In Science Journals

Description Highlights from the Science family of journals

component of plans to mitigate global climate change. Planting new forests is a common strategy, but this approach can have negative social and ecological impacts and substantial costs. Roebroek et al. instead investigated how ceasing management (e.g., wood harvesting or fire suppression) of forests would change their global carbon sequestration capacity. The authors assessed the differences between the biomass of similar forests with and without human activities and used machine learning to predict the additional biomass gain from removing human activities from global forests. Even if all management ceased (an extremely unlikely scenario), global forest carbon would only increase by about 15%. This work provides further evidence that changing forest management is not an alternative to cutting carbon emissions. -BEL Science, add5878, this issue p. 749

Directing light-olefin synthesis
The production of light olefins from a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (syngas) over metal-oxide zeolite catalysts is complicated by competing side reactions. Jiao et al. show that the Brønsted acid sites created in the zeolite AlPO-18 by germanium substitution were highly active for carbon-carbon coupling of the intermediates to olefins but much weaker for the unwanted size reactions of hydrogenation and olefin oligomerization. A carbon monoxide conversion of 85%, along with a selectivity of for light olefins of 83%, led to an overall yield of almost 50%. -PDS Science, adg2491, this issue p. 727

A cool bundle of tubes
Vapor compression cooling often relies on refrigerants that are greenhouse gases or have other issues with flammability and toxicity