Volume 607 Issue 7919, 21 July 2022

Pan-Arctic collaborations must continue, even if informally, between researchers inside and outside Russia.

Misguided anti-espionage moves by the United States caused damage; the government should turn to researchers for recovery.

Scientists calculate a fundamental constant by measuring the gravitational forces between two beams.

A distinctive rock layer on two Japanese islands is traced to an underwater volcano’s violent eruption some 13,500 years ago.

A boron-based glue not only bonds tightly but also releases quickly when submerged in water.

Scientists find that underweight study participants in China engage in less physical activity than normal-weight counterparts.

Sea–surface salinity levels in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans can presage heavy rains in the Midwestern United States.

One of the largest known congregations of filter-feeding whales is recorded off the coast of Antarctica.

A species of North American gopher fertilizes and harvests roots, encouraging their growth.

The latest science news, in brief.

Anticipation of future science grows as NASA releases unprecedented glimpses of the night sky.

Swedish study of the culture in academic workplaces suggests that women and PhD students are most likely to be bullied.

Faced with a loss of crucial climate data, scientists are finding workarounds as relations with Russian partners break down.

Researchers are relying on limited seismic and satellite information in their efforts to understand the event.

Studies are ‘decades behind’ owing to a lack of funding, but research is picking up.

Faecal transplants have helped some people to overcome resistance to powerful immunotherapies. Now dozens of trials are taking aim at the cancer–microbiome connection.

Impacts on research are being felt more widely than just in Ukraine and Russia.

Neuroscientist, science communicator and advocate for openness in research.

CCTV cameras and spyware are proliferating in the continent without checks and balances. Governments must legislate locally to prevent civil-rights abuses.

Allison McClure describes how she secured her first postdoctoral position and shares her thoughts on how laboratories can attract candidates.

It’s worth waiting for the right postdoctoral researcher to come along, says Caroline Hill. But how do you choose the best candidate?

Rebecca Cliffe is equipping the world’s slowest mammal with data-logging backpacks to better understand sloths’ behaviour.

A dynamic mode of stem-cell regulation has been discovered. Intestinal stem cells use migration to maintain a large pool of multifunctional cells, perhaps endowing the organ with robust responses to injury.

Applying strain to a material that has a type of magnetism called antiferromagnetism allows its magnetization to be fully switched with an electric current — making it appealing for use in next-generation magnetic memory devices.

A single-cell analysis suggests that the 3D location of chromosomes in the cell nucleus contributes to their likelihood of being involved in genomic rearrangements associated with cancer.

Simulations show that rising global temperatures and changes in land use will drive new encounters between mammalian species. This could lead to an increase in virus- sharing events that might threaten both wildlife and humans.

The race is on to develop nanometre-scale motors for future tiny machines. The latest entry is a multi-component motor that self-assembles from DNA, harnesses Brownian motion to spin a rotor, and can wind up a molecular spring.

Observations by the Ultra-Violet Imaging Telescope on AstroSat reveal ten blue compact dwarf galaxies with excess far-ultraviolet emission in their outer region, indicating star formation in accreting disks.

A dynamical topological phase with edge qubits that are dynamically protected from control errors, cross-talk and stray fields, is demonstrated in a quasiperiodically driven array of ten ¹⁷¹Yb⁺ hyperfine qubits in a model trapped-ion quantum processor.

Signatures of non-equilibrium Floquet SPT phases with a programmable superconducting quantum processor are observed in which the discrete time translational symmetry only breaks at the boundaries and not in the bulk.

Full, perpendicular and bidirectional spin–orbit torque switching of chiral antiferromagnetic order using an electrical current is experimentally demonstrated with epitaxial heterostructures.

By examining three model pyroelectric materials with different bonding characters along the out-of-plane direction, it is shown that their pyroelectric coefficients increase rapidly when the thickness of free-standing sheets becomes small.

The discovery of graphite–diamond hybrid carbon, Gradia, which consists of graphite and diamond nanodomains interlocked through coherent interfaces, clarifies the long-standing mystery of how graphite turns into diamond.

A nanoscale rotary motor made of DNA origami, driven by ratcheting and powered by an external electric field, shows the ability to wind up a spring and has mechanical capabilities approaching those of biological motors.

Concerted proton–electron transfer mediators enable facile electrochemical metal hydride formation and thus improve CO₂ reduction to useful chemicals, and could benefit a range of catalytic reactions involving metal hydride intermediates.

The diversity hotspots hypothesis attributes the overall increase in global diversity during the Late Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras to the development of diversity hotspots under prolonged conditions of Earth system stability and maximum continental fragmentation.

An online training module that synergistically targets two different mindsets can reduce stress levels in adolescents in the context of social-evaluative stressors—stressful experiences in which individuals fear that others are judging them negatively.

Experiments in mice show that direct- and indirect-pathway neurons in the basal ganglia are co-activated during movement but exhibit opposite patterns of activity during the active suppression of movement.

Single-nucleus RNA-sequencing analysis supports the presence of immature dentate granule cells throughout the human lifespan and shows that these cells are reduced in number and dysregulated in Alzheimer's disease.

The molecular mechanism by which FERONIA, LORELEI and NORTIA work together to facilitate calcium-mediated synergid–pollen tube communication in flowering plants is presented.

This study provides a comprehensive spatiotemporal map of human and mouse gonadal differentiation, using a combination of single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, chromatin accessibility assays and fluorescent microscopy, which can guide in vitro gonadogenesis.

Small intestinal crypts contain twice as many effective stem cells as large intestinal crypts, and this difference is determined by the degree of Wnt-driven retrograde cell movement—which is largely absent in the large intestine—counteracting conveyor-belt-like upward movement.

Changes in climate and land use will lead to species aggregating in new combinations at high elevations, in biodiversity hotspots and in areas of high human population density in Asia and Africa, driving the cross-species transmission of animal-associated viruses.

Within-host evolution is a critical regulator of commensal pathogenicity that provides a unique source of stochasticity in the development and progression of microbiota-driven disease.

Using differences among strains as a model for inter-individual variation, this paper identifies a conserved metabolicadaptation in C. elegans that compensates for genetic variation.

Distinct brain regions differentially and rapidly tailor the leukocyte landscape during psychological stress, calibrating the ability of the immune system to respond to physical threats.

Using single-cell DNA sequencing after an error-prone mitosis in untransformed, diploid cell lines and organoids, chromosomes are shown to have different segregation error frequencies that result in non-random aneuploidy landscapes.

The 3D structure of the human nutrient-sensing complex GATOR2 is resolved using cryo-electron microscopy.

The biosynthetic pathway of strychnine, brucine and diaboline is described, and the biosynthesis of these complex, pharmacologically active compounds has been successfully recapitulated in Nicotiana benthamiana from an upstream intermediate.