Some astronomers argue the flagship observatory — successor to the Hubble Space Telescope — will memorialize discrimination. Others are waiting for more evidence.

Researchers around the world are eagerly awaiting the completion of Tiangong, to study topics from dark matter and gravitational waves to the growth of cancer and pathogenic bacteria.

PhD student Emilio Dorigatti supported three junior colleagues during their degrees.

Nearly half of researchers surveyed in the United Kingdom and elsewhere reported problems, with people from marginalized groups most likely to be mistreated.

Sulphur-crested cockatoos are the first parrots known to have complex culture centred on food-gathering.

Surveys show that people in ten low- and middle-income nations are generally more eager to receive the COVID-19 jab than people in two wealthier nations where vaccine is plentiful.

The trailblazing collaboration that first imaged a black hole turns its sights on a nearby black-hole jet.

People infected with Delta have a much higher viral load. Plus, repurposed medicines might offer hope for long COVID, and how to create a perfect protocol.

The United Kingdom allowed mass gatherings and attempted to study them, but the early results provide limited data on viral transmission.

Study of nearly 7,000 scientists also finds that more than half engage in ‘questionable research practices’.

In science news around the world, the Hubble Space Telescope ends a monthlong hiatus when operators successfully switched a failed control system to backup devices. The European Union and China announce plans to follow through on commitments to curb their carbon emissions, as the European Union would steeply increase the price of carbon dioxide emissions and China unveils a carbon trading scheme for

Deadly flooding in northern Europe has prompted questions about how such wealthy developed countries could still be taken by surprise, despite ample flood warnings. Although recent infrastructure projects appear to have reduced damage in parts of the Netherlands, scientists point to a number of potential factors: Climate change has supercharged rainstorms in Europe, making them even more intense than

In the wake of the controversial U.S. regulatory approval of the Alzheimer's drug aducanumab, physicians expect many patients with memory problems will want to know whether they are eligible. But a definitive diagnosis is expensive and time-consuming, involving a hunt for indicators of disease, or biomarkers, in patients' spinal fluid or in positron emission tomography scans. The demand threatens to

Abhimanyu Lele, a third-year graduate student at the University of Chicago, was one of the lucky few this spring. In a typical year, thousands of graduate students and faculty fan out across the world to tackle important research in climate change, fragile ecosystems, animal populations and more. But the pandemic shut down travel, and fieldwork can't be done via Zoom, depriving young scientists like

Two research groups have independently shown the atmosphere can contain detectable amounts of DNA from many kinds of animals. Their preprints, posted on bioRxiv last week, suggest sampling air may enable a faster, cheaper way to survey creatures in ecosystems. For more than a decade, researchers have analyzed disparate sources of environmental DNA (eDNA) in water to identify elusive organisms. Far

The astronomy team that 2 years ago captured the first close-up of a giant black hole, lurking at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, has now zoomed in on a second, somewhat smaller giant, in the nearby active galaxy Centaurus A. The Event Horizon Telescope merges dozens of widely dispersed radio dishes, from Hawaii to France and from Greenland to the South Pole, into a huge virtual telescope. Its

In a sharp tightening of the diplomatic screws, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is urging China to increase its transparency about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and allow greater access to its labs to help resolve the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Tedros also says WHO will create a new body to conduct the next phase of studies into the emergence

Behind a range of medical decisions—prescriptions, specialist referrals, surgeries—lie algorithms that help doctors gauge risks. But these risk calculators often include a controversial variable: a patient's race. At a population scale, race often does correlate with medical outcomes, in part because it acts as a proxy for the influence of other socioeconomic factors on health. But in recent years

Transport electrification is a key element of decarbonization strategies; thus, the design, production, manufacture, use, and disposal of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are taking center stage. The environmental, economic, and social consequences of the battery life cycle are high on political agendas, owing to exponential growth in metals extraction; the climate impacts of battery production; and uncertainties

The interior of a planet holds important clues to its origin and thermal and dynamic evolution. Exploring a planet's deeper layers can reveal how a planet accreted and differentiated into layers, whether its core sustains a geodynamo that creates a magnetic field, and what the origin is of any tectonic and volcanic activity. New clues are now uncovered for Mars. On pages 438, 434, and 443 of this issue

Quantum computers (QCs) promise to exponentially speed up a number of problems in optimization, materials science, and chemistry. The caveat is that they may not even get the chance. One outstanding issue is the coherence time, which is how long a system can remain in a quantum state. We live in the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors, and the time to execute the necessary number of

Predictive understanding for how a particular amino acid sequence encodes enzymatic function is a grand challenge in molecular biology, with profound impacts in fields ranging from industrial biotechnology, computational protein design, and agriculture to predictive identification of disease mutations (1) and medicinal chemistry. Innovative methods for high-throughput and quantitative measurements

Probing single molecules in their nanoenvironment can reveal site-specific phenomena that would be obscured by ensemble-averaging experiments on macroscopic populations of molecules. Particularly in the past decade, major technological breakthroughs in scanning probe microscopy (SPM) have led to unprecedented spatial resolution and versatility and enabled the interrogation of molecular conformation

A primary defense strategy in response to infection or inflammation is to mobilize innate immune cells through the circulatory system to the affected organ. Patrolling monocytes and neutrophils constantly monitor healthy tissue and extravasate from vascular endothelium to infected or injured tissue through a stepwise mechanism (1). On page 409 of this issue, Cugurra et al. (2) demonstrate in a mouse

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein's new book, Noise, argues that variability in decision-making contexts where one expects consistency is both more prevalent and more consequential than one would imagine. In their words, "wherever there is judgment, there is noise, and more of it than you think."

