News at a glance

SCI COMMUN### Space science The International Space Station (ISS) had a tense hour last week when thrusters on a newly arrived Russian laboratory module misfired and pushed the station 45° out of its normal orientation. The 20-ton, truck-size Nauka module—named for the Russian word for “science”—was delayed 15 years by funding and technical issues. The troubles continued after its 21 July liftoff on a Proton-M rocket, as controllers struggled to communicate with Nauka after it reached orbit and to fire up its main engine. Three hours after docking with the ISS on 29 July, Nauka's thrusters switched on unprompted—the result of a “short-term software failure,” according to the Russian space agency Roscosmos—and began to slowly turn the whole station. Russian controllers tried to counteract the turn by firing thrusters on an attached service module and later a cargo freighter. Nauka's thrusters eventually ran out of fuel and the station was righted. NASA says the ISS crew was never in any danger and could not feel the thruster tug-of-war going on in the station's Russian section. > “This pandemic was a big test for AI [artificial intelligence] and medicine. … But I don't think we passed that test.” > > University of Cambridge machine learning researcher Derek Driggs , to MIT Technology Review, on findings that none of hundreds of AI-based tools to diagnose or triage COVID-19 patients are fit for clinical use. ### Conservation The killing of adult female elephants reduces the survival chances of offspring even if they are already weaned—and the effect is large enough to slow population growth, researchers report this week. Maternal care is known to be important for long-lived mammals such as elephants, but its impact on population growth hadn't been directly measured for any wild species. By studying 19 years of data on 645 female elephants in a wild population in Samburu county in Kenya, scientists calculated annual survival probabilities for elephants of various ages. An orphaned juvenile—a weaned individual between the ages of 3 and 8 years—had an 86% chance of survival, compared with 96% for a juvenile with a living mother, the researchers report in Current Biology . The orphans were less likely to survive than the oldest adult females, which surprised the team, in part because poachers target adults for their large tusks. It's not known why orphaned juveniles are vulnerable, but they tend to face more aggression from their herd. ### COVID-19 In a dramatic reversal that concedes the power of the highly transmissible Delta variant, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on 27 July revised its 13 May guidance on wearing masks, saying fully vaccinated people should again wear masks in public, indoor spaces in areas of substantial or high coronavirus transmission. Three days later, the agency published data from an outbreak in Barnstable county in Massachusetts that it called “pivotal” to its decision. Of 469 people infected there during the first half of July, a time of densely packed indoor and outdoor events, 74% were fully vaccinated. The Delta variant was identified in 89% of 133 sequenced cases. Furthermore, samples from the noses and throats of fully vaccinated people bore as much virus as those from the unvaccinated. That finding “raised concerns that, unlike with other variants, vaccinated people infected with Delta can transmit the virus,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a 30 July statement. She added that the masking recommendation was updated to ensure vaccinated individuals would “not unknowingly transmit virus to others.” Four of five people who were hospitalized in the Massachusetts outbreak were fully vaccinated. There were no deaths. ### Bioethics Relatives of Henrietta Lacks, whose cervical cancer cells were harvested without her knowledge at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951, plan to sue pharmaceutical companies that have profited from studying those cells. The self-renewing “HeLa” cell line has become a mainstay of basic and applied research in diverse fields including cancer biology and infectious disease. Lacks's family has hired trial lawyer Christopher Seeger and civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who has also represented families of Black men killed by the police, including George Floyd and Michael Brown, The Baltimore Sun reported last week. The lawyers have not disclosed any defendants, but said they plan to file the first lawsuits on the 70th anniversary of Lacks's death, on 4 October. ### COVID-19 The mysterious disappearance of coronavirus sequences from a U.S. database appears to have a mundane explanation: the accidental deletion of a data-sharing statement. In late June, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center suggested in a preprint that Chinese scientists had deliberately hidden viral sequences from early COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, first adding them to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) database but then requesting they be removed. Using data in a paper the group published in the journal Small , Bloom was able to recover parts of the missing sequences in Google's Cloud. Last month, a Chinese health minister said editors at the journal had eliminated text that noted where the sequences were deposited, leading the scientists to think the data did not need to be public and to request their removal. Last week, the journal added a correction note to the paper confirming that a “Data Availability” paragraph had been mistakenly deleted during copy editing. The viral sequences have