Electromagnetic fields in light waves are mainly transverse to propagation direction but actually also have longitudinal components, which may give rise to unexpected optical phenomena involving the angular momentum of light, such as transverse spin and optical torques.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2956-7.

A common bacterium can be engineered to carry coded messages in its genome.

Gut-wrenching infection encourages production of an amino acid consumed by helpful bacteria.

Data from nearly 100,000 people find no upper limit to the heart benefits of increasing exercise levels

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03142-2.

Subscription journals will let some Plan S funded researchers share accepted manuscripts under open licences.

Be ready for queries that reflect stereotypes about academia and that probe why you’re switching sectors, says Tina Persson.

Scientists say CoronaVac could reduce cases of severe disease, particularly in countries with raging outbreaks.

John Tregoning grapples with a shifting schedule and a new UK lockdown.

“The nomenclature is a bloody mess.”

Despite sharp drops early in the pandemic, global emissions of carbon dioxide rebounded, new data show.

The CoronaVac vaccine, developed by Sinovac in China, reports mixed results in Brazil. Plus, what we know about COVID’s toll on smell and taste, and the mysterious extinction of the dire wolf.

Efforts to track SARS-CoV-2 sequences have helped identify worrying variants — but researchers are blind to emerging mutations in some regions.

Elevated levels of a plant hormone tip off roots about compacted soil.

Northern India is among the regions facing shortages from climate change’s effects on mountain rivers.

Researchers are studying the sensory impact of the coronavirus, how long it lasts and what can be done to treat it.

Interim results show COVID immunity for at least five months. Plus, insects face ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and thieving monkeys can spot ransom-worthy items.

In science news around the world, several science advocacy groups join calls for President Donald Trump to resign or be immediately removed from office for inciting the 6 January attack by a violent mob on the U.S. Capitol. In a reversal, the Trump administration decides to release its entire stockpile of two authorized COVID-19 vaccines to speed a so far sluggish campaign to vaccinate people. Facing

Science advocates are hoping the new Democratic majority in both houses of Congress will team up with President-elect Joe Biden "to move forward in ways that are transformational and not incremental." The narrow edge in the Senate will make it easier for Biden to win confirmation of his appointees and for Congress to revoke controversial rules finalized in the final 5 months of President Donald Trump's

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has declared that one of North America's best known butterflies, the monarch, might be in trouble. But the agency put off protecting the insect under the federal Endangered Species Act, which may give researchers time to resolve a long-standing debate over how best to gauge the health of monarch populations. In recent months, dueling preprints and publications

Anyone who has been stung by a jellyfish might think they know more than enough about cnidocytes, the cells that deliver the sting. But one researcher has found that these cells have much more to tell, including insight into a simple evolutionary mechanism that, hundreds of millions of years ago, might have enabled jellyfish, sea anemones, corals, and their relatives—collectively known as cnidarians—to

The story of the collapse of the Arecibo telescope is now well known. On 10 August 2020, a steel cable supporting a 900-ton instrument platform high above the dish broke at one end and fell, slicing into the dish. A second support cable snapped on 6 November and the National Science Foundation said attempting repairs was too dangerous: Arecibo would be dismantled. On 1 December, fate took control as

When neutron stars are formed, their massive gravitational pressure “crushes” most of their protons and electrons into neutrons. Understanding the interaction between the remaining protons (∼5%) and neutrons in the star's core is required to model the neutron star equation of state, which relates its pressure and density and determines many of its macroscopical properties. These proton-neutron interactions

Uncovering connections between seemingly unrelated branches of science might accelerate research in one branch by using the methods developed in the other branch as stepping stones. On page 284 of this issue, Hie et al. (1) provide an elegant example of such unexpected connections. The authors have uncovered a parallel between the properties of a virus and its interpretation by the host immune system

Glutamine has a host of metabolic functions, including biosynthesis, redox maintenance, and chromatin biology. Drugs are currently available to target glutamine and related metabolism. However, the use of these compounds has been limited by finding appropriate applications because the role of glutamine in health and disease is still poorly understood. Some studies have pointed to a limited role of

