Volume 581 Issue 7808, 21 May 2020

It took a collaborative global effort to reveal the structures of key coronavirus proteins. That spirit is being tested as vaccine development gets under way.

Toxic living conditions have long inflated death rates. Scientists must learn to track these patterns of inequality.

A precise pattern of electrical pulses allows people who have lost their sight to identify individual letters.

Chilean fans’ fervour for grilling leads to pollution spikes when the national team plays.

A simple recipe creates a valuable crystalline drug.

Twinning might not be about twins, but about avoiding pregnancy failure.

The latest science news, in brief.

Drug manufacturers face supply-chain weaknesses and sourcing issues as they ramp up complex production processes to meet global demand.

The men are reportedly doing well one year on, but there is no way to confirm that the unpublished treatment using ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells works.

Research begins to pick apart the mechanisms behind a deadly COVID-19 complication.

Studies of social networks show that opposition to vaccines is small but far-reaching — and growing.

Stopping the pandemic could rely on breakneck efforts to visualize SARS-CoV-2 proteins and use them to design drugs and vaccines.

Forty years after the Mount St Helens eruption galvanized volcano researchers, they are using powerful new tools to spy on the world’s most dangerous mountains.

An IPCC founder and tenacious advocate for climate action.

Pioneering theoretical ecologist and outspoken government adviser.

Scientists have a responsibility to communicate effectively and compassionately, says Samantha Yammine. Here’s how.

UK funding strategist Anne-Marie Coriat finds inspiration among the artworks and books in the Wellcome Collection’s Reading Room.

An analysis of faecal samples reveals that obese people who take cholesterol-lowering statin drugs have a ‘healthier’ community of gut microorganisms than would be expected. What are the implications of this surprising finding?

An artificial eye has been reported that incorporates densely packed, nanometre-scale light sensors into a hemispherical retina-like component. Some of its sensory capabilities are comparable to that of its biological counterpart.

Toll-like receptors can initiate an immune response when they detect signs of a viral or microbial threat. New insight into how such receptor activation drives defence programs should aid our efforts to understand autoimmune diseases.

A powerful radio telescope has peered back through time to observe a galaxy that contained a cold, rotating disk of gas not long after the Big Bang — fuelling the debate about when and how disks first formed in galaxies.

A massive rotating disk galaxy was formed a mere 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, a surprisingly short time after the origin of the Universe.

Quantum entanglement is realized between rotational levels of a molecular ion with energy differences spanning several orders of magnitude and long-lived internal states of a single atomic ion.

A biomimetic electrochemical eye is presented that has a hemispherical retina made from a high-density array of perovskite nanowires that are sensitive to light, mimicking the photoreceptors of a biological retina.

Metal alloys consisting of three or more major elemental components show enhanced mechanical properties, which are now shown to be correlated with short-range order observed with electron microscopy.

Cyclohexene isotopologues and stereoisotopomers with varying degrees of deuteration are formed by binding a tungsten complex to benzene, which facilitates the selective incorporation of deuterium into any position on the ring.

Applying a bias correction to a state-of-the-art dataset covering non-alpine regions of the Northern Hemisphere and to three other datasets yields a more constrained quantification of snow mass in March from 1980 to 2018.

Direct dates for human remains found in association with Initial Upper Palaeolithic artefacts at Bacho Kiro Cave (Bulgaria) demonstrate the presence of Homo sapiens in the mid-latitudes of Europe before 45 thousand years ago.

Single-cell RNA sequencing is used to generate a dataset covering all major human organs in both adult and fetal stages, enabling comparison with similar datasets for mouse tissues.

A cross-sectional analysis of participants in the MetaCardis Body Mass Index Spectrum cohort finds that the higher prevalence of gut microbiota dysbiosis in individuals with obesity is not observed in those who take statin drugs.

The interaction between TASL and SLC15A4 links endolysosomal Toll-like receptors to the transcription factor IRF5, providing a mechanistic explanation for the involvement of the complex in systemic lupus erythematosus.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures and functional and mutagenesis studies provide insights into the catalysis of triacylglycerol synthesis by human acyl-CoA diacylglycerol acyltransferase at its intramembrane active site.

The structure of human diacylglycerol O-acyltransferase 1, a membrane protein that synthesizes triacylglycerides, is solved with cryo-electron microscopy, providing insight into its function and mechanism of enzymatic activity.

The structure of human ACAT1, which catalyses the transfer of an acyl group from acyl-coenzyme A to cholesterol to form cholesteryl ester, is resolved by cryo-electron microscopy.

The structure of human ACAT1 in complex with the inhibitor nevanimibe is resolved by cryo-electron microscopy.