Volume 601 Issue 7893, 20 January 2022

A new action plan to halt biodiversity loss needs scientific specialists to work with those who study how governments function.

Urban areas must invest in ecosystems, not just in roads, pipes and homes.

The amoeba life stage of a common slime mould outshines workhorse microbes at producing certain medicinal compounds.

Specially engineered particles allow researchers to fix blindness-causing genes in mice.

Guests quaffed beer infused with hallucinogenic seeds, according to the detritus from a feast in what is now Peru.

Bacteria fending off viruses rely on a form of cell death also used by mammals to fight infection.

Roughly 60 million nests of the Jonah’s icefish cover 240 square kilometres — the largest unbroken fish breeding ground ever found.

A display based on organic light-emitting diodes has now been produced entirely by 3D printing.

Simulations show how a violent impact long ago might have led to lopsided lunar chemistry.

The latest science news, in brief.

Researchers hope that a person who has so far lived for a week with a genetically modified pig heart will provide a trove of data on the possibilities of xenotransplantation.

Amid concerns over lost antibody defences, some researchers argue that more attention should be paid to T cells.

Despite evidence that pregnant people are at high risk of serious disease, many remain unvaccinated.

In a fresh report, federal researchers recommend ways to strengthen scientific integrity and preserve public trust in government.

Inactivated-virus vaccines elicit few, if any, infection-blocking antibodies — but might still protect against severe disease.

Countries have reported some five million COVID-19 deaths in two years, but global excess deaths are estimated at double or even quadruple that figure.

Naturalist, conservationist and synthesizer who founded sociobiology.

Federal whistle-blowers share stories about political interference in science, and explain why the long-awaited measures announced last week are needed.

Anthropologist Lars Krutak finds meaning in markings that are more than skin-deep.

Cell-free RNA transcripts in maternal blood can be analysed to monitor the progression of pregnancy and to predict a potentially harmful pregnancy-specific condition called pre‑eclampsia.

A silicon-based quantum-computing platform has met key standards for reducing error — setting the stage for quantum devices that could benefit from established semiconductor microchip technologies.

A computational method has been devised to identify drug-candidate molecules from a library of billions of molecules using 100 times less computational power than is used by standard methods.

The chirality, or handedness, of nanoparticles is shown to be a key factor in determining how well such particles engage with the immune system — a finding that might help to inform the design of vaccines and anticancer therapeutics.

Archival images of glacial ice on a Norwegian archipelago, together with the islands’ climatic diversity, enable application of an innovative method for making long-term projections of ice loss using short-term observations.

Advances in the precision of radiocarbon dating can offer year-specific data. Analyses of archaeological sites in Denmark and Canada provide insights into the chronology of the global networks of the Viking Age.

Optical observations with a linear resolution of a few parsecs show that the outflow from the central black hole in the low-mass galaxy Henize 2-10 triggered a round of star formation.

Three-dimensional analysis of the solar neighbourhood shows that nearly all star-forming regions near the Sun lie on the surface of the Local Bubble, which was inflated by supernovae about 14 million years ago.

Single- and two-qubit gate fidelities above the fault-tolerance threshold for quantum computation are demonstrated in silicon quantum dots by fast electrical control using a micromagnet-induced gradient field and tunable coupling.

A spin-based quantum processor in silicon achieves single-qubit and two-qubit gate fidelities above 99.5% using gate-set tomography, exceeding the theoretical threshold required for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Universal quantum logic operations with fidelity exceeding 99%, approaching the threshold of fault tolerance, are realized in a scalable silicon device comprising an electron and two phosphorus nuclei, and a fidelity of 92.5% is obtained for a three-qubit entangled state.

A triple phase transition, where changing a single parameter simultaneously gives rise to metal–insulator, topological and a parity–time symmetry-breaking phase transitions, is observed in non-Hermitian Floquet quasicrystals.

Small-molecule serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography (smSFX) characterizes microcrystals by indexing sparse serial XFEL diffraction frames, with little sample preparation, without beam damage, and at room temperature and pressure.

Nanoparticles with different chiralities have different in vitro and in vivo effects on the immune system, suggesting new ways of creating vaccine adjuvants.

Historical photographs, modern observations, and a simple space-for-time substitution approach predict that glacier mass loss from Svalbard is poised to double over the twenty-first century.

The satellite instrument TROPOMI is used to assess ambient NO₂ levels at approximately one-kilometre resolution across 215 cities worldwide during COVID-19 lockdowns, finding about 30% lower NO₂ concentrations in countries with strict lockdowns.

Precise dating of wooden artefacts at a Norse settlement in Newfoundland establishes that the Norse were in the Americas in ad 1021.

Disturbances in the radiocarbon record anchor a precisely dated archaeological stratigraphy of a medieval trading emporium in Denmark in time, revealing that the Viking expansion was associated with competition for trade routes rather than with raids.

Molecular barcoding is used to show that progenitor cells in the human cortex can produce both excitatory neurons and inhibitory interneurons, with implications for our understanding of the evolution of the human brain.

Single-cell RNA sequencing with parallel tagging of progenitor cells is used to track clonal relationships and transcriptomic signatures during development of the mouse forebrain.

CV2CoV, a second-generation mRNA COVID-19 vaccine with non-modified nucleosides but optimized non-coding regions, is demonstrated to be effective against SARS-CoV-2 challenge when tested in non-human primates.

High-dimensional datasets derived from time-resolved live imaging of leukocytes in mice were used to identify leukocyte identities and dynamic neutrophil states with high cellular resolution.

Expression signatures from cell-free RNA of pregnant women can be used to reveal normal biology of pregnancy and predict development of pre-eclampsia.

Restriction of dietary valine reduces growth of T cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia through altered valine tRNA biogenesis and reduced translation of mRNAs that encode subunits of mitochondrial complex I.

PROTAC degrader–induced SWI/SNF inactivation abolishes DNA accessibility at enhancer elements of oncogenes and also tempers supra-physiologic expression of driver transcription factors, resulting in potent inhibition of tumour growth in mouse models.

The human silencing hub (HUSH) complex uses introns to distinguish intronless foreign DNA from intron-containing host DNA and modifies chromatin to silence transcription of retrotransposons and retroviruses.

MicroRNAs encode sorting sequences that determine whether they are secreted in exosomal vesicles to regulate gene expression in distant cells or retained in cells that produced them, with different sequences used by individual cell types.

V-SYNTHES, a scalable and computationally cost-effective synthon-based approach to compound screening, identified compounds with a high affinity for CB2 and CB1 in a hierarchical structure-based screen of more than 11 billion compounds.

The cryo-electron microscopy structure of the glucocorticoid receptor (GR)-loading complex—a complex in which Hsp70 loads GR onto Hsp90 and Hop—is described, providing insights into how the chaperones Hsp90 and Hsp70 coordinate to facilitate GR remodelling for activation.

Studies based on cryo-electron microscopy structures of Hsp90 chaperone complexes reveal the molecular mechanism of the chaperone-mediated maturation of the human glucocorticoid receptor.