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Access to green space has been a critical, and contentious, issue for neighbourhood inequality and health outcomes. This Analysis looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic interacts with availability of nature for urban residents.

With rich, multi-layered baseline data and long-term follow-up through linkage, the HELIOS Study provides a resource to investigate the behavioural, environmental, genomic, and molecular factors impacting health in Asian populations.

Biosecurity experts use military-style exercises to plan for biological threats. Have their warnings been heeded?

An artificial intelligence that restores illegible inscriptions, and the project that's reintroducing lost species in Argentina.

In response to COVID-19, many states have implemented social distancing orders, but the effect of these orders on population mobility has not been fully quantified. Here, the authors use data from the US to show that state-level social distancing orders substantially reduced mobility and limited the spread of disease.

Studying production, funding and consumption of science, the authors find a strong alignment between what the public consumes and what is impactful, as well as an alignment between funding and collective public use.

High numbers of COVID-19-related deaths have been reported in the United States, but estimation of the true numbers of infections is challenging. Here, the authors estimate that on 1 June 2020, 3.7% of the US population was infected with SARS-CoV-2, and 0.01% was infectious, with wide variation by state.

Boucherie et al. apply physics-based models to the arrangement of locations to study how geography shapes human movement. They find an underlying pattern in how people choose to move, independent of geographical layout.

Core/shell/halfshell semiconductor-superconductor nanowire Josephson junctions are promising building blocks for topological quantum devices. The authors show that their geometry shapes the superconducting transport, with the supercurrent exhibiting magnetic-field oscillations that reflect coherent interference around the shell.

Wolves in Asia are remarkably diverse, inhabiting some of the world's hottest deserts to the high plains of the Tibetan plateau. However, they remain understudied and poorly understood. Here, we sequenced whole genomes of wolves in Asia to assess their evolutionary history and genetic diversity.

Analysis of soundscape data from 139 globally distributed sites reveals that sounds of biological origin exhibit predictable rhythms depending on location and season, whereas sounds of anthropogenic origin are less predictable. Comparisons between paired urban–rural sites show that urban green spaces are noisier and dominated by sounds of technological origin.

Seed predation increases from the Arctic to the tropics, but it is unknown whether urbanization disrupts this latitudinal pattern. An experimental study conducted across the Americas shows that the latitudinal gradient in predation holds in urban areas, even though total seed predation is reduced.

Social distancing policies aiming to reduce COVID-19 transmission have been reflected in reductions in human mobility. Here, the authors show that reduced mobility is correlated with decreased transmission, but that this relationship weakened over time as social distancing measures were relaxed.

Invasive populations often have low genetic diversity because they originated from a small number of founding individuals. This study shows that in an invasive honey bee, one consequence of low genetic diversity is a reduced rate of population expansion due to serial founder effects at range edges.

Quantum mechanics predicts that objects can simultaneously exist in a superposition of two states. Kneeet al.propose and demonstrate experimentally a protocol which fully confirms this prediction, by testing the so-called Leggett–Garg inequality in a non-invasive manner.

Analysing camera-trap data of 163 mammal species before and after the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns, the authors show that responses to human activity are dependent on the degree to which the landscape is modified by humans, with carnivores being especially sensitive.

In modern power grids, knowing the required electric power demand and its variations is necessary to balance demand and supply. The authors propose a data-driven approach to create high-resolution load profiles and characterize their fluctuations, based on recorded data of electricity consumption.

Urban agriculture is intuitively appealing, but its carbon footprint is unclear. This analysis of case studies in the United States and northern Europe finds that food from urban agriculture is much more carbon-intensive but that circularity, such as by recycling of food waste, on long-used city plots can help urban agriculture outperform conventional agriculture.

PLA2g6 regulates store-operated Ca²⁺ entry and is linked to Parkinson’s disease. Here, Zhou et al find faulty PLA2g6-dependent Ca²⁺signaling in idiopathic PD patients, and show that its impairment triggers autophagic dysfunction and loss of dopaminergic neurons in a new PLA2g6 ex2KO mouse model.

Data collected from more than 2,000 taxa provide an unparalleled opportunity to quantify how extreme wildfires affect biodiversity, revealing that the largest effects on plants and animals were in areas with frequent or recent past fires and within extensively burnt areas.

City governments are moving to integrate justice and equity concerns into climate action. Diezmartínez et al. demonstrate that contestations about the politics of climate justice were central during the first 2 years of implementation for a Boston building decarbonization policy, highlighting important challenges in translating climate justice into practice. Nature Cities is proud that this robust work is our first fully qualitative methods study.

