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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has raised $4 million to establish an ambitious College of Science, Technology and Society. Supporters say it will help give MIT-trained scientists and engineers “an education for the 21st century” others claim it is an attempt to protect private industry from criticism of its use of science. David Dickson reports

A participatory view of science resolves quantum paradoxes and finds room in classical physics for 'the Now', says N. David Mermin.

A fictional gumshoe was first to pick up the intriguing criminal potential of 'gummy fingers'.

Experiments in mice show that a LINE-1 transposable element, Lx9c11, has a functional role in immunity by negatively regulating the response to viral infection to protect the host from an over-reactive immune response.

Pseudomonas syringaeHopU1 interferes with binding of GRP7 to the transcripts of the PRRs FLS2 and EFR.

The tuberculoma or tubercle is the granuloma that is formed during tuberculosis infection. The role of the immune system in the formation of the granuloma is documented extensively, but this Review takes a different tack and examines the role ofMycobacterium tuberculosisin the biology of the granuloma and how this relates to disease transmission and progression.

Risk associated with genetically defined forms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can propagate by means of transcriptional regulation to affect convergently dysregulated pathways, providing insight into the convergent impact of ASD genetic risk on human neurodevelopment.

The study reports the discovery of a persistent bow shock around a diskless magnetic accreting white dwarf, revealing a powerful energy-loss mechanism that challenges current models of accretion and compact binary evolution.

Recent advances in the synthesis of graphene fragments that possess unpaired π-electrons and display high-spin ground states have unlocked possibilities to explore exotic physical phenomena related to magnetism. Here, the authors demonstrate the magnetic bistability of a diradical nanographene that allows direct spin manipulation at the single-molecule level.

There is a trade-off between achieving fast qubit control and preserving long qubit lifetimes. In this work, the authors demonstrate single qubit gates by driving a transmon qubit parametrically at 1/3 of its frequency, creating fast, high-fidelity gates while protecting the qubit lifetime and mitigating heating.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Picks include a rogue gene-editor, a wunderkind physicist and a DNA detective who helped catch a serial killer.

Donor spin impurities in silicon are promising qubit candidates, but efficient control and coupling of distant spins remains a key challenge. In this work, the authors experimentally demonstrate coherent coupling between a superconducting flux qubit and individual bismuth donor spins in silicon.

A wide range of policies and actions can be used to address energy insecurity, and there are many actors and institutions to carry them out. This Perspective provides an overview of the many levers, or opportunities, that electricity sector actors have to reduce energy insecurity and affordability in the United States.

Although progress in the coverage of routine measles vaccination in children in low- and middle-income countries was made during 2000–2019, many countries remain far from the goal of 80% coverage in all districts by 2019.

Much investment goes into improving police-community interactions, yet trust in police remains low. Here, the authors show that community members report feeling less threat and more trust when officers use transparency statements to start interactions.

Using a new method called FoldTree, the authors compare proteins on the basis of their shape to construct more accurate family trees over long evolutionary timescales and capture distant relationships where sequence information becomes less reliable.

Ice deposits up to around 50 m thick infill some craters near the Moon’s south pole and Mercury’s north pole, as inferred from the poleward shallowing of simple craters.

Hominin fossils from the Ledi-Geraru Research Project area, Ethiopia, suggest that early Homo and Australopithecus species co-existed in the region more than 2.5 million years ago.

Literature produced inconsistent findings regarding the links between extreme weather events and climate policy support across regions, populations and events. This global study offers a holistic assessment of these relationships and highlights the role of subjective attribution.

Mutations that enhance the activity of protein kinase C alpha (PKCα) are associated with Alzheimer’s Disease. Here, the authors report that the enhanced activity of one variant, PKCα M489V, is sufficient to rewire the brain phosphoproteome, drive synaptic degeneration, and impair cognition in a mouse model.

Maximum levels of global plant phylogenetic diversity capture more human benefits and at higher diversity levels than does random selection of taxa.

Singlet fission — the splitting of a singlet exciton into two triplets — is a process that could be exploited to improve the power conversion efficiency of solar cells. Spectroscopic data now suggest that coherent and incoherent mechanisms for singlet fission in crystalline hexacene coexist and occur on different timescales.

The most up-to-date combination of results on the properties of the Higgs boson is reported, which indicate that its properties are consistent with the standard model predictions, within the precision achieved to date.

An extreme Einstein ring ~10,000 times as bright as the Milky Way in the infrared is studied with VLT/ERIS and ALMA, and the authors find that the lensed galaxy is a starburst with a fast-rotating disk, rather than being driven by a major merger.

Natural ecosystems and biodiversity must be made a bulwark against climate change, not a casualty of it, argue Will R. Turner, Michael Oppenheimer and David S. Wilcove.

Fine-scale geospatial mapping of overweight and wasting (two components of the double burden of malnutrition) in 105 LMICs shows that overweight has increased from 5.2% in 2000 to 6.0% in children under 5 in 2017. Although overall wasting decreased over the same period, most countries are not on track to meet the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025.

Plasma turbulence is the main driver to deteriorate the performance of fusion power plants. This work presents an unprecedented comparison of plasma turbulence between experiment and simulation, proving that the gyrokinetic model GENE reached a high level of maturity to predict core turbulence.

An exciting genome-wide association study in the British population for seven common diseases. This analysis confirms previously identified loci and provides strong evidence for many novel disease susceptibility loci.

Quantum spin-ice phases are predicted to have emergent gauge fields and fractionalization. Neutron scattering and thermodynamic measurements of the quantum spin-ice candidate Ce₂Zr₂O₇ show features consistent with these predictions.

Data leakage undermines the reliability of machine learning model evaluations, particularly in biological data. Here, they present a data splitting approach that minimizes information leakage and enables more accurate assessment of model performance on out-of-distribution data.

AlphaStar uses a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm and has reached Grandmaster level, ranking among the top 0.2% of human players for the real-time strategy game StarCraft II.