now been added to a public Chinese database, the health minister noted. Bloom says that appears true, but adds the explanation given is “completely inconsistent” with the emailed data removal request sent to NIH last year, which said the sequences had already been deposited elsewhere. ### Research collaboration The U.S. government wants to retry a former faculty member at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, it had previously charged with concealing his ties to Chinese entities. On 16 June, a federal judge declared a mistrial in the case against Anming Hu, the first to go before a jury under the government's 3-year-old China Initiative, which has led to the prosecution of several scientists of Chinese heritage. But on 30 July the Department of Justice filed “a notice of intent” to retry Hu, who lost his job after his arrest in February 2020 and has remained under house arrest. Civil rights groups that have accused the government of racial profiling condemned the move. On 29 July, nearly 100 Democratic members of Congress complained to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland that Hu has been one of “many people of Asian descent … falsely accused of espionage” under the initiative. ### Biotechnology A genetic engineering technique called gene drive successfully collapsed captive populations of the malaria-spreading mosquito Anopheles gambiae in the largest test yet of the strategy. Researchers inserted a mutation that renders females unable to reproduce, along with another genetic element that spreads that mutation quickly through a population. A 2018 study showed the approach could suppress populations of mosquitoes housed in small cages (about .016 cubic meters). The new study tested the strategy in larger cages (nearly 5 cubic meters), where multiple generations of mosquitoes could mate, forage, and lay eggs more like they would in the wild. Introducing the engineered mosquitoes crashed the caged populations within 1 year, the researchers reported last week in Nature Communications , and the insects did not develop resistance to the sterilizing effects of the mutation. Experimental releases of the insects in the wild face regulatory hurdles and are likely still years away. ### Conservation The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) last week announced that its long-running “Red List of Threatened Species” will be joined by a new measure, “Green Status of Species,” that looks beyond the Red List's ratings of extinction risk to measure recovery and the impact of conservation efforts. Species currently on the Red List will now also get a green score that puts them into one of several categories ranging from “extinct in the wild” to “fully recovered.” Researchers will also estimate the impact of past, current, and future conservation efforts on a species. They hope this metric, which is more success-oriented and sensitive to change than Red List status, will provide a road map for future protective measures. The first batch of roughly 50 assessments is slated to go live on the IUCN website this fall. $33.5 billion —Anticipated 2021 revenue from Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, according to an updated projection the company released last week. 40% —Proportion of wild white-tailed deer tested in four U.S. states between January and March that had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting they had been infected with the virus. (bioRxiv) ### A test for anonymous hiring In a bid to reduce bias during faculty hiring, Yale University's molecular biophysics and biochemistry department conducted an experiment last year: Scientists applying for a tenure-track position were asked to submit anonymized materials—omitting their names and the names of institutions they'd trained at and journals they'd published in. Science spoke with the department chair, Enrique De La Cruz, to find out how the search—which was ultimately successful—went. (A longer version of this interview is at .) > Q: Was there any pushback to the idea? > A: No. There was skepticism. I think there was concern that we would de-emphasize the significance of scholarship for other things. But the fact that it was an experiment helped. We're scientists, so if you phrase it that way everyone's on board. “OK, it's an experiment? Sure, sounds good. That's what we do.” > Q: How did it work? > A: We asked applicants to make their applications anonymous. It required them to think deeply about what they've done and articulate their contributions without relying on the shorthand—for example, I worked for this Nobel laureate at this prestigious institution, and I published in these fantastic journals. The hiring committee made a first cut based only on anonymized statements about the applicants' past and future research, and then another based on teaching and diversity, equity, inclusion statements, which were also anonymized. After all that was done, they looked at CVs and letters of recommendation, which were not anonymous. … It was a lot of work, but I do think it'll be easier next time. > Q: After the initial selection, you ended up with a larger percentage of women and members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups compared with the applicant pool. Why do you think that is? > A: I'm not going to draw any firm conclusions based on an experiment I've done once. But I can imagine that it is possible that people from underrepresented groups were energized and motivated by being evaluated without identifying information. Maybe they took it a little more seriously because they saw it as an opportunity as opposed to an obstacle.