Volume 611 Issue 7934, 3 November 2022

The cost-of-living crisis is a fundamental threat for PhD scholars and early-career researchers. They need to be paid properly.

Wealthy countries must take responsibility for the people most injured by climate change.

Energy-transition plans leave out African data, models and expertise, excluding more than one billion people on the continent.

Nerve cells that carry pain signals play a part in suppressing inflammation and tissue damage in the gut.

The wreck of a German patrol boat continues to influence ocean chemistry and microbiology at its final resting spot.

A robotic bird of prey scares off nuisance flocks in a flash — and they don’t seem to get wise to the deception.

Two super-hot planets have atmospheres laced with barium.

A genetic variant connected to a rare form of inherited epilepsy arose in an individual who lived some 800 years ago.

An instrument found on workbenches around the world has been scaled down enough to be used in a smartphone.

A study of low-income households in California suggests that many more could be cut off from the grid by the end of this century.

The latest science news, in brief.

Controversy surrounding a study that involved modifying the SARS-CoV-2 virus has prompted researchers to call for better guidance from funders.

Concerns about image integrity have so far led to 17 retractions, corrections or expressions of concern for papers co-authored by geneticist Gregg Semenza.

At the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th congress, Xi laid out his vision for science and innovation to drive the country’s growth.

Report finds that most nations are not on track to meet global pledge to protect Earth’s forests.

Scientific papers made free to access during the pandemic are rumoured to be disappearing behind paywalls. They aren’t — yet.

More than a decade ago, scientists started finding peculiar droplets inside cells. Now researchers are trying to work out how these ubiquitous beads form and what they do.

Armed forces have a massive carbon footprint that is absent from global accounting.

The cost-of-living crisis is causing widespread financial distress among those in master’s and PhD programmes worldwide.

Large language models can draft abstracts or suggest research directions, but these artificial-intelligence tools are a work in progress.

In his diving surveys, ecologist Henri Vallès is finding that some coral populations might be on the mend.

Sediment records from Alaska, spanning the past 20,000 years, suggest that melting glaciers triggered volcanic episodes that removed oxygen in the northeastern Pacific Ocean, explaining ‘dead zones’ that lasted millennia.

Lizards and snakes belong to the highly successful group of reptiles called squamates, but a poor fossil record has obscured their early evolutionary history. A discovery now sheds light on this enigmatic portion of the tree of life.

Shining a laser on an iron wire generates fast-moving electrons that boost the electromagnetic waves created by the light interacting with the wire. This way of making laser-like light could surpass existing methods that use electrons.

A climate-driven rise in exposure to extreme temperatures will hasten mortality. To predict such losses, we need to know how quickly organisms succumb to stressful temperatures. A study shows how heat-failure rates vary across species.

Membrane-spanning proteins have many crucial roles in the cell. New findings challenge our current understanding of the route by which such proteins are inserted into the membranes of animal cells.

An optical atomic clock operating on a magnetic-dipole transition in a highly charged argon ion is shown to improve uncertainties for the absolute transition frequency and isotope shift by several orders of magnitude.

A photonic platform that allows the spontaneous generation and active manipulation of an optical vortex–antivortex pair using an external magnetic field is demonstrated.

Stimulated emission by free electrons is used to amplify terahertz surface plasmon polaritons in a manner resembles that of light amplification in a high-gain free-electron laser.

The introduction of a coherent perovskite phase into the layered structure of a lithium-ion battery reduces lattice strain and stress to produce a robust crystal structure.

By harnessing capillary forces, 3D-printed machines with cross-sections that vary by height can move floating objects programmatically in two dimensions and even braid filaments without physical contact.

Deoxygenation in the North Pacific immediately after the Cordilleran ice sheet retreat was shown to be linked with volcanism, suggesting that coupling between atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and solid-Earth systems can drive biogeochemical change.

The historical and spatial patterns of the phosphorus budget and phosphorus use efficiency by country and crop type are reported, and used to determine phosphorus pollution and scarcity challenges.

Experiments show that calcium solubility in bridgmanite increases with depth in Earth’s lower mantle, resulting in the disappearance of CaSiO₃ perovskite and indicating a transition from a two-perovskite to a single-perovskite domain.

Within the stressful temperature range, heat failure rate increases by more than 100% per degree Celsius across a broad range of ectotherm taxa.

A study using high-resolution synchrotron phase-contrast tomography documents the near-complete skeleton of a stem squamate, Bellairsia gracilis, from the Middle Jurassic epoch of Scotland, providing insights into early squamate anatomy.

A study examining DNA transfer from mitochondria to the nucleus using whole-genome sequences from 66,083 people shows that this is an ongoing dynamic process in normal cells with distinct roles in different types of cancer.

A cross-ancestry meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies identifies association signals for stroke and its subtypes at 89 (61 new) independent loci, reveals putative causal genes, highlighting F11, KLKB1, PROC, GP1BA, LAMC2 and VCAM1 as potential drug targets, and provides cross-ancestry integrative risk prediction.

Neural recording and closed-loop manipulation during chronic stress in mice reveal causal links between dopamine, behavior and resilience.

Adenylate cyclase activity in TIR1/AFB, the canonical auxin receptor, has an essential role in auxin-mediated root growth inhibition in land plants.

Single-cell B cell repertoire analysis identifies the expansion of a naive-derived population of antibody-secreting cells contributing to de novo autoreactivity in patients with severe COVID-19 and those with post-COVID symptoms.

LRRC15-positive cancer-associated fibroblasts constitute a pivotal axis in tumorigenesis and are potential therapeutic targets to improve responses to immune checkpoint blockade.

Patients with resectable clinical stage III or oligometastatic stage IV melanoma were given neoadjuvant relatlimab and nivolumab combination immunotherapy, which induced a high pathologic complete response rate, indicating the efficacy and safety of this regimen.

Biochemical and structural analysis of intermediates during multipass membrane protein biogenesis showed how an intramembrane chaperone guides nascent membrane proteins to a semi-enclosed lipid-filled cavity where they are inserted and folded correctly.

Biochemical reconstitution and functional analysis reveal how newly synthesized multipass membrane proteins dynamically remodel the translocon to facilitate their successful biogenesis.

β₂-adrenergic receptor(β₂AR) signalling induces ERK activity at endosomes, but not at the plasma membrane, and this activity is dependent on active, endosome-localized Gα_s and requires ligand-stimulated β₂AR endocytosis.

Electrophysiological, structural and biochemical studies on the bestrophin-2 anion channel reveal asymmetric permeability to glutamate and show that it forms a cooperative machinery in complex with glutamine synthetase for glutamate release.