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For water-bear enthusiasts, it’s the creature’s legs that make it stand out.

Neural mechanisms underlying motivation-driven behaviors are not fully understood. Here authors show that non-cholinergic neurons in rodent basal forebrain link sensory stimuli with motivational states and experience-driven plasticity.

Concerns over health misinformation online are becoming increasingly important. Here the authors show that older adults are more likely than younger people to encounter low-credibility health information online. Although exposure is limited overall, it is highest among those who already believe inaccurate health claims.

Here the authors provide an explanation for 95% of examined predicted loss of function variants found in disease-associated haploinsufficient genes in the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), underscoring the power of the presented analysis to minimize false assignments of disease risk.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

Recent accounts of overconfidence suggest it helps individuals reach higher status in groups by making them seem more competent. Lyons et al. show that lobbyists with higher social status (for example, higher income) are more likely to overrate their own success.

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).

Olfactory perception of food-derived odors influences feeding behavior, but the underlying neural pathways remain unclear. Here, the authors show that prolonged exposure to food odor suppresses food intake and body weight gain by activating an olfactory bulb–hypothalamus circuit.

Post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (PI-ME/CFS) is a disabling disorder, yet the clinical phenotype is poorly defined and the pathophysiology unknown. Here, the authors conduct deep phenotyping of a cohort of PI-ME/CFS patients.

Eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (EGPA) is a rare inflammatory disorder characterised by asthma, eosinophilia and vasculitis. Here, the authors describe a genome-wide association study of EGPA that reveals clinical and genetic differences between subgroups stratified by autoantibody status (ANCA).

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.

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.

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.

A genome-wide association study of critically ill patients with COVID-19 identifies genetic signals that relate to important host antiviral defence mechanisms and mediators of inflammatory organ damage that may be targeted by repurposing drug treatments.

The growth factor NELL-1 induces bone formation during development, but its role in osteoporosis is unknown. This study shows that NELL-1 binding to integrin ß1 induces Wnt/ß-catenin signalling in the bone and restores bone mineral density in osteoporotic mice and sheep, suggesting the therapeutic potential of NELL-1 for the treatment of bone loss.

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.

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.

Individuals over eighty years of age are less likely to mount a good immune response against SARS-CoV-2 (measured by neutralization titres) after the first dose of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine, but achieve good neutralization after the second dose.

A dataset of 3D images from more than 200,000 human induced pluripotent stem cells is used to develop a framework to analyse cell shape and the location and organization of major intracellular structures.

The Omicron variant evades vaccine-induced neutralization but also fails to form syncytia, shows reduced replication in human lung cells and preferentially uses a TMPRSS2-independent cell entry pathway, which may contribute to enhanced replication in cells of the upper airway. Altered fusion and cell entry characteristics are linked to distinct regions of the Omicron spike protein.

The extent, origins and consequences of genetic variation within human cell lines are studied, providing a framework for researchers to measure such variation in efforts to support maximally reproducible cancer research.

It has been suggested that the Cambrian ocean was oxygen deficient, but physical evidence for widespread anoxia has been lacking. Now, sulphur isotope data from Cambrian rocks at six different locations around the world is presented, with the finding of a positive sulphur isotope excursion in phase with a large excursion in the marine carbon isotope record, which is thought to be indicative of a global carbon cycle perturbation at the time. With the help of a box model, these isotope shifts support the idea of large-scale anoxic and sulphidic conditions in the later Cambrian ocean.

Zinc is a marine nutrient that may have been limited in the early oceans. Estimates of marine zinc availability through time suggest that values were instead near-modern during the Proterozoic eon.

Clay minerals played a vital role in the delivery of phosphorus (P) to shallow Neoproterozoic post-Snowball glaciation marine waters. The resulting increase in P bioavailability by at least 20-fold coincided with seawater oxygenation.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common mental health problem. Here, the authors report a GWAS from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium in which they identify two risk loci in European ancestry and one locus in African ancestry individuals and find that PTSD is genetically correlated with several other psychiatric traits.

As phase 1 of the Earth Microbiome Project, analysis of 16S ribosomal RNA sequences from more than 27,000 environmental samples delivers a global picture of the basic structure and drivers of microbial distribution.

Multi-ancestry genome-wide analyses identify 95 loci associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and implicate candidate genes, pathways and neurobiological systems underlying its pathophysiology.

Genetic and testing data from England show that the SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern B.1.1.7 has a transmission advantage over other lineages.

Post-international travel quarantine has been widely implemented to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 transmission, but the impacts of such policies are unclear. Here, the authors used linked genomic and contact tracing data to assess the impacts of a 14-day quarantine on return to England in summer 2020.

In this study, Aggarwal and colleagues perform prospective sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 isolates derived from asymptomatic student screening and symptomatic testing of students and staff at the University of Cambridge. They identify important factors that contributed to within university transmission and onward spread into the wider community.

Condensates composed of the disordered region of the mediator of RNA polymerase II transcription subunit 1 (MED1) are known to partition specific proteins, but whether this specificity arises from ordered-structure-mediated or dynamic multivalent amino acid interactions remains unclear. Here, the authors show that a physics-based model that only accounts for multivalent polymer interactions is able to explain and predict selective partitioning, suggesting that the specificity of condensate composition is underpinned by multivalent interactions in the context of conformational disorder.

Transcriptomic and proteomic profiling of blood samples from individuals with COVID-19 reveals immune cell and hematopoietic progenitor cell alterations that are differentially associated with disease severity.

B cell development and selection occur in the often hypoxic environment of the bone marrow. Burrows and colleagues demonstrate that dynamic regulation of B cell–intrinsic hypoxia-inducible factor-1α is essential for normal B cell development and function.

Global oxygen regulation over Earth history has largely depended on variations in organic carbon burial, which includes the suppression of land vegetation due to fires. Here, the authors show that major evolutionary changes in plant ecosystems could have influenced fire regimes and thus affected atmospheric O₂.

A study of SARS-CoV-2 variants examining their transmission, infectivity, and potential resistance to therapies provides insights into the biology of the Delta variant and its role in the global pandemic.

The precise cell-type specific role of inhibitory interneurons in regulating sensory responses in the olfactory bulb is not known. Here, the authors report that removing GABAergic inhibition from one layer differentially affects response dynamics of the two main output cell types and changes odor mixture processing.

Circulating tumour DNA profiling in early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer can be used to track single-nucleotide variants in plasma to predict lung cancer relapse and identify tumour subclones involved in the metastatic process.

Human embryonic stem cells are generally cultured as adherent monolayers, but large-scale production of these cells for clinical applications would require the development of culture conditions amenable to growth in bioreactors. Steiner et al. show that human embryonic stem cells can be derived, grown and differentiated in suspension.

Ordovas-Montanes and colleagues describe the composition of the nasal cellular ecosystem and signatures of disease severity in vaccinated and unvaccinated adults during infection with the ancestral, Delta and Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2.

The ATLAS Collaboration reports the observation of the electroweak production of two jets and a Z-boson pair. This process is related to vector-boson scattering and allows the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking to be probed.

The ATLAS Collaboration reports a measurement of the ratio of the decay rates of W bosons to τ leptons and muons, in agreement with universal lepton couplings as postulated in the standard model of particle physics.