Volume 604 Issue 7904, 7 April 2022

The open data revolution won’t happen unless the research system values the sharing of data as much as authorship on papers.

Displaced children and adults can wait decades to return home or resettle — research and policy must catch up.

Some coastal cities are subsiding by dozens of millimetres per year, making them even more vulnerable to sea-level rise triggered by climate change.

The right strategies could help to reduce sand mining and the associated environmental destruction.

A form of the element lutetium exists for only a few hundred nanoseconds before decaying.

Polystyrene products can be recycled into a widely used compound thanks to a light-driven reaction.

The ‘broken wing’ trick has evolved in more than 50 bird families, hinting at its success in protecting eggs and chicks.

Insect’s populations defy many conventional pesticides but collapse after infection by a microbial pathogen.

Escherichia coli sampled from pigs and other farm animals show a steep rise in antibiotic-resistance genes.

The latest science news, in brief.

E-mails show agency’s controversial response to astronomers concerned about past LGBT+ discrimination.

The country needs to control the virus until it has boosted vaccination rates in elderly people and reinforced the health-care system.

The US president wants huge increases for clean energy and public health, but a divided Congress might not go along with the plan.

Researchers are trying to establish whether existing COVID-19 vaccines and treatments can prevent lasting symptoms.

Study suggests some 40% of horseshoe bats in the region have yet to be formally described.

For vaccine dosing decisions, past experience and best guesses won the day in the mad rush to beat back the pandemic. Modelling tools might have made a difference.

Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic.

From Japan to Yemen, India to Ukraine, rates of births, deaths and displacement are reshaping nations.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks.

To avert privacy breaches, scams and environmental damage, governments and central banks need to know how best to regulate this financial frontier.

Fresh formats showcase researchers’ work more effectively.

Data sharing can save important scientific work from extinction, but only if researchers take care to ensure that resources are easy to find and reuse.

Marine biologist Laura Aiudi is working on a net that saves the lives of endangered species — but still protects the livelihood of fishermen.

A protein complex called the rixosome helps to degrade RNA transcripts that linger after gene expression ceases. This discovery points to distinct roles for the rixosome in regulating chromatin in different species.

A cubic metre of tellurium held at cryogenic temperatures over many years has enabled a search for matter created in a rare nuclear process. The feat bodes well for stabilizing other complex systems at low temperatures.

Human cancer cells often double their genome through an error in cell division, and this can lead to further genomic instability. A detailed analysis of the first cell cycle after genome doubling sheds light on this phenomenon.

A paper published in 1997 brought the thermodynamics of the nineteenth century into the twenty-first century — expanding the physics of transformations involved in the operation of steam engines to the realm of molecular motors.

A general method that quantifies and disentangles the effects of a gene’s mutations on the traits of its protein enables assessments of mutational effects on protein biophysics for many of the proteins of a living organism.

Analysis is presented that indicates that there is strong evidence that SiO or Mg, the major constituents of silicate condensates, must be present in gaseous form in the atmosphere of ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-178b.

The CUORE experiment finds no evidence for neutrinoless double beta decay after operating a large cryogenic TeO₂ calorimeter stably for several years in an extreme low-radiation environment at a temperature of 10 millikelvin.

Charge-density-wave-driven electronic nematicity that occurs well below the charge-density-wave transition temperature is reported in the kagome superconductor CsV₃Sb₅.

In the standard Si transistor gate stack, replacing conventional dielectric HfO₂ with an ultrathin ferroelectric–antiferroelectric HfO₂–ZrO₂ heterostructure exhibiting the negative capacitance effect demonstrates ultrahigh capacitance without degradation in leakage and mobility, promising for ferroelectric integration into advanced logic technology.

A protocol in which monomers are pre-organized using a reversible and removable urea linkage enables the production of covalent organic frameworks with higher crystallinity and porosity than those produced using standard approaches with randomly aligned monomers.

The molecular chemical ‘fuelling’ of the catalysis-driven motor 1-phenylpyrrole 2,2′-dicarboxylic acid, which operates by a Brownian information ratchet mechanism, facilitates dynamics that are otherwise kinetically inaccessible.

A biocatalytic enzyme originating from bacteria, EneIRED, facilitates amine-activated conjugate alkene reduction followed by reductive amination, efficiently preparing chiral amine diastereomers, which are commonly used in pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. 

Identification of a hyperstable boronate enables automated lego-like synthesis to access a wider range of three-dimensionally complex small organic molecules rich in Csp³–C bonds. 

The hippocampal code in freely flying bats is highly stable over days and across contexts if behaviour is taken into account.

An analysis of spatial navigation in nearly 400,000 people shows, by measuring their performance in a video game, that individuals who grew up outside cities are better at navigation than those who grew up in cities.

Spatial transcriptomics and single-cell profiling identify previously uncharacterized cell types of human terminal and respiratory bronchioles, and show that cell differentiation and lineage trajectories are distinct from those in the mouse lung.

Human respiratory bronchioles contain a unique population of secretory cells called respiratory airway secretory cells that are distinct from the cells in the larger proximal airways, and act as unidirectional progenitors for alveolar type 2 cells.

The inactive Pr conformer of Arabidopsis phytochrome B shows a topologically complex dimeric organization that is distinct from its prokaryotic relatives.

A combination of pyrimidine biosynthesis inhibitors and antiviral nucleoside analogues can boost the antiviral effect of nucleoside analogues against SARS-CoV-2.

Sequencing of B cell receptors and expression of the corresponding monoclonal antibodies is used to characterize the evolution of the long-term B cell response to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination.

Extensive DNA damage occurs during the first interphase following induction of tetraploidy in human cells, largely as a result of the lower amount of protein relative to DNA.

Integrated structure–function studies show that transcription-coupled DNA repair (TCR)—rather than global genomic repair—is responsible for most chromosomal repair events in bacteria, and that TCR mainly occurs independently of the Mfd translocase.

A molecule identified in a screen for compounds that bind the non-coding mouse RNA Xist blocks Xist-dependent X-chromosome inactivation, demonstrating the utility of this approach for identifying drugs that target RNA.

The rixosome associates with Polycomb repressive complexes and chromatin and has a role in silencing of Polycomb target gene expression in human cells via degradation of nascent RNA transcripts.

An approach that combines deep mutational scanning with neural network-based thermodynamic modelling is used to provide comprehensive maps of the energetic and allosteric effects of mutations in two common protein domains.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of human NLRP3 in its resting state and bound to the inhibitor CRID3 provide insight into the binding mechanism of CRID3 and its mode of antagonism.

The diverse makeup and assembly of subunits augment the structure, physiology and pharmacology of GABA_A receptors.

A cryo-electron microscopy analysis reveals how HAS selects its substrates, hydrolyses the first substrate to prime the synthesis reaction, opens a hyaluronan-conducting transmembrane channel, ensures alternating substrate polymerization and coordinates hyaluronan inside its transmembrane pore.