Petrels are wide-ranging, highly threatened seabirds that often ingest plastic. This study used tracking data for 7,137 petrels of 77 species to map global exposure risk and compare regions, species, and populations. The results show higher exposure risk for threatened species and stress the need for international cooperation to tackle marine litter.

One approach to build a scalable quantum computer is to connect many smaller cells into a larger whole, but for realistic systems this quickly becomes prone to errors. Nickerson et al. present a noisy network protocol that can withstand high error rates within each cell but still perform stable purification.

A study uses single-molecule footprinting to measure protein occupancy at regulatory elements on individual molecules in human cells and describes how different properties of transcription factor binding contribute to gene expression.

Studies of plants on a series of Australian sand dunes show that leaves and roots have different approaches to coping with phosphorus limitation. While leaves concentrate on using phosphorus efficiently, roots take on rich and diverse nutrient-acquisition strategies.

Wood used in construction stores carbon and reduces the emissions from steel and cement production. Transformation to timber cities while protecting forest and biodiversity is possible without significant increase in competition for land.

Scientists reflect on a year of civil unrest. Writing from Syria, Bolivia, Sudan, Iran, Chile, Ecuador, Lebanon, Venezuela, Hong Kong and Catalonia, correspondents tell of altered priorities, day-to-day challenges and hope in the dark times.

Global public expectations for carbon removal governance are: engagement beyond acceptance research; regulating industry beyond incentivizing innovation; systemic coordination; and prioritizing underlying and interrelated causes of unsustainability.

Land use is a key control of insect communities. Here the authors investigate relationships of insect biomass and richness with land use along a climate gradient, finding evidence of urbanisation and agriculture as drivers of decline, and of biomass and species richness not being suitable as mutual surrogates.

Fire impacts soil organic carbon stocks, in addition to aboveground biomass, yet changes are not well constrained. This study shows that more soil carbon is lost from drier ecosystems than humid ones and that the carbon sink is increasing in savannah–grassland regions with declining burned area.

Animal ecologists are increasingly limited by constraints in data processing. Here, Tuia and colleagues discuss how collaboration between ecologists and data scientists can harness machine learning to capitalize on the data generated from technological advances and lead to novel modeling approaches.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) management usually involves bringing multiple stakeholders together, to construct policy-relevant research programs and science-based tools for adaptive management. Here, we present the conclusions of a transdisciplinary workshop that aimed at reviewing experiences in the co-design of EBM research in MPAs. We find that MPAs represent powerful instruments for conducting real-world experiments, de facto acting as living labs in support of ocean governance.

Globally consistent surveys of five factors influencing the success of marine protected areas — age, size, isolation, protection and enforcement — reveal that only when all five are present does nature thrive. See Letter p.216

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) has a poor prognosis involving evasion of immune control. Here, the authors perform a comprehensive analysis of single-cell multi-omic data revealing either a myeloid-enriched or adaptive-enriched tumour microenvironment, linked to distinct B and T cell clonal selection and differentiation, distinct overall survival, and potential therapeutic approaches.

In a randomized phase 1 trial, the addition of a live Clostridium species-containing product to a tyrosine kinase inhibitor and anti-programmed cell death protein 1 treatment combination did not increase bacterial abundance of Bifidobacterium spp. but enhanced clinical responses in participants with metastatic renal cell carcinoma.

Plastics were found in 77 out of 84 coral reefs surveyed in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, including in deeper reefs and remote and near-pristine reefs, such as in uninhabited central Pacific atolls.

The global-mean temperature evolution over the course of the twenty-first century is uncertain. Simulations with an ensemble of thousands of climate models that reproduce observed warming over the past 50 years suggest that a mid-range greenhouse-gas emissions scenario without mitigation could lead to a warming of between 1.4 and 3 K by 2050, relative to 1961–1990.

Under continued global warming, lakes will increasingly be covered by white ice, in particular towards the end of the ice cover season when fatal winter drownings occur most often and light limits the growth and reproduction of primary producers.

Multidrug efflux protein pumps are key players in bacterial antimicrobial resistance. Here, the authors show how dynamics of a periplasmic pump component can be targeted for efflux inhibition.

Inventory data from more than 1 million trees across African, Amazonian and Southeast Asian tropical forests suggests that, despite their high diversity, just 1,053 species, representing a consistent ~2.2% of tropical tree species in each region, constitute half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees.