News at a glance

SCI COMMUN### Planetary science China's Zhurong rover rolled off the Tianwen-1 Mars mission's lander last week to start its explorations, leaving tracks in the Red Planet's dust. Zhurong's sensors will provide an up-close look at Mars's subsurface strata, minerals, and weather and atmosphere. Researchers expect 90 days of operations but hope for more. Meanwhile, the mission's orbiter will continue to gather data on Mars's topography and ionosphere. The flawless 15 May landing and subsequent smooth deployment of the rover (which photographed the lander in the photo above) may encourage China in its ambitions for planetary exploration. After bringing rocks back from the Moon in December 2020, China is considering a landing site for a planned, second sample return mission to the Moon's far side in 2023 or 2024. > “I frequently vomit before going to the lab.” > > Anonymous scientist, in a survey conducted by the antibullying Academic Parity Movement and posted as a preprint. Many of the 2000 self-selected respondents said they had been bullied but didn't report it to their institution, fearing retaliation. Most who did said they found the process unfair. ### History of science A picture may be worth 1000 words, but a letter containing a single equation written in Albert Einstein's shaky hand sold last week for a whopping $1.2 million, Boston-based RR Auction reported. Penned on 26 October 1946, when the famous theorist was 67, the letter contains one of four extant instances of Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 in his own hand. The equation implies that a small amount of mass (m) equals a huge amount of energy (E) because the speed of light (c) is enormous. The letter's recipient, Polish-American physicist Ludwik Silberstein, wrote one of the first English-language textbooks on relativity—a theory that encompasses both the special theory of relativity that Einstein published in 1905 and the general theory, published in 1915, which explains the origins of gravity. Silberstein had doubts about general relativity and engaged Einstein in public debate—which Silberstein lost as the theory became a cornerstone of modern physics. ### Evolution With more than 350,000 species, flowering plants feed, fuel, and adorn the world. Now, researchers have taken a big step toward understanding the origin of traits that distinguish them from an older group of plants, the gymnosperms, which today includes pine trees and ginkgoes. Among the differences, the flowering plants or “angiosperms,” which evolved about 125 million years ago, produce more sophisticated seeds, with two outer protective coats instead of just one. In 2017 in an open-pit coal mine in Inner Mongolia, palaeobotanists discovered evidence of an evolutionary link between these two major groups of plants: a treasure trove of exquisitely preserved, extinct gymnosperms with double-coated seeds. The outer coat or “cupule” most likely gave rise to the outer coat, the integument, of angiosperm seeds, palaeobotanist Gongle Shi of the Chinese Academy of Sciences's Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology and colleagues write this week in Nature . Modern gymnosperms lack cupules. The ancient plants, which no longer exist, also had specialized leaves or other tissues that may have been the forerunners of the female angiosperm reproductive structures called carpels. ### Gene therapy A blind man who received a gene for a light-sensing algal protein in one eye can now see objects with the help of special goggles, researchers report this week in Nature Medicine . It is the first published case of using optogenetics, a method of controlling neurons, to treat a disease in people. The 58-year-old French man was a participant in a clinical trial of the technique. He has an inherited disease called retinitis pigmentosa that destroys the eye's light-sensing photoreceptor cells; he could sense light but not discern shapes. Researchers used a virus to insert the algal gene into the man's retinal ganglion cells, which carried signals from the light-sensing protein to the brain. Months later, while wearing goggles that focused light on his retina, he could find and touch a notebook and count glass tumblers. If the treatment helps others, it may offer advantages over alternative technologies such as retinal implants. ### Science education The latest results from a quadrennial national test have disappointed U.S. science educators. The scores of fourth grade students in science showed a significant drop of three points on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between 2015 and 2019, while the scores of eighth and 12th grade students stayed flat. Key metrics for measuring how science is taught are also discouraging. For example, just 30% of fourth grade students engage in inquiry-based activities—a teaching method that studies have validated as more effective than others—only once or twice a year, and only 18% as often as twice a month. “Far too many elementary teachers have told us that science is not a priority in their schools and is perceived as less important than math and English language arts,” says Erika Shugart, executive director of the National Science Teaching Association. Until that attitude changes, Shugart says, “we can anticipate that lackluster NAEP scores will continue.” ### Climate policy President Joe Biden's administration last week reinstated the past director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which coordinates climate science across 13 federal agencies and oversees a periodic and influential review, the National Climate Assessment. In November 2020, the Trump administration reassigned Michael Kuperberg, a climate scientist who had run USGCRP for 6 years, to the Department of Energy and replaced him with a climate change denier. Trump subordinates had criticized the 2018 installment of the climate assessment, which, like previous ones, predicted calamitous, costly effects from climate change. In restoring Kuperberg to his old post, the White House also directed USGCRP to accelerate its work on two fronts: advancing climate science on socially relevant topics and ensuring that knowledge is more easily accessible to the public. The next climate assessment is now due by the end of 2023. ### Energy The United Kingdom's rebooted fusion reactor, MAST-Upgrade, has successfully demonstrated a novel exhaust system for superhot waste gases, key to making future commercial devices smaller and cheaper, researchers announced this week. Such reactors generate energy by fusing hydrogen isotopes in gas heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius and confined with powerful magnets. As waste gases are expelled, they must touch a reactor surface, and not many materials can stand the heat for long. MAST-Upgrade was built with extra chambers and magnets, known as a super-X diverter, to lead the waste gases on a winding 20-meter path, during which they have time to cool. In tests since the reactor was fired up in October, researchers showed that this reduced the heat load 10-fold at the final contact surface. “This will make a big change in the amount of downtime in a future power plant,” says lead scientist Andrew Kirk of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. ### COVID-19 India is suffering an epidemic within the pandemic. Nearly 9000 COVID-19 patients have also contracted mucormycosis, a rare disease also called black fungus, for its discolored lesions on the nose and inside the mouth. Spread by spores in the environment, mucormycosis has a mortality rate of more than 50%. Healthy people easily stave off infection, but those with weakened immune systems are vulnerable. In India, the disease is appearing mostly in COVID-19 patients given steroids to suppress an overactive immune response and in those who also suffer from diabetes. The surge in mucormycosis is causing a shortage of amphotericin B, the drug used to treat the disease. Last week, India's health ministry urged the country's 36 states and territories to declare mucormycosis epidemic, a step that leads to closer tracking of cases. ### COVID-19 Belgian authorities have hunted for more than a week for a heavily armed former soldier who they said threatened a prominent virologist, Marc Van Ranst of KU Leuven, over his support of COVID-19 lockdowns. Police took Van Ranst, a member of two expert panels advising the government, and his family to a safe house on 18 May. The fugitive, far-right former military shooting instructor Jürgen Conings, is on the Belgian list of terrorism suspects and “very dangerous,” Belgian Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne said in a 21 May TV interview. He added that Conings spent 2 hours on 17 May near a “target,” identified as Van Ranst by Belgian media. Van Ranst had been receiving police protection since July 2020 because he received pandemic-related threats regularly. Tweeting from his hideout last week, he said the threats “don't impress me at all.” ### Publishing Who voices more anxiety about peer reviews: researchers whose manuscripts have been accepted or rejected? The answer: It's a tie. That's one of the counterintuitive findings of a study of researchers' emotional and cognitive reactions to peer reviews, as revealed in more than 3600 comments posted by researchers on SciRev.org. The website allows authors to rate the quality of reviews at each of more than 3500 journals by name. The 16 May paper in Scientometrics unpacked the SciRev.org comments using language-analysis software. Although authors of rejected papers were not more likely to report anxiety than authors of accepted papers, they were more prone to say they were saddened by the decision. Also surprising, authors who waited longer for review decisions were no more likely to make negative comments about peer review. “Possibly, slow peer review processes have become so prevalent in academia [that] most authors did not bother to criticize it,” wrote the study's author, Shan Jiang of the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Further research about psychological reactions to peer review could help improve the process, the paper suggests. ### Genetics After the last ice age, the population of modern humans in northern East Asia may have undergone a major turnover, a study this week in Cell suggests. Researchers analyzed DNA from across the genomes of 25 ancient hunter-gatherers. It shows that the earliest known modern humans in the north China Plain, which stretches from Mongolia to the Amur Peninsula of Russia, who lived there 33,000 to 40,000 years ago, belonged to one widespread population. But by the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, about 19,000 years ago, they had been replaced by another population of people related to living East Asians and ancient Siberians. The first group may have died out during the ice age, the research team writes, noting that frigid temperatures in Europe may have driven a similar ancient population turnover. ### Space science Future robotic and crewed missions to the Moon could find their way on its surface more easily under a plan proposed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to establish a fleet of navigation satellites—a lunar version of GPS. The agency last week announced €2 million contracts to each of two industrial consortia to devise plans. Space agencies and companies hope to dispatch dozens of lunar probes this decade, but they must carry heavy radio gear to stay in contact with large dishes on Earth that guide them. Instead, ESA proposes that three or four satellites in lunar orbit and surface beacons could provide GPS-like signals so future missions could make do with a simple, less costly, lightweight receiver. The system would improve navigational accuracy, fixing position to within 100 meters compared with the current 500 meters at best. 8023 —Depth in meters where the deepest ocean bed core was drilled. The sample, for earthquake research, was taken this month in the Japan Trench, near the epicenter of the 2011 quake that caused a tsunami and knocked out the Fukushima nuclear power plant.