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," wrote the philosopher George Santayana in 1905. Heeding this aphorism, in The Wretched Atom, historian Jacob Darwin Hamblin seeks to remind readers of the misguided 20th-century effort launched by the United States, its allies, and international agencies to expand nuclear energy around the world.

We extend the definition of asymptotic multiparticle states of the S-matrix beyond the tensor products of one-particle states. We identify new quantum numbers called pairwise helicities, or qij, associated with asymptotically separated pairs of particles. We first treat all single particles and particle pairs independently, allowing us to generalize the Wigner construction, and ultimately projecting

Adenosine monophosphate (AMP)–activated protein kinase (AMPK) regulates metabolism in response to the cellular energy states. Under energy stress, AMP stabilizes the active AMPK conformation, in which the kinase activation loop (AL) is protected from protein phosphatases, thus keeping the AL in its active, phosphorylated state. At low AMP:ATP (adenosine triphosphate) ratios, ATP inhibits AMPK by increasing

Plant nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors (NLRs) regulate immunity and cell death. In Arabidopsis, a subfamily of “helper” NLRs is required by many “sensor” NLRs. Active NRG1.1 oligomerized, was enriched in plasma membrane puncta, and conferred cytoplasmic calcium ion (Ca2+) influx in plant and human cells. NRG1.1-dependent Ca2+ influx and cell death were sensitive to Ca2+ channel blockers

The Crab Nebula is a bright source of gamma rays powered by the Crab Pulsar’s rotational energy through the formation and termination of a relativistic electron-positron wind. We report the detection of gamma rays from this source with energies from 5 × 10−4 to 1.1 peta–electron volts with a spectrum showing gradual steepening over three energy decades. The ultrahigh-energy photons imply the presence

Two promising architectures for solid-state quantum information processing are based on electron spins electrostatically confined in semiconductor quantum dots and the collective electrodynamic modes of superconducting circuits. Superconducting electrodynamic qubits involve macroscopic numbers of electrons and offer the advantage of larger coupling, whereas semiconductor spin qubits involve individual

For 2 years, the InSight lander has been recording seismic data on Mars that are vital to constrain the structure and thermochemical state of the planet. We used observations of direct (P and S) and surface-reflected (PP, PPP, SS, and SSS) body-wave phases from eight low-frequency marsquakes to constrain the interior structure to a depth of 800 kilometers. We found a structure compatible with a low-velocity

A planet’s crust bears witness to the history of planetary formation and evolution, but for Mars, no absolute measurement of crustal thickness has been available. Here, we determine the structure of the crust beneath the InSight landing site on Mars using both marsquake recordings and the ambient wavefield. By analyzing seismic phases that are reflected and converted at subsurface interfaces, we find

Clues to a planet’s geologic history are contained in its interior structure, particularly its core. We detected reflections of seismic waves from the core-mantle boundary of Mars using InSight seismic data and inverted these together with geodetic data to constrain the radius of the liquid metal core to 1830 ± 40 kilometers. The large core implies a martian mantle mineralogically similar to the terrestrial

Most optoelectronic devices operate at high photocarrier densities, where all semiconductors suffer from enhanced nonradiative recombination. Nonradiative processes proportionately reduce photoluminescence (PL) quantum yield (QY), a performance metric that directly dictates the maximum device efficiency. Although transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) monolayers exhibit near-unity PL QY at low exciton

The nonequilibrium triplet state of molecules plays an important role in photocatalysis, organic photovoltaics, and photodynamic therapy. We report the direct measurement of the triplet lifetime of an individual pentacene molecule on an insulating surface with atomic resolution by introducing an electronic pump-probe method in atomic force microscopy. Strong quenching of the triplet lifetime is observed

The emergence, spread, and establishment of innovations within cultures can promote adaptive responses to anthropogenic change. We describe a putative case of the development of a cultural adaptation to urban environments: opening of household waste bins by wild sulphur-crested cockatoos. A spatial network analysis of community science reports revealed the geographic spread of bin opening from three

The ability to perceive and respond to environmental stimuli emerges in the absence of sensory experience. Spontaneous retinal activity prior to eye opening guides the refinement of retinotopy and eye-specific segregation in mammals, but its role in the development of higher-order visual response properties remains unclear. Here, we describe a transient window in neonatal mouse development during which

The biogenesis of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) requires apoA1 and the cholesterol transporter ABCA1. Although the liver generates most of the HDL in the blood, HDL synthesis also occurs in the small intestine. Here, we show that intestine-derived HDL traverses the portal vein in the HDL3 subspecies form, in complex with lipopolysaccharide (LPS)–binding protein (LBP). HDL3, but not HDL2 or low-density

The meninges are a membranous structure enveloping the central nervous system (CNS) that host a rich repertoire of immune cells mediating CNS immune surveillance. Here, we report that the mouse meninges contain a pool of monocytes and neutrophils supplied not from the blood but by adjacent skull and vertebral bone marrow. Under pathological conditions, including spinal cord injury and neuroinflammation

Systematic and extensive investigation of enzymes is needed to understand their extraordinary efficiency and meet current challenges in medicine and engineering. We present HT-MEK (High-Throughput Microfluidic Enzyme Kinetics), a microfluidic platform for high-throughput expression, purification, and characterization of more than 1500 enzyme variants per experiment. For 1036 mutants of the alkaline