Volume 607 Issue 7918, 14 July 2022

The UK government must stop picking fights with universities and reset the country’s relationship with the European Union.

To decide my future, I had to overcome unnecessary barriers to health care.

Ultra-high-resolution images show particles of the Chikungunya virus forming at the surface of a host cell.

Rock doves on some Scottish islands show almost no sign of having interbred with domestic pigeons.

Early immunotherapy treatment can rev up anti-tumour cells.

The growing use of colourless glass bottles for storing white wine allows light to degrade the drink’s ‘nose’.

A dearth of snowpack can make the air and soil ripe for heatwaves.

A new charge-carrying material produces a high-performance battery that won’t explode or catch fire.

The snapping shrimp’s headgear is the first known biological armour that protects against blasts.

The latest science news, in brief.

After a three-year shutdown, the Large Hadron Collider will smash particles together at the highest energies yet.

Physicists are celebrating ten years since the Higgs boson’s discovery. But many of its properties remain mysterious.

Legal ruling limits the environmental agency’s regulatory powers, hamstringing Biden’s climate plan.

US regulatory agency signals willingness to allow first xenotransplant trials.

Maryna Viazovska, who works on the geometry of spheres, is one of four winners of the coveted prize this year.

A form of polio derived from the vaccine is probably circulating in the United Kingdom, highlighting the ongoing need for polio vaccination worldwide.

Charity failed to provide adequate vaccines for the global south. Now, 15 countries are seeing whether an open-science model can end a dangerous legacy of dependency.

Faced with the challenge of advising the World Health Organization on who should be the first to receive COVID-19 vaccines, an advisory group used an approach it hadn’t tried before.

Science is riddled with stories of getting scooped, data glitches and funding crises. Five researchers share stories of how they rallied.

Schmidt Futures is creating the US$40-million Virtual Institute of Scientific Software to fund the maintenance of researcher-written code.

With no research institute in Nepal equipped to support her drought research, Hemu Kafle helped establish a new one.

In regions of the globe at middle and high latitudes, glacial periods have waxed and waned for hundreds of millennia. Glacier-derived sediment in a Peruvian lake suggests that tropical glaciers have moved to a similar beat.

A combination of functional imaging and gene-expression profiling in brain tissue has been used to unravel the properties of 35 subtypes of neuron in mice, revealing a gene-expression axis that governs each subtype’s activity.

Lung samples housed in medical archives have yielded three genomes for the influenza A virus that caused the 1918 global pandemic. The sequences reveal mutations that might have triggered the pandemic’s devastating second wave.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Self-assembling ‘crystals’ of starfish embryos exhibit a curious behaviour termed odd elasticity, which seemingly violates Newton’s laws of classical mechanics. This discovery poses questions for physicists and biologists alike.

The discovery that gut viruses can be transmitted from mouse pups to their mothers in saliva during breastfeeding reveals previously unrecognized sites of viral replication and means of viral transmission.

A Review on inflammatory memory in non-immune cells of different epithelia and neurons, and the potential mechanisms controlling these epigenetic memories and their implications in human health and disease.

Analysis of the pulse profile of a fast radio burst showed sub-second periodicity, providing evidence for a neutron-star origin of the event and favouring emission arising from the magnetosphere.

Precision laser spectroscopy measurements of neutron-rich indium isotopes were performed to investigate the validity and identify limitations of theoretical descriptions of nuclei based on simple single-particle approaches.

Individually addressable ‘T centre’ photon-spin qubits are integrated in silicon photonic structures and their spin-dependent telecommunications-band optical transitions characterized, creating opportunities to construct silicon-integrated, telecommunications-band quantum information networks.

Control loops generically produce braids of eigenfrequencies, and these braids form a non-Abelian group that reflects the non-trivial geometry of the space of degeneracies; these features are demonstrated experimentally using a cavity optomechanical system.

The phase diagram of the unconventional superconductor Sr₂RuO₄ in both normal and superconducting states is mapped out using high-precision measurements of the elastocaloric effect, showing similarities to other unconventional superconductors as well as unique features.

An anti-reflection structure is used to eliminate all back scattering of light passing through a diffusive medium.

Experiments show that swimming starfish embryos spontaneously assemble into large chiral crystals that exhibit self-sustained chiral oscillations and unconventional deformation responses characteristic of odd elastic materials.

A multimodal microscopy toolkit reveals nanoscale defect clusters in halide perovskite films and that these clusters are sites at which photochemical degradation seeds.

Analysis of a continuous and independently dated record of glaciation in the tropical Andes spanning 700,000 years shows that Andean glaciation follows patterns of global ice volume change, with a periodicity of approximately 100,000 years.

DNA from ancient wolves spanning 100,000 years sheds light on wolves’ evolutionary history and the genomic origin of dogs.

Two-photon imaging and in situ transcriptomic analysis of the primary visual cortex in mice show that a single transcriptomic axis correlates with the state modulation of cortical inhibitory neurons.

Suppression of salicylic acid production in Arabidopsis thaliana at high temperature is caused by decreased recruitment of GUANYLATE BINDING PROTEIN-LIKE 3 defence-associated condensates on promoter sites of master immune regulatory genes.

Enteric viruses replicate in salivary glands, can be propagated in salivary gland-derived spheroids and cell lines, and are released into saliva, which is a new transmission route having implications for therapeutics, diagnostics and sanitation measures.  

Infection with Omicron after vaccination produces cross-neutralizing antibodies to other variants of concern, whereas this induces a limited response to non-Omicron variants in unvaccinated individuals.

A study quantifying the neutralization of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 variants in individuals infected with Omicron/BA.1 shows that vaccinated individuals previously infected with Omicron have enhanced protection against reinfection with current variants, \including Omicron/BA.2, while Omicron/BA.1 infected unvaccinated individuals have limited protection.

Synthetic chimeric orthogonal IL-2 receptors that incorporate the intracellular domain of receptors for other γ-chain cytokines such as IL-9 can reroute orthogonal signalling and alter the phenotype of T cells to improve anti-tumour responses.

The survival of cells with chromosomal instability (CIN) depends on the cGAS–STING pathway, in which IL-6 and its receptor have a key role; this vulnerability can be exploited to treat tumours that display CIN.

The cryo-electron microscopy structure of the membrane-embedded ubiquitin ligase complex reveals its function as a retrotranslocation channel for shuttling mobile receptors out of peroxisomes.

The core cell cycle is largely driven by increasing total CDK activity together with minor differences in the substrate specificity of the CDKs initiating DNA replication and mitosis.

A study demonstrates the rational de novo design of water-soluble assemblies constructed from long 3₁₀-helical peptides, and details their characterization by circular dichroism spectroscopy, analytical ultracentrifugation and X-ray crystallography.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of Drosophila Dicer-2–R2D2 complexes with and without small interfering RNA reveal how the RNA is presented to Argonaute in the correct orientation for viral gene silencing.

Structures of the Dcr-2–Loqs-PD complex while it is processing a double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) substrate elucidate the interactions between Dcr-2 and Loqs-PD, and show that Dcr-2 undergoes substantial conformational changes during a dsRNA-processing cycle.