanometre.

The polarization direction of a ferroelectric-like state can be used to control the conversion of spin currents into charge currents at the surface of strontium titanate, a non-magnetic oxide.

Oppositely charged colloidal particles are assembled in water through an approach that allows electrostatic interactions to be precisely tuned to generate macroscopic single crystals.

Immediately before and during the eruption of Kīlauea Volcano in May 2018, anomalously high rainfall increased the pore pressure in the subsurface to its highest level in 50 years, causing weakening and mechanical failure of the edifice.

Using annual projections of temperature and precipitation to estimate when species will be exposed to potentially harmful climate conditions reveals that disruption of ecological assemblages as a result of climate change will be abrupt and could start as early as the current decade.

An infinite number of alternative diversification scenarios—which may have markedly different, but equally plausible, dynamics—can underpin a given time-calibrated phylogeny of extant species, suggesting many previous studies have over-interpreted phylogenetic evidence.

Using lipid residues absorbed in potsherds, the ages of pottery from various archaeological sites are determined and validated using sites for which the dates are well known from other methods.

Experiments in mice show that a population of neurons in the vagal ganglia respond to the presence of glucose in the gut and connect to neurons in the brainstem, revealing the circuit that underlies the neural basis for the behavioural preference for sugar.

Temozolomide therapy seems to lead to mismatch repair deficiency and hypermutation in gliomas, but not to an increase in response to immunotherapy.

Single-cell RNA-sequencing analysis of intestinal mesenchyme identified a population of fibroblasts that produce prostaglandin E₂, which, when disrupted, prevented initiation of intestinal tumours.

Phosphorylation of INSIG1 and INSIG2 by PCK1 leads to a reduction in the binding of sterols, the activation of SREBP1 and SREBP2 and the downstream transcription of lipogenesis-associated genes that promote tumour growth.

Shugoshin and MAD2 regulate separase-mediated chromosome separation during mitosis, in parallel to a previously identified mechanism involving the anaphase inhibitor securin.

If early mitosis is too short, separase induces apoptosis by cleaving MCL2 and BCL-XL, thereby eliminating cells that are prone to chromosome missegregation.