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In the wake of devastating floods in the South of Brazil, researchers are working out how best to help people — plus, what concerns do Nature’s readers have about the US election.

We round up some recent stories from the Nature Briefing.

Enzymes embedded directly into the material allows PLA plastic to completely break down — plus a gel that can safely store proteins for shipping.

Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic.

The Taiwan Precision Medicine Initiative (TPMI) has built a cohort of more than half a million individuals with Han Chinese ancestry, providing a rich resource of genetic and medical data for this group.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a common cause of vision loss with a large genetic risk in older individuals. Here, for a high-risk AMD subtype, the authors identify an association with a chromosome 10 risk region containing a long non-coding RNA.

Variants in the PSMC5 gene impair proteasome function and cellular homeostasis, altering brain development in children. This study reveals underlying molecular mechanisms contributing to this neurodevelopmental phenotype, and suggests therapeutic leads for neurodevelopmental proteasomopathies.

Solid tumors often resist immunotherapy due to an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. Here, the authors develop CancerPAM, a multiomics CRISPR pipeline that enables tumor-specific cytokine expression to boost immune infiltration and CAR T cell efficacy in neuroblastoma.

Oceans are on the front line of new planned climate actions, but understanding of novel marine-climate intervention development and deployment remains low. Here a survey among intervention practitioners allows identification of science and governance gaps for marine-climate interventions.

Potthoff and colleagues present a MALDI-MSI-based method that integrates in-source brightfield and fluorescence microscopy, which allows for spatially-resolved analysis of lipids and metabolites at the (sub)cellular level.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) variability and its phenotypic consequences aren’t well studied in relation to viral replication fitness and disease severity. Here, the authors identify a replication-enhancing domain in non-structural protein 5A, linking high replication fitness to severe disease outcomes, with implications for understanding HCV pathogenesis in immunocompromised patients.

What is the state of trust in scientists around the world? To answer this question, the authors surveyed 71,922 respondents in 68 countries and found that trust in scientists is moderately high.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

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.

Dorsal striatal dopamine release develops plateau responses to reward cues, but lacks outcome release medially and transitions to both outcome and rewarded cue laterally. Here the authors suggest the need for reconsideration of reward prediction error models for striatal dopamine release.

The authors show that extreme fire years in global forests align with rare fire weather extremes. Climate change has made such extremes 88-152% more probable. These findings highlight the need for action towards adaptation and mitigation of fire impacts.

The brain is vulnerable to stress and disease, with much work focused on defining mechanisms that impact the brain’s resilience. Here the author’s reveal in Drosophila that m⁶A epitranscriptomic modification of RNA dampens the brain’s capacity to mitigate stress by regulating RNA stability and translation.

Glutathione has pleiotropic functions in different organs. Here the authors specifically examine deletion of a glutathione synthetic enzyme in the liver of adult mice and show that lack of glutathione affects lipid abundance through repressing NRF2.

Determining progress in adaptation to climate change is challenging, yet critical as climate change impacts increase. A stocktake of the scientific literature on implemented adaptation now shows that adaptation is mostly fragmented and incremental, with evidence lacking for its impact on reducing risk.

Carbon dioxide removal technologies may be needed to meet climate targets. In this study, national surveys and deliberative workshops in the United States and the United Kingdom show that carbon dioxide removal is perceived as too slow to address the immediate climate crisis while not addressing the root causes of climate change.

The unpredictability of evolution makes it difficult to deal with drug resistance because over the course of a treatment there may be mutations that we cannot predict. The authors propose to use quantum methods to control the speed and distribution of potential evolutionary outcomes.

Telomeres, tandem repeats at the ends of linear chromosomes, have evolved to deal with the end replication and end protection. Using a proteomics approach, the authors identify TEBP-1 and TEBP-2, two double-stranded binding proteins which together are required for fertility. Despite being paralogs, they have distinct individual effects on telomere dynamics; TEBP-1 and TEBP-2 are part of a telomeric complex also containing POT-1.

Nature Biotechnology's readers select some of biotech's most remarkable and influential personalities from the past 10 years.

Distinguishing band and Mott insulators experimentally represents a longstanding challenge. Here, the authors demonstrate a momentum-resolved signature of a dimerized Mott-insulator in the out-of-plane spectral function of Nb₃Br₈.

