A unexpected US call shocks public-health researchers and drugmakers, and why some researchers oppose unrestricted data sharing.

Space agency aims to breathe new life into its Earth-science programme as US President Joe Biden pushes an ambitious climate agenda.

A rooted bacterial tree is necessary to understand early evolution, but the position of the root is contested. Here, we model the evolution of 11,272 gene families to identify the root, extent of horizontal gene transfer (HGT), and the nature of the last bacterial common ancestor (LBCA). Our analyses root the tree between the major clades Terrabacteria and Gracilicutes and suggest that LBCA was a free-living

In science news around the world, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration takes the unprecedented step of informing a clinical trial sponsor, Acceleron Pharma, that it had violated the law that requires details of such studies to be posted to the federal repository ClinicalTrials.gov. The World Health Organization declares the latest outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo officially

An international fight broke out last week when Brazilian regulators vetoed the import of the Russian COVID-19 vaccine, Sputnik V, alleging its second dose contains adenoviruses capable of replication—a potential danger to vaccine recipients. The vaccine's maker soon announced on Twitter that it would sue in Brazil for defamation. In response, officials of the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency held

NASA is set to announce its next generation of Earth-observing satellites. As soon as this month, it will lay out plans for a multibillion-dollar set of missions that will launch later this decade. This "Earth system observatory" will offer insights into two long-standing wild cards of climate change—clouds and aerosols—while providing new details about the planet's changing surface. The satellite

Each summer, on bridges across the world, mayfly massacres occur. Warm weather prompts these aquatic insects to emerge as short-lived adults that are lured to early deaths by artificial lighting on bridges. Mayflies aren't alone in their fatal attraction to what researchers refer to as ALAN: artificial light at night. Studies from around the globe are finding worrisome impacts on insect mating and

Researchers are getting closer to solving the mystery of why the Sun's wispy atmosphere is nearly 200 times hotter than its surface. Temperatures ought to decline as one moves out from the Sun's core, but the solar atmosphere, or corona, seethes at more than 1 million degrees Celsius, far hotter than the 5500°C temperature of the surface. Flares have been a prime suspect for providing the missing heat

In February 2019, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) made a significant—and apparently secret—change to how it oversees laboratory animal welfare. Instead of fully inspecting all of the nearly 1100 facilities that house monkeys, rabbits, and other creatures used in biomedical research, it mandated partial "focused" inspections for places accredited by a private organization of lab vets and scientists

A group of whistleblowers has asked three funding agencies for a misconduct investigation into a series of 22 research papers, many of them on the effects of ocean acidification on fish behavior and ecology. The request, which they shared with a Science reporter, rests on what they say is evidence of manipulation in publicly available raw data files for two papers, one published in Science, the other

Migration of ungulates (hooved mammals) is a fundamental ecological process that promotes abundant herds, whose effects cascade up and down terrestrial food webs. Migratory ungulates provide the prey base that maintains large carnivore and scavenger populations and underpins terrestrial biodiversity (fig. S1). When ungulates move in large aggregations, their hooves, feces, and urine create conditions

Quantum mechanics governs both fundamental particles and large objects, but for the latter, a myriad of different factors conspire to mask its effects and render deviations from a purely classical description all but invisible. However, careful and controlled experiments can reveal purely quantum mechanical phenomena of large objects. On pages 622 and 625 of this issue, Kotler et al. (1) and Mercier

Materials scientists have long used highly coveted biomimetic techniques in the search for synthetic structural materials that resemble muscles and other natural fibers (1). Among these techniques, self-assembly processes inspired by cell fusion are gaining notoriety (2). Within biological systems, fission occurs when one entity can separate into two or more parts, and the opposite process, fusion

High-resolution imaging shows why the union between two sets of chromosomes goes awry as least as often as not.

Woven textiles with integrated interactive functionalities.

