A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03360-2.

In the wake of the World Health Organization’s investigation, there are still key questions about when, where and how the pandemic began.

Specialised quantum computers could pave the way for a new type of internet

Hear the latest science from the coronavirus pandemic.

With its effect on the gut lining, a parasite aids another infectious agent.

Earth’s upper atmosphere cooks up a storm.

During the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in humans a D614G substitution in the spike (S) protein emerged and became the predominant circulating variant (S-614G) of the COVID-19 pandemic1. However, whether the increasing prevalence of the S-614G variant represents a fitness advantage that improves replication and/or transmission in humans or is merely due to founder effects remains elusive. Here, we generated

Inside a composite structure, mechanical energy is transformed into an electron flow that powers a chemical reaction.

The process of setting up a funding agency for high-risk research in the United Kingdom is under way. But questions remain about how it will benefit science.

The American Physical Society’s new criteria for conference venues seem to be unique among scientific societies.

Studies from China suggest that the coronavirus can be transmitted on frozen surfaces — but scientists say that’s unlikely to be how the pandemic started.

The male’s misleading alarm calls could help to keep the female in his embrace.

Institutions need experts in racial justice and queer liberation to shoulder the burden of advocating for scientists from under-represented groups, says Robin Aguilar.

In science news around the world, the United States surpasses 500,000 deaths from COVID-19, the world's highest toll. A U.K. ethics board authorizes a research team there to intentionally infect volunteers with the pandemic coronavirus, in a world-first, hotly debated experiment intended to accelerate research on vaccines against the disease. Researchers produce the first clone of an endangered animal

NASA's $2.7 billion Perseverance rover has made a precise landing on the floor of Mars's Jezero crater, which scientists believe was filled with water 3.8 billion years ago. Two kilometers away sits the rover's primary target: a fossilized river delta, created as muddy water spilled into the crater—ideal for preserving signs of life. But before Perseverance starts the long climb up into the delta,

Most groups of animals have many small species, somewhat fewer medium-size species, and even fewer large species. In contrast, the extinct dinosaurs—especially carnivores—had plenty of species no bigger than modern-day chickens and also many giant species, but few medium-size ones. Paleontologists have wondered whether juvenile dinosaurs crowded out medium-size adults by exploiting the habitats and

Neutrinos are everywhere, streaming through your body by the trillions every second. But the chargeless, nearly massless particles are notoriously hard to pin down, especially the rare high-energy ones from deep space. Only about a dozen cosmic neutrinos are detected annually, and only one had been linked to a source in the sky. Now, IceCube, a kilometer-wide neutrino detector nestled deep beneath

Plastics are a climate problem. Making precursors for common plastics, such as ethylene and carbon monoxide, consumes fossil fuels and releases plenty of carbon dioxide. In recent years, chemists have devised bench-top reactors called electrochemical cells that aim to reverse the process, starting with water and waste carbon dioxide from industrial processes and using renewable electricity to turn

The U.K. government has released its plans for emulating the storied high-risk, high-reward U.S. funding agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. During the 2019 election campaign, the Conservative government promised to set up such an agency, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson's former adviser Dominic Cummings pushed for it. Now, it has a name: the Advanced Research & Invention Agency. The agency

A technique called interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), used to detect tiny movements of Earth's surface from space, is taking off. Individual GPS stations can track surface movements of less than 1 millimeter, but InSAR can measure changes almost as subtle across a swath hundreds of kilometers wide. With InSAR, scientists are tracking how ice streams flow, how faults slip in earthquakes

The paucity of seismic stations in the ocean limits sustained seafloor seismic and pressure observations that are needed for rapid earthquake detection, early warning of damaging ground shaking, and tsunami prediction and verification. Because establishing infrastructure in the oceans is expensive, there is a big advantage to methods that use undersea telecommunication cables. On page 931 of this issue

Transient intermediate structures between reactants and products in chemical reactions—transition states—can be probed by colliding the reactants at a well-defined collision energy Ecol, and then observing the product scattering angle θ and product kinetic and internal energy. By varying Ecol, sharp variations, or resonances, can be observed in the probability of forming the product at a particular

