Volume 601 Issue 7891, 6 January 2022

A New Year’s resolution for bench scientists is to step out of the lab to study how life really works.

Research has stalled, funds have evaporated and many scientists are still struggling to get out.

Hundreds of engineering steps must now take place as the observatory unfurls and travels to its new home.

A few publishers are using automated software to catch flaws in submitted papers.

Omicron, Moon missions and particle physics are among the themes set to shape research in the coming year.

Some public-health researchers are embracing data and technology to target small groups with precise health interventions. Others fear that these tactics could fail millions.

Crystallographer who defined rules of virus structure.

Africa urgently needs to guarantee its own health security.

Although burning bridges can be tempting, a better approach is to leave goodwill and cheer in your wake.

The web-based tool allows scalable, user-friendly computation across multiple data sets

At the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo, María Eugenia Francia tackles a cause of vision problems in babies.

Analysis of plankton fossils has revealed pulses of size diversity that are inextricably linked to the degree of circularity of Earth’s orbits. Could this orbital variability provide a beat that dictates the rhythm of evolution?

In some neurodegenerative diseases, a protein called TDP-43 forms aggregates in the brain, resulting in neuronal cell death. The structure of these aggregates and their properties have been unveiled.

Efforts to prove Fermat’s last theorem, and a bewildered translator tackles a book about birds.

Treatment for leukaemia can fail for reasons that are not fully clear. Tracking the progress of individual cellular lineages for this type of cancer offers a way to investigate this phenomenon.

A comparison of the charge-to-mass ratio for the proton and the antiproton has been performed with record-breaking precision — the best such test yet for a mirror-like symmetry that relates matter and antimatter.

The progress and the outstanding issues in understanding the correlated phases in the unconventional iron-based superconductors is reviewed.

Observations of a stellar stream below the metallicity floor for a disrupted globular cluster are described.

An analysis of Zeeman measurements reveals that the reduction of magnetic flux relative to mass, which is necessary for star formation, seems to have occurred earlier than previously thought.

Multiple high-precision measurement campaigns at CERN of the antiproton-to-proton charge-to-mass ratio—to a precision of 16 parts per trillion—in a cryogenic multi-Penning trap offer no evidence of charge–parity–time violation, and set stringent limits on the clock-weak-equivalence principle.

Spontaneous crystallization of atoms occurs in a rotating ultracold Bose–Einstein condensate occupying the lowest Landau level, behaviour that is related to a quantum hydrodynamic instability driven by shear forces.

Carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels can be produced using sunlight and air via a thermochemical solar fuel production chain, thus representing a pathway towards the long-term decarbonization of the aviation sector.

X-ray diffraction experiments indicate that the depression of the Earth’s 660-kilometre seismic discontinuity beneath cold subduction zones is caused by a phase transition from akimotoite to bridgmanite, leading to slab stagnation.

In a 15-year whole-ecosystem, single-factor experiment, stopping experimental mercury loading results in rapid decreases in methylmercury contamination of fish populations and almost complete recovery within the timeframe of the study.

.Morphometric analysis of coccolith assemblages spanning the last 2,800,000 years suggests that the evolution of coccolithophores is linked to seasonality changes, paced by Earth’s orbital eccentricity with implications for the carbon cycle.

A technique using barcoded beads for DNA sequencing within tissue sections enables spatial resolution of tumour clonal heterogeneity and can be multiplexed with other analytical techniques for analysis of complex cellular phenotypes.

A neural circuit for implementing a coordinate transformation and 2D vector computation is described in Drosophila.

Specific neurons in the fan-shaped body of the Drosophila brain convert translational information in relation to the fly’s body to externally referenced coordinates for navigation.

Single-cell tracing and optogenetics manipulation in mice are used to show how spatial tuning of individual pyramidal cells in CA1 can propagate to and be amplified by their local subnetwork of neurons.

Seronegative healthcare workers with an innate signature of infection preferentially expand pre-existing T cells targeting the conserved replication transcription complex of SARS-CoV-2 in abortive infection.

Single-cell analyses of skin samples from patients with vitiligo and functional genetic experiments in vitiligo mouse models show that distinct fibroblast subsets drive the organ level lesion patterns in this autoimmune disease.

Non-genetic malignant clonal dominance is a cell-intrinsic and heritable property that underpins clonal output and response to therapy in cancer. 

The endoplasmic reticulum proteins CLIMP63, kinectin and p180 bind preferentially to subsets of microtubules with different post-translational modifications, thereby linking the ‘tubulin code’ to the intracellular distribution of membrane organelles.

Cryo-electron microscopy of aggregated TDP-43 from postmortem brain tissue of individuals who had ALS with FTLD reveals a filament structure with distinct features to other neuropathological protein filaments, such as those of tau and α-synuclein.

Using high-resolution NMR characterization, the kinetics and dynamics of the catalytic function of a DNAzyme are shown.