Over the 20th century, the social sciences developed without taking much notice of humans' nature as products of evolution. In the 1970s this attitude was challenged by behavioral biologists (1, 2) who asserted that general principles concerning the behavior of life forms must also be relevant to understanding human behavior. They argued that because human cognition and emotions had evolved by natural

Nature conservation literature and policy instruments mainly focus on the impacts of human development and the benefits of nature conservation for oceans and aboveground terrestrial organisms (e.g., birds and plants) and processes (e.g., food production), but these efforts almost completely ignore the majority of terrestrial biodiversity that is unseen and living in the soil (1). Little is known about

In Michael Mann's latest book, The New Climate War, the reader is afforded a unique perspective on the struggle for climate action and climate protection. This perspective, covering the span of a few centuries and ending in the present, weaves together the missteps, manipulations, and misrepresentations that have occurred throughout the so-called climate war between those who believe that human actions

General Motors and Ford, the two largest U.S. automakers, are together worth about US$100 billion. The combined value of Google and Facebook is about $2 trillion—20 times higher. What makes these companies worth so much? Ads. In Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet, Tim Hwang suggests that the digital advertising industry may be on the brink of a global

Many plant specialized metabolites function in herbivore defense, and abrogating particular steps in their biosynthetic pathways frequently causes autotoxicity. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying their defense and autotoxicity remain unclear. Here, we show that silencing two cytochrome P450s involved in diterpene biosynthesis in the wild tobacco Nicotiana attenuata causes severe autotoxicity

The surface of neutron-rich heavy nuclei, with a neutron skin created by excess neutrons, provides an important terrestrial model system to study dilute neutron-rich matter. By using quasi-free α cluster–knockout reactions, we obtained direct experimental evidence for the formation of α clusters at the surface of neutron-rich tin isotopes. The observed monotonous decrease of the reaction cross sections

Removal of senescent cells (senolysis) has been proposed to be beneficial for improving age-associated pathologies, but the molecular pathways for such senolytic activity have not yet emerged. Here, we identified glutaminase 1 (GLS1) as an essential gene for the survival of human senescent cells. The intracellular pH in senescent cells was lowered by lysosomal membrane damage, and this lowered pH induced

Type I interferon (IFN) signaling in fetal tissues causes developmental abnormalities and fetal demise. Although pathogens that infect fetal tissues can induce birth defects through the local production of type I IFN, it remains unknown why systemic IFN generated during maternal infections only rarely causes fetal developmental defects. Here, we report that activation of the guanine nucleotide–binding

Soil compaction represents a major challenge for modern agriculture. Compaction is intuitively thought to reduce root growth by limiting the ability of roots to penetrate harder soils. We report that root growth in compacted soil is instead actively suppressed by the volatile hormone ethylene. We found that mutant Arabidopsis and rice roots that were insensitive to ethylene penetrated compacted soil

Nanoparticle surface structure and geometry generally dictate where chemical transformations occur, with higher chemical activity at sites with lower activation energies. Here, we show how optical excitation of plasmons enables spatially modified phase transformations, activating otherwise energetically unfavorable sites. We have designed a crossed-bar Au-PdHx antenna-reactor system that localizes

The ability for viruses to mutate and evade the human immune system and cause infection, called viral escape, remains an obstacle to antiviral and vaccine development. Understanding the complex rules that govern escape could inform therapeutic design. We modeled viral escape with machine learning algorithms originally developed for human natural language. We identified escape mutations as those that

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spread rapidly in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state in northern Brazil. The attack rate there is an estimate of the final size of the largely unmitigated epidemic that occurred in Manaus. We use a convenience sample of blood donors to show that by June 2020, 1 month after the epidemic peak in Manaus, 44% of the population had detectable