In humans, the liver is the most regenerative solid organ, able to regrow to normal size after removal of up to 90% of the liver volume (1, 2). The liver is also distinct because it scales with body size, a characteristic that has been attributed to a “hepatostat” that adjusts liver size to the needs of the body (3). Identifying the cells contributing to liver homeostasis and repair could lead to therapies

Human-made physical random number generators (RNGs) can be traced back 5000 years or more. Early examples such as knucklebones, two-sided throwsticks, or dice have been found in the Middle East, India, and China. RNGs were used for fortune telling and games of chance, with the oldest known board games of similar age as those of the number generators. Today, RNGs are vital for services and state-of-the-art

On 7 November 2020, moments before Kamala Harris and Joe Biden began their victory speeches, giant screens flanking the stage proclaimed, “The people have chosen science.” Yet, nearly 74 million Americans, almost half the voters, had cast their ballots for Donald Trump, thereby presumably not choosing science. Prominent scientists asserted that “science was on the ballot” and lamented that “a significant

In his entertaining and thought provoking The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, the Cambridge University zoologist and mathematical biologist Arik Kershenbaum— known principally for his studies of animal vocalizations—turns to astrobiology, a field concerned with the origins and persistence of life in the Universe, and provides readers with a tentative sketch of the nature of potential alien life on

Historian Brandy Schillace's new book, Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher—so titled to evoke Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde—offers a probing and provocative portrait of the American neurosurgeon and neurophysiologist Robert J. White (1926–2010), whose life's ambition was to establish that the brain—the seat of consciousness, personhood, or, as a pious Catholic like White conceived of it, the human

The main force generators in eukaryotic cilia and flagella are axonemal outer dynein arms (ODAs). During ciliogenesis, these ~1.8-megadalton complexes are assembled in the cytoplasm and targeted to cilia by an unknown mechanism. Here, we used the ciliate Tetrahymena to identify two factors (Q22YU3 and Q22MS1) that bind ODAs in the cytoplasm and are required for ODA delivery to cilia. Q22YU3, which

Limited initial supply of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine raises the question of how to prioritize available doses. We used a mathematical model to compare five age-stratified prioritization strategies. A highly effective transmission-blocking vaccine prioritized to adults ages 20 to 49 years minimized cumulative incidence, but mortality and years of life lost were

Nitrogen oxides are removed from the troposphere through the reactive uptake of N2O5 into aqueous aerosol. This process is thought to occur within the bulk of an aerosol, through solvation and subsequent hydrolysis. However, this perspective is difficult to reconcile with field measurements and cannot be verified directly because of the fast reaction kinetics of N2O5. Here, we use molecular simulations

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) viral proteins interact with the eukaryotic translation machinery, and inhibitors of translation have potent antiviral effects. We found that the drug plitidepsin (aplidin), which has limited clinical approval, possesses antiviral activity (90% inhibitory concentration = 0.88 nM) that is more potent than remdesivir against SARS-CoV-2 in vitro

Seafloor geophysical instrumentation is challenging to deploy and maintain but critical for studying submarine earthquakes and Earth’s interior. Emerging fiber-optic sensing technologies that can leverage submarine telecommunication cables present an opportunity to fill the data gap. We successfully sensed seismic and water waves over a 10,000-kilometer-long submarine cable connecting Los Angeles,

The effect of electron spin-orbit interactions on chemical reaction dynamics has been a topic of much research interest. Here we report a combined experimental and theoretical study on the effect of electron spin and orbital angular momentum in the F + HD → HF + D reaction. Using a high-resolution imaging technique, we observed a peculiar horseshoe-shaped pattern in the product rotational-state–resolved

Despite dominating biodiversity in the Mesozoic, dinosaurs were not speciose. Oviparity constrained even gigantic dinosaurs to less than 15 kg at birth; growth through multiple morphologies led to the consumption of different resources at each stage. Such disparity between neonates and adults could have influenced the structure and diversity of dinosaur communities. Here, we quantified this effect

The composition of the early Solar System can be inferred from meteorites. Many elements heavier than iron were formed by the rapid neutron capture process (r-process), but the astrophysical sources where this occurred remain poorly understood. We demonstrate that the near-identical half-lives (≃15.6 million years) of the radioactive r-process nuclei iodine-129 and curium-247 preserve their ratio,