Computational methods are used to predict which peptides or antigens are able to bind to MHC in order to activate T cell receptors in neoantigen-directed immunotherapies. Here the authors present an accurate transformer-based method to consider not only the peptide and MHC but also the source antigenic protein to predict peptides which bind to MHC molecules.

MYC activation can sensitise cells to apoptosis upon glutamine withdrawal. Here the authors show that MYC activation enhances global transcription and translation that creates a metabolic demand, while glutamine limitation causes a metabolic demand and supply imbalance through loss of TCA energetics and thus, sensitises cells to apoptosis.

Germ layer specification during zygotic genome activation is regulated by chromatin state. Here, the authors use single-cell multiome profiling in Drosophila to show that H3K27me3 and H3K27ac at cis-regulatory elements control cell type-specific gene expression and developmental progression.

While glucose homeostasis in the circulation is tightly controlled by insulin and other hormones, dedicated hormonal regulators do not exist for most other circulating metabolites. Using perturbative metabolite infusions with isotope labelling in mice, Li et al. show that homeostasis of many circulating metabolites is considerably regulated through mass action-driven oxidation.

Ocean acidification in the California Current Ecosystem was twice the global average during the past century and influenced by decadal climate variations, according to a record of the calcification rate of planktonic foraminifera from the Santa Barbara Basin.

Healthcare emissions negatively affect the environment and health, posing ethical questions between health and environmental impacts. A focus group study in US health systems revealed a willingness to make environmentally informed health decisions and identified barriers to making such decisions.

Analysis of 100 consecutive personalized bacteriophage therapy cases supports the use of personalized and sometimes pre-adapted, bacteriophage preparations, often in combination with antibiotics.

Whether a relationship exists between cerebrovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease has been a source of controversy. Here, the authors show there is a very weak temporal relationship between the progression of Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers and those of cerebrovascular disease.

Auditory brainstem response (ABR) is used to study temporal encoding of auditory information in music and language. This study utilizes magnetoencephalography to localize both cortical and subcortical origins of the sustained frequency following response (FFR), the ABR component that encodes the periodicity of sound.

A substrate-guided design strategy generated highly potent inhibitors of the biosynthesis of the genotoxin colibactin by human gut bacteria. These inhibitors also enable a generalizable approach for chemically guided natural product discovery.

Researchers have demonstrated the generation and control of subfemtosecond pulse pairs from a two-colour X-ray free-electron laser and conducted pump–probe experiments in core-ionized molecules.

A leaky accumulation model can predict rats’ changes of mind during decision making in a dynamic environment explaining reversals in frontal cortical activity and demonstrating a stable choice code despite environmental uncertainty.

A reclusive Russian claims to have solved a century-old mathematical problem — but his enigmatic personality is adding a fresh dimension to the proof-checking process. Emily Singer reports.

An analysis of metagenomic sequencing of stool samples from multiple cohorts of patients with melanoma treated with immune checkpoint blockade uncovers microbiome correlates of response to therapy and also reveals widespread variability across populations.

Mendenhall et al. use a locally constructed measure of stress and a mixed-methods approach to investigate a syndemic in Soweto, South Africa. Stress interacted with multiple morbidities to reduce quality of life, conditioned by illness experiences.

Accurate phenotyping is key to deciphering behavior. Here, authors show the utility of the software package DeepOF in supervised and unsupervised identification of distinct individual and social behavioral patterns following chronic social stress.

A typology of four perspectives on loss and damage is developed based on the study of actor perspectives, including interviews with stakeholders in research, practice, and policy. This may help with navigation of this necessarily ambiguous territory.

The nucleus-like compartment formed in bacteria during infection by jumbo phage 201phi2-1 is composed of the bacteriophage protein chimallin, which can self-assemble into closed compartments in vitro.

Using a human forebrain organoid model of fragile X syndrome, Kang et al. reveal a critical role of FMRP in human brain development and identify a large number of human-specific mRNAs that could be regulated by FMRP.

Li et al. develop neural fragility, a networked dynamic system biomarker, for localizing seizures in patients with epilepsy and find that it is more robust compared to traditional features that clinicians and researchers look at in a 91-patient study.

This Registered Report presents evidence from 87 countries and regions showing that brief emotion-regulation interventions consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic.