Volume 600 Issue 7888, 9 December 2021

The pandemic will not end while vaccine equity keeps getting pushed to the margins.

Lack of rigour is often blamed on pressure to publish. But ethnographers can find out what truly keeps science from upping its game.

Community policing in the global south fails to reduce crime rates or public mistrust.

The extinct Haast’s eagle — known from fossils found in New Zealand — hunted like its modern relatives, but also had habits of a scavenger.

Early retirement for climate-damaging power plants would also cut emissions of air pollution that endanger human health.

The seven planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 were largely spared cosmic collisions, raising questions about where these worlds got their water.

The Andean superpower Tiwanaku developed with the help of a stable source of nutrients, including llama meat.

A species of swift lives up to its name as it migrates from southern Europe to central Africa.

This fabricated gel doesn’t crack under pressure.

The latest science news, in brief.

COVID researchers are working at breakneck speed to learn about the variant’s transmissibility, severity and ability to evade vaccines.

Researchers say travel restrictions in response to the newly detected coronavirus variant come too late and could even slow studies of Omicron.

Collaborators are locked in a high-stakes dispute over which researchers should be named as inventors on a key vaccine patent application.

The machine-learning techniques could benefit other areas of maths that involve large data sets.

Data collected by the Tianwen-1 mission and Zhurong Mars rover are offering insights into a previously unexplored region of Mars’s northern hemisphere.

The rapid spread of new variants offers clues to how SARS-CoV-2 is adapting and how the pandemic will play out over the next several months.

Three decades after it was conceived, Hubble’s successor is set for launch. Here’s why astronomers around the world can’t wait.

The Nobel-winning neuroscientist has been studying connections on an ever-grander scale.

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

To withstand extreme weather, rapid innovation and rock-bottom prices, solar installations need tighter quality control, standards and testing.

To avoid crop failures and soaring power costs, Brazil needs to diversify sources, monitor soil moisture, model local hydroclimate dynamics and treat water as a national security priority.

Our quest to bring a child into our family led us to confront academic working practices, say Tony Ly and Nathan W. Bailey.

The image viewing and analysis software napari has filled a gap in the programming language’s scientific ecosystem.

Field-programmable gate arrays can speed up applications ranging from genomic alignment to deep learning.

Eletra de Souza’s research aims to help decrease lethal strikes in Brazil.

The molecular mechanisms involved in human gastrulation, a crucial stage in early embryonic development, have been largely elusive. Gene-expression data from a gastrulating human embryo shed light on this process.

Plants offset a large fraction of Earth’s carbon dioxide emissions, but estimating the size of this carbon sink relies on differing terrestrial-biosphere models. Combining multiple models with data has now reduced the uncertainty.

Natural killer cells can destroy cells infected by SARS-CoV-2, but this immune-system defence malfunctions in people with severe COVID-19. Will this finding drive a search for ways to reinvigorate natural killer cells in such cases?

Direct imaging has revealed the existence of a large planet orbiting a binary system that contains the most massive planet-hosting stars detected so far. The discovery challenges existing models for how planets and stars form.

Nature’s pages feature changes in the number of topics a science lecturer might cover, and official rules about who can be called a chemist.

Artificial activation of neurons identified in a brain region called the cerebellum reduces food intake in mice. The findings could have implications for people with appetite disorders.

A direct imaging study demonstrates the existence of a giant planet in a wide orbit around the high-mass b Centauri binary system, and uses measurements of the orbital properties to discuss its formation mechanism.

Coherent control and giant modulation of optical nonlinearity in a van der Waals layered magnetic insulator is demonstrated using Floquet engineering.

A study combining tunnelling and Andreev reflection spectroscopy with a scanning tunnelling microscope provides evidence for unconventional superconductivity in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene.

A stretchable anode, cathode, semiconductor and current collector have been developed to create stretchable diodes that can operate at megahertz frequencies for use in wirelessly operated, skin-like wearable electronics.

An emergent constraint combining biosphere models and carbon budget estimates suggests that the increase in the global terrestrial carbon sink is caused largely by a CO₂-induced increase in photosynthesis.

Stegouros elengassen, an ankylosaur from the late Cretaceous of Chile, has a large tail weapon, named a macuahuitl after the Aztec club, with a frond-like structure formed by seven pairs of laterally projecting osteoderms encasing the distal half of the tail.

A new method quantifies the social makeup of online communities, and applying it to 14 years of commenting patterns on Reddit shows increased polarization in 2016, driven by new users to the platform.

Activity in anterior deep cerebellar nuclei reduces food consumption in mice without reducing metabolic rate, potentially identifying a therapeutic target for disorders involving excessive eating.

Analyses of layer 5 cortical pyramidal neurons in 10 mammalian species show that human neurons are distinct in that they do not follow the expected allometric relationship between neuron size and membrane conductance.

A combination of multiview imaging, structured illumination, reconstruction algorithms and deep-learning predictions realizes spatial- and temporal-resolution improvements in fluorescence microscopy to produce super-resolution images from diffraction-limited input images.

The single-cell transcriptional profile of a human embryo between 16 and 19 days after fertilization reveals parallels and differences in gastrulation in humans as compared with mouse and non-human primate models.

Characterizations of bacteria under acute stress reveal features that can be predicted using a conceptual model of physical ageing. 

The improper timing of transforming growth factor-β production is a hallmark of severe COVID-19 that may impede natural killer cell function and early control of infection.

The symbiotic gut bacterium Bacteroides fragilis produces unique α-galactosylceramides from host dietary branched-chain amino acids, which are presented as CD1d ligands and immunomodulate natural killer T cells.

CRISPR screening and protein–protein interaction networks identify components and mechanisms of nutrient-dependent mTORC1 signalling in regulatory T cells and reveal how mTORC1 integrates immunological cues and nutrient signals for adaptive immunity.

Therapeutic administration of IL-27—serum levels of which are decreased in individuals with obesity—improves thermogenesis, protects against diet-induced obesity and ameliorates insulin resistance in mouse models of obesity.

Whole-transcriptome sequencing of a subset of 75 non-small-cell lung cancer specimens in a multi-institutional genome screening study identified a fusion of the CLIP1 and LTK genes with transformational potential due to constitutive LTK kinase activity.

FAM72A differentially controls mutation rates by regulating uracil processing at different stages of the cell cycle, thereby regulating somatic hypermutation and class-switch recombination in B cells.

FAM72A interacts with UNG2 to regulate the balance between error-prone and error-free DNA repair.

Structures of Ubr1 in complex with Ubc2, ubiquitin and two N-degron peptides reveal a Ubc2-binding region and an acceptor ubiquitin-binding loop on Ubr1, providing mechanistic insights into the initiation and elongation steps of ubiquitination catalysed by Ubr1.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the HER2–HER3–NRG1β complex reveal a dynamic HER2–HER3 interface and explain the mechanism for the activating HER2 cancer mutations.