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Perhaps the earliest known signs of life have been found in Quebec, where features such as haematite tubes suggest that filamentous microbes lived around hydrothermal vents at least 3,770 million years ago.

A 2.5-billion-year record of oxygen isotopes in sedimentary sulfate reveals the transitional oxygenation of the Earth’s surface and provides constraints on the dynamic, lengthy co-oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.

An expert-elicitation process identifies current methodological barriers for monitoring terrestrial biodiversity, and how technological and procedural development of robotic and autonomous systems may contribute to overcoming these challenges.

An analysis of 24,202 critical cases of COVID-19 identifies potentially druggable targets in inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).

Gel electrophoresis image analysis still largely relies on manual or semi-automatic tools, limiting both efficiency and reproducibility. Here, authors introduce GelGenie, an AI-driven open-source platform that rapidly detects gel bands under various conditions.

A study of the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in England between September 2020 and June 2021 finds that interventions capable of containing previous variants were insufficient to stop the more transmissible Alpha and Delta variants.

Banded iron formations could have formed in the early oceans due to microbial metabolism. Here Dodd and colleagues find little organic carbon in these formations, indicating microbial iron cycling was minimal and could have limited the recycling of important nutrients to overlying waters.

Experiments in mice show that the perineural net has a key role in metabolic disease by controlling insulin access to neurons in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus.

Sera from vaccinated individuals and some monoclonal antibodies show a modest reduction in neutralizing activity against the B.1.1.7 variant of SARS-CoV-2; but the E484K substitution leads to a considerable loss of neutralizing activity.

Chronic infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to the emergence of viral variants that show reduced susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies in an immunosuppressed individual treated with convalescent plasma.

A national prospective study of patients requiring hospitalization for COVID-19 demonstrates global cognitive deficits at 1 year, associated with elevated brain injury markers and reduced gray matter volume.

Reconstruction of oceanic phosphorus concentrations during a large negative carbon-isotope excursion co-occurring with global oceanic oxygenation and evolution of some of Earth’s earliest animals suggests that decoupled phosphorus and ocean anoxia cycles during the Ediacaran may have prolonged the rise of atmospheric oxygen.

Protein-mediated transport is implicated in trafficking fatty acids at contact sites of lipid droplets and mitochondria. Here, the authors use proteomics to catalogue the proteins at this contact site and report a mechanism of fatty acid transfer that regulates fatty acid oxidation and lipid homeostasis.

Tilting planar photovoltaic panels to track the position of the sun over the day can add to yearly energy consumption. Here, Lamoureaux et al.propose a kirigami solar cell structure with solar tracking integrated within the design, reducing cost, structural weight and bulk associated with conventional tracking.

A chip-integrated laser with 7.5 × 10⁻¹⁴ fractional frequency instability is demonstrated by active stabilization to an on-chip 6.1-m-long spiral resonator. By using this laser to interrogate the narrow-linewidth transition of ⁸⁸Sr⁺, a clock instability averaging down as \(3.9\times 1{0}^{-14}/\sqrt{\tau }\) is achieved.

COVID-19 can be associated with neurological complications. Here the authors show that markers of brain injury, but not immune markers, are elevated in the blood of patients with COVID-19 both early and months after SARS-CoV-2 infection, particularly in those with brain dysfunction or neurological diagnoses.

Flexible neural probes, consisting of a linear array of graphene microtransistors, can be used to record from DC brain signals to high-frequency neuronal activity in awake rodents, thus showing potential for in vivo electrophysiology, and in particular epilepsy research.

Available evidence supports the existence of functional connections between resident microorganisms and the kidney that are altered in the context of specific kidney diseases. This Roadmap article describes current understanding of the mechanisms by which microorganisms regulate host organ function, highlighting key knowledge gaps that remain to be addressed and opportunities for future research.

Miotto et al. show that in mice, liver-derived extracellular vesicles act on skeletal muscle and the pancreas and increase glucose effectiveness and insulin secretion, thereby modulating glycaemic control.

Networks of notches in nanocomposite sheets prevent unpredictable local failure and increase the ultimate strain of the sheets from 4% to 370% without affecting their electrical conductance.

NsrR is a bacterial transcriptional regulator that acts as a nitric oxide (NO) sensor. Here, the authors present the crystal structure of NsrR, which reveals an unusual Fe-S cluster coordination and explains how NO exposure leads to the degradation of the cluster.

Genome-wide association studies have identified regions which confer risk of high-grade serous epithelial ovarian cancer. Here the authors use expression quantitative train locus analysis to identify candidate genes and functionally characterise them, identifying a role for HOXD9 in ovarian cancer.

A region on chromosome 19p13 is associated with the risk of developing ovarian and breast cancer. Here, the authors genotyped SNPs in this region in thousands of breast and ovarian cancer patients and identified SNPs associated with three genes, which were analysed with functional studies.

The RNA for ALS- and frontotemporal dementia-associated C9ORF72 gene is exported from nucleus via an unknown mechanism. This study shows that reduction of nuclear export adaptor SRSF1 can alleviate neuronal cell death and nuclear export of C9ORF72 inDrosophilaand patient-derived induced motor neurons.

The circadian clock involves daily variations in transcription of a set of core genes. Here, the authors show that oscillations in free calcium concentration, read by calmodulin-like proteins, regulate the clock and are part of this complex mechanism.

Around 10% of high-grade serous ovarian carcinomas (HGSOC) harbor BRCA1 promoter methylation, but it is uncertain how it predicts response to PARP inhibition. Here, the authors show that homozygous BRCA1 methylation predicts response to rucaparib while heterozygous methylation of BRCA1 predicts resistance in HGSOC.

A study shows that soil food webs directly help mitigate the effects of drought on soil nutrients. The fungal-based food webs of grassland were more resistant to bouts of drought than the bacterial-based food webs of intensively managed wheat, and retained more carbon and nitrogen in the soil.

Self-interaction of a bound state through its coupling to the continuum is a phenomenon that is very difficult to observe. Here, the authors optically collide atomic clouds of rubidium and potassium to observe the self-interaction energy through precise measurements of magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances.

This paper presents an experimental and theoretical study of the Bose–Einstein condensation phase transition of a trapped atomic gas. The vortices formed spontaneously during condensation are observed and characterized, and the results provide further understanding of the development of coherence in superfluids.

An essential ingredient of future worldwide quantum communication is the generation of long-lived entangled quantum states; a coherence time of six hours is now reported for optically addressable nuclear spins in europium-doped yttrium orthosilicate.

A quantum memory would enable storage and retrieval of a quantum state of light without corrupting the information it carries. Previous devices have had low efficiencies of less than 17 per cent, and used weak quantum states with an average photon number of around one. Now a solid-state quantum memory is described with an efficiency of up to 69 per cent, which performs better than a classical device for bright states of up to 500 photons.

A pathway for the production of aromatic amino acid metabolites in Clostridium sporogenes is described; modulation of serum levels of these metabolites in gnotobiotic mice affects intestinal permeability and systemic immunity.

The Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) presents its production phase: the generation of spatial maps of functional tissue units across organs from diverse populations and the creation of tools and infrastructure to advance biomedical research.