Volume 605 Issue 7911, 26 May 2022

Evidence from around the world can help children to catch up, and could improve education as a whole.

There’s no perfect solution to suppress the pandemic, but careful study and communication are key.

Three months after the Russian invasion, our Kyiv office is open again.

Proteins that make up silk fibres can be formed into a material with a structure similar to that of the lustrous lining of oyster shells.

Arctic sea ice is thinning so fast that open-water vessels could ply northern shipping routes within decades.

Climbing parrots put their heads to use as a third limb.

Conventional tools to prevent mosquito bites are no use against those that attack during daylight hours.

Release of the signalling chemical dopamine stays high for a week after vigorous activity ends, animal research shows.

Afghan phone records show that high-casualty events trigger the most internal displacement.

Analysis of images from an iconic telescope reveals asteroids that are probably too small to detect from Earth.

The latest science news, in brief.

The genetically modified organs seemed to function for more than two days but some researchers are sceptical that the experiments had value.

With cases of sexually transmitted infections growing, researchers hope self-tests — made popular by the pandemic — could stem the tide.

The accelerated approval of aducanumab has triggered US lawmakers to push for more oversight from the agency.

Health-care workers who got the influenza vaccine were also protected from COVID-19 — but the effect might not last long.

Molar found in Laos could be the first fossil evidence that the hominin species was far-ranging and able to adapt to different climates.

Funding councils are considering changes to the Research Excellence Framework to improve research culture.

The particle-smashing machine has fired up again — sparking fresh hope it can find unusual results.

The pandemic is the largest disruption to education in history. But research has identified ways to help children make up lost ground. Will they work in classrooms around the world?

A biography charts the rise of the father of modern neuroscience.

From explosions to meltdowns, history provides key context in the search for alternative energy sources amid decarbonization.

The patent system assumes that inventors are human. Inventions devised by machines require their own intellectual property law and an international treaty.

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As inflation rates soar, new data on the finances of US graduate students spark calls for action.

Careful consideration and documentation of laboratory animals’ diets will boost the reproducibility of experiments.

Forest ecologist Paolo Cherubini once helped to settle a legal dispute involving a viola supposedly made in the sixteenth century.

It emerges that high blood sugar deregulates the enzyme TET3 in the eggs of female mice, preventing it from properly modifying sperm-derived DNA when eggs are fertilized. This leads to metabolic defects in adult progeny.

The seas are acidifying as a result of carbon dioxide emissions. It now emerges that this will alter the solubility of the shells of marine organisms called diatoms — and thereby change the distribution of nutrients and plankton in the ocean.

Innovations have been developed that facilitate quantum teleportation between nodes in a quantum network that do not neighbour each other, paving the way for complex network configurations.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

It has been unclear how the brain creates stable visual experiences from the highly variable activity of individual neurons. Imaging from thousands of neurons across the entire mouse visual cortex provides an explanation.

The migration and growth of cancer cells at sites far from the initial tumour is usually fatal. Metabolic heterogeneity — variable expression of an enzyme in the initial tumour — is identified as an early step in this deadly process.

Oceanic plate carbon reservoirs are reconstructed and the fate of subducted carbon is tracked using thermodynamic modelling, challenging previous views and providing boundary conditions for future carbon cycle models.

The SARS-CoV-2 Assessment of Viral Evolution (SAVE) programme provides a real-time risk assessment of SARS-CoV-2 variants with the potential to affect transmission, virulence and resistance to infection- and vaccine-induced immunity.

Using data gathered from the microphones of the Perseverance rover, the first characterization of the acoustic environment on Mars is presented, showing two distinct values for the speed of sound in CO₂-dominated atmosphere.

Using a compact, particle-beam-driven plasma-based accelerator to accelerate high-quality electron beams that are completely characterized in the six-dimensional phase space, free-electron lasing  is observed with narrow-band amplified radiation in the infrared range.

A quantum network formed by three optically connected nodes comprising solid-state qubits demonstrates the teleportation of quantum information between two non-neighbouring nodes, negating the need for a direct connection between them.

By using 17 physical qubits in a superconducting circuit to encode quantum information in a surface-code logical qubit, fast (1.1 μs) and high-performance (logical error probability of 3%) quantum error-correction cycles are demonstrated.

A fault-tolerant, universal set of single- and two-qubit quantum gates is demonstrated between two instances of the seven-qubit colour code in a trapped-ion quantum computer.

Artificial cilia composed of surface electrochemical actuators are combined in arrays to create arbitrary flow patterns in liquids, and, when integrated with light-powered CMOS circuits, enable programmable wireless operation at low voltage.

A perspective is given on how an electrocatalytic approach, inspired by decades of energy storage studies, can be used in the context of efficient cobalt-hydride generation with a variety of applications in modern organic synthesis.

Mesocosm experiments in different biomes show that future ocean acidification will slow down the dissolution of biogenic silica, decreasing silicic acid availability in the surface ocean and triggering a global decline of diatoms as revealed by Earth system model simulations.

In the tunicate Ciona intestinalis, the homeobox transcription factor Hmx drives differentiation of bipolar tail neurons, indicating conserved regulation and function, and homology with cranial sensory ganglia in higher vertebrates.

Select chemical compounds enriched in human odour activate an olfactory glomerulus in the brain of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which strengthens host-seeking behaviour and helps explain their strong preference for biting humans.

The mouse neocortex supports sensory performance through transient increases in sensory coding redundancy, neural codes that are robust to cellular variability, and inter-area fluctuation modes that transmit sensory data and task responses in non-interfering channels.

Subpopulations of Purkinje neurons display distinct transcriptomic responses and functions in associative learning.

Complementary single-cell approaches show that a population of regulatory T cells co-expressing ICOS and IL-1 receptor type 1 is highly enriched in tumours but not in site-matched inflamed non-malignant tissue.

In Caenorhabditis elegans, geranylgeranyl conjugation to RAB-11.1 acts as a lipid sensor to regulate nutrient uptake and lipid metabolism in response to metabolic demand.

A study using a mouse solid tumour model suggests that adjusting the dosing frequency of the PI3Kδ inhibitor AMG319 in the treatment of human cancers could decrease tumour growth with fewer adverse effects.

PHDGH heterogeneity in primary tumours could be a sign of tumour aggressiveness.

In Drosophila, there are extensive physical and functional associations of distant paralogous genes, including co-regulation by shared enhancers and co-transcriptional initiation over distances of nearly 250 kilobases.

Pregestational hyperglycaemia in mothers increases the probability of glucose intolerance in the offspring, an effect controlled by TET3-dependent DNA demethylation of genes involved in insulin secretion.

The molecular determinants for primer synthesis are identified within the catalytic domain of primase-polymerase enzymes, elucidating the mechanisms underlying initiation of primer synthesis.