Behavior is a way for organisms to respond flexibly to the environmental conditions they encounter. Our own species exhibits large behavioral flexibility and occurs in all terrestrial habitats, sharing these environments with many other species. It remains unclear to what extent a shared environment constrains behavior and whether these constraints apply similarly across species. Here, we show that

Long-lived excited states of interacting quantum systems that retain quantum correlations and evade thermalization are of great fundamental interest. We create nonthermal states in a bosonic one-dimensional (1D) quantum gas of dysprosium by stabilizing a super-Tonks-Girardeau gas against collapse and thermalization with repulsive long-range dipolar interactions. Stiffness and energy-per-particle measurements

Signaling through the CD19-CD81 co-receptor complex, in combination with the B cell receptor, is a critical determinant of B cell development and activation. It is unknown how CD81 engages CD19 to enable co-receptor function. Here, we report a 3.8-angstrom structure of the CD19-CD81 complex bound to a therapeutic antigen-binding fragment, determined by cryo–electron microscopy (cryo-EM). The structure

To initiate cotranscriptional splicing, RNA polymerase II (Pol II) recruits the U1 small nuclear ribonucleoprotein particle (U1 snRNP) to nascent precursor messenger RNA (pre-mRNA). Here, we report the cryo–electron microscopy structure of a mammalian transcribing Pol II–U1 snRNP complex. The structure reveals that Pol II and U1 snRNP interact directly. This interaction positions the pre-mRNA 5′ splice

Here we describe mechanistically distinct enzymes (a kinase, a guanosine triphosphatase, and a ubiquitin protein hydrolase) that function in disparate biochemical pathways and can also act in concert to mediate a series of redox reactions. Each enzyme manifests a second, noncanonical function—transnitrosylation—that triggers a pathological biochemical cascade in mouse models and in humans with Alzheimer’s

A long-standing question in infectious disease dynamics concerns the role of transmission heterogeneities, which are driven by demography, behavior, and interventions. On the basis of detailed patient and contact-tracing data in Hunan, China, we find that 80% of secondary infections traced back to 15% of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) primary infections, which indicates

Human monogenic disorders have revealed the critical contribution of type 17 responses in mucosal fungal surveillance. We unexpectedly found that in certain settings, enhanced type 1 immunity rather than defective type 17 responses can promote mucosal fungal infection susceptibility. Notably, in mice and humans with AIRE deficiency, an autoimmune disease characterized by selective susceptibility to

Multicellular organisms are composed of cells connected by ancestry and descent from progenitor cells. The dynamics of cell birth, death, and inheritance within an organism give rise to the fundamental processes of development, differentiation, and cancer. Technical advances in molecular biology now allow us to study cellular composition, ancestry, and evolution at the resolution of individual cells

The apparent “boosted mobility” observed by Wang et al. (Reports, 31 July 2020, p. 537) is the result of a known artifact. When signal intensities are changing during a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) diffusion measurement for reasons other than diffusion, the use of monotonically increasing gradient amplitudes produces erroneous diffusion coefficients. We show that no boosted molecular mobility is

Günther et al. report that their control experiment using randomized magnetic field gradient sequences disagreed with findings we had reported using linear gradients. However, we show that measurements in our laboratory are consistent using both methods.

The SREBP pathway controls cellular homeostasis of sterols. The key players in this pathway, Scap and Insig-1/2, are membrane-embedded sterol sensors. 25-hydroxycholesterol (25HC)-dependent association of Scap and Insigs acts as the master switch for the SREBP pathway. Here, we present cryo-EM analysis of the human Scap and Insig-2 complex in the presence of 25HC, with the transmembrane (TM) domains

Sperm are haploid, but must be functionally equivalent to distribute alleles equally among progeny. Accordingly, gene products are shared through spermatid cytoplasmic bridges which erase phenotypic differences between individual haploid sperm. Here, we show that a large class of mammalian genes are not completely shared across these bridges. We term these genes “genoinformative markers” (GIMs) and

High-voltage fish in the Amazon swarm the buffet together.