The ability to sequence genes and, more recently, whole genomes has transformed our understanding of the tree of life by elucidating the tremendous diversity of microorganisms and by placing plants, animals, and fungi as branches nested among microbial lineages (1–3). The resulting evolutionary tree divides life into three domains: the exclusively microbial Bacteria and Archaea, and Eukarya, organisms

World Health Organization will test whether three existing drugs can save lives of hospitalized people.

Neighbouring nations have denounced Japan’s plan to release water used to cool the nuclear plant's melted reactors into the sea, but researchers say the dangers are low.

A model shows how a spinning cylinder can stay suspended in the air next to an oil-slicked moving belt.

When the ice covering the west of the continent disappears, the bedrock could rise up and shove extra water into the ocean.

Birds are dinosaurs. A couple of decades of revealing finds and careful phylogenetic work have shown that birds are nested within the group of small, mostly predatory, and running dinosaurs that includes dromaeosaurs and troodontids, among others (1). Now, scientists are using that phylogenetic tapestry to trace the evolution of traits such as sensory biology and behavior. Two studies in this issue

Vibrating aluminium membranes provide the first direct evidence of quantum entanglement in macroscopic objects.

If you’re starting a doctoral programme later this year, particularly if your institution is still facing COVID-19 restrictions, Ciara O’Brien has some advice.

Signs of fission in a room entombed at Chernobyl. Plus, the US backs waiving patents on COVID vaccines and exploring what level of coronavirus risk societies will accept.

Data from Qatar provide strongest evidence yet that COVID-19 vaccines can stop strains thought to pose a threat to immunization efforts.

Building on such predecessors as The Craft of Science Writing and Escape from the Ivory Tower, in Getting to the Heart of Science Communication, Faith Kearns reminds readers that how a scientist presents his or her research can drastically affect how people outside of academia think, and especially how they feel, about a given topic. The book offers a view from the front lines of science communication

"A narrative history of the early Near East is virtually impossible," confessed archaeologist Paul Collins, the curator for the ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in his 2016 study, Mountains and Lowlands: Ancient Iran and Mesopotamia. The Sumerians, Collins's latest contribution to the Lost Civilizations series, eschews narrative in favor of separate chapters on, for example, "The

The mammalian sex chromosome system (XX female/XY male) is ancient and highly conserved. The sex chromosome karyotype of the creeping vole (Microtus oregoni) represents a long-standing anomaly, with an X chromosome that is unpaired in females (X0) and exclusively maternally transmitted. We produced a highly contiguous male genome assembly, together with short-read genomes and transcriptomes for both

Reptiles, including birds, exhibit a range of behaviorally relevant adaptations that are reflected in changes to the structure of the inner ear. These adaptations include the capacity for flight and sensitivity to high-frequency sound. We used three-dimensional morphometric analyses of a large sample of extant and extinct reptiles to investigate inner ear correlates of locomotor ability and hearing

Owls and nightbirds are nocturnal hunters of active prey that combine visual and hearing adaptations to overcome limits on sensory performance in low light. Such sensory innovations are unknown in nonavialan theropod dinosaurs and are poorly characterized on the line that leads to birds. We investigate morphofunctional proxies of vision and hearing in living and extinct theropods and demonstrate deep

Stimuli-responsive fusion and fission are widely observed in both bio-organizations and artificial molecular assemblies. However, the design of a system with structure and property persistence during repeated fusion and fission remains challenging. We show reversible fusion and fission of wet-spun graphene oxide (GO) fibers, in which a number of macroscopic fibers can fuse into a thicker one and can

Iodine-terminated self-assembled monolayer (I-SAM) was used in perovskite solar cells (PSCs) to achieve a 50% increase of adhesion toughness at the interface between the electron transport layer (ETL) and the halide perovskite thin film to enhance mechanical reliability. Treatment with I-SAM also increased the power conversion efficiency from 20.2% to 21.4%, reduced hysteresis, and improved operational

Quantum entanglement of mechanical systems emerges when distinct objects move with such a high degree of correlation that they can no longer be described separately. Although quantum mechanics presumably applies to objects of all sizes, directly observing entanglement becomes challenging as masses increase, requiring measurement and control with a vanishingly small error. Here, using pulsed electromechanics

Quantum mechanics sets a limit for the precision of continuous measurement of the position of an oscillator. We show how it is possible to measure an oscillator without quantum back-action of the measurement by constructing one effective oscillator from two physical oscillators. We realize such a quantum mechanics–free subsystem using two micromechanical oscillators, and show the measurements of two

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.188901

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.188902

Unconventional ferroelectricity exhibited by hafnia-based thin films—robust at nanoscale sizes—presents tremendous opportunities in nanoelectronics. However, the exact nature of polarization switching remains controversial. We investigated a La0.67Sr0.33MnO3/Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 capacitor interfaced with various top electrodes while performing in situ electrical biasing using atomic-resolution microscopy with

Slovakia conducted multiple rounds of population-wide rapid antigen testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in late 2020, combined with a period of additional contact restrictions. Observed prevalence decreased by 58% (95% confidence interval: 57 to 58%) within 1 week in the 45 counties that were subject to two rounds of mass testing, an estimate that remained robust

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2 is creating tremendous human suffering. To date, no effective drug is available to directly treat the disease. In a search for a drug against COVID-19, we have performed a high-throughput x-ray crystallographic screen of two repurposing drug libraries against the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro), which is essential for viral replication. In contrast

Billions of nocturnally migrating songbirds fly across oceans and deserts on their annual journeys. Using multisensor data loggers, we show that great reed warblers (Acrocephalus arundinaceus) regularly prolong their otherwise strictly nocturnal flights into daytime when crossing the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert. Unexpectedly, when prolonging their flights, they climbed steeply at dawn,

Bones and teeth are important sources of Pleistocene hominin DNA, but are rarely recovered at archaeological sites. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has been retrieved from cave sediments but provides limited value for studying population relationships. We therefore developed methods for the enrichment and analysis of nuclear DNA from sediments and applied them to cave deposits in western Europe and southern

Humans diverged from apes (chimpanzees, specifically) toward the end of the Miocene ~9.3 million to 6.5 million years ago. Understanding the origins of the human lineage (hominins) requires reconstructing the morphology, behavior, and environment of the chimpanzee-human last common ancestor. Modern hominoids (that is, humans and apes) share multiple features (for example, an orthograde body plan facilitating

Deciphering how the human striatum develops is necessary for understanding the diseases that affect this region. To decode the transcriptional modules that regulate this structure during development, we compiled a catalog of 1116 long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs) identified de novo and then profiled 96,789 single cells from the early human fetal striatum. We found that D1 and D2 medium spiny

Phenotypes associated with genetic variants can be altered by interactions with other genetic variants (GxG), with the environment (GxE), or both (GxGxE). Yeast genetic interactions have been mapped on a global scale, but the environmental influence on the plasticity of genetic networks has not been examined systematically. To assess environmental rewiring of genetic networks, we examined 14 diverse

Tailoring the molecular environment around catalytically active site allows to enhance catalytic reactivity via a hitherto unexplored pathway. In zeolites, the presence of water creates an ionic environment via formation of hydrated hydronium ions and the negatively charged framework Al tetrahedra. The high density of cation-anion pairs determined by the aluminum concentration of a zeolite induces

Quantum walks are the quantum mechanical analog of classical random walks and an extremely powerful tool in quantum simulations, quantum search algorithms, and even for universal quantum computing. In our work, we have designed and fabricated an 8x8 two-dimensional square superconducting qubit array composed of 62 functional qubits. We used this device to demonstrate high fidelity single and two particle

The 1.3-MDa transcription factor IID (TFIID) is required for preinitiation complex (PIC) assembly and RNA polymerase II (Pol II)-mediated transcription initiation on almost all genes. The 26-subunit Mediator stimulates transcription and cyclin-dependent kinase 7 (CDK7)-mediated phosphorylation of Pol II C-terminal domain (CTD). We determined the structures of human Mediator in the Tail module-extended

Agency hopes to eliminate bias when choosing between applications of similar quality.