Random numbers are widely used for information security, cryptography, stochastic modeling, and quantum simulations. Key technical challenges for physical random number generation are speed and scalability. We demonstrate a method for ultrafast generation of hundreds of random bit streams in parallel with a single laser diode. Spatiotemporal interference of many lasing modes in a specially designed

The liver is organized into zones in which hepatocytes express different metabolic enzymes. The cells most responsible for liver repopulation and regeneration remain undefined, because fate mapping has only been performed on a few hepatocyte subsets. Here, 14 murine fate-mapping strains were used to systematically compare distinct subsets of hepatocytes. During homeostasis, cells from both periportal

Detailed phylogenies of tumor populations can recount the history and chronology of critical events during cancer progression, such as metastatic dissemination. We applied a Cas9-based, single-cell lineage tracer to study the rates, routes, and drivers of metastasis in a lung cancer xenograft mouse model. We report deeply resolved phylogenies for tens of thousands of cancer cells traced over months

Understanding genome organization requires integration of DNA sequence and three-dimensional spatial context; however, existing genome-wide methods lack either base pair sequence resolution or direct spatial localization. Here, we describe in situ genome sequencing (IGS), a method for simultaneously sequencing and imaging genomes within intact biological samples. We applied IGS to human fibroblasts

Organ homeostasis is orchestrated by time- and spatially restricted cell proliferation. Studies identifying cells with superior proliferative capacities often rely on the lineage tracing of a subset of cell populations, which introduces a potential selective bias. In this work, we developed a genetic system [proliferation tracer (ProTracer)] by incorporating dual recombinases to seamlessly record the

Ni et al. (Research Articles, 20 March 2020, p. 1352) report bulk trap densities of 1011 cm–3 and an increase in interfacial trap densities by one to four orders of magnitude from drive-level capacitance profiling of lead halide perovskites. From electrostatic arguments, we show that the results are not trap densities but are a consequence of the geometrical capacitance and charge injection into the

Several lines of evidence implicate the protein tau in the pathogenesis of multiple brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, other neurodegenerative conditions, autism, and epilepsy. Tau is abundant in neurons and interacts with microtubules, but its main functions in the brain remain to be defined. These functions may involve the regulation of signaling pathways relevant to diverse biological

Immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies are crucial for protection against invading pathogens. A highly conserved N-linked glycan within the IgG-Fc tail, which is essential for IgG function, shows variable composition in humans. Afucosylated IgG variants are already used in anticancer therapeutic antibodies for their increased activity through Fc receptors (FcγRIIIa). Here, we report that afucosylated IgG

Ravishankar et al. claimed that drive-level capacitance profiling (DLCP) cannot resolve trap density in perovskites of given thickness. We point out that the trap densities derived by DLCP are from the differential capacitance at different frequencies; thus, the background charges caused by diffusion and geometry capacitance have been subtracted. Even for the nondifferential doping analysis, the contribution

The control of non-equilibrium quantum dynamics in many-body systems is challenging as interactions typically lead to thermalization and a chaotic spreading throughout Hilbert space. We investigate non-equilibrium dynamics following rapid quenches in a many-body system composed of 3 to 200 strongly interacting qubits in one and two spatial dimensions. Using a programmable quantum simulator based on

Build more capacity, and stretch what we already have

Long-read and strand-specific sequencing technologies together facilitate the de novo assembly of high-quality haplotype-resolved human genomes without parent–child trio data. We present 64 assembled haplotypes from 32 diverse human genomes. These highly contiguous haplotype assemblies (average contig N50: 26 Mbp) integrate all forms of genetic variation even across complex loci. We identify 107,590

Mitogens trigger cell division in animals. In plants, cytokinins, a group of phytohormones derived from adenine, stimulate cell proliferation. Cytokinin signaling is initiated by membrane-associated histidine kinase receptors and transduced through a phosphorelay system. Here we show, in the Arabidopsis shoot apical meristem (SAM), that cytokinin regulates cell division by promoting nuclear shuttling

Chiral assemblies of plasmonic nanoparticles are known for strong circular dichroism but not for high optical asymmetry, which is limited by the unfavorable combination of electrical and magnetic field components compounded by strong scattering. Here we show that these limitations can be overcome by long-range organization of nanoparticles similar to liquid crystals found in helical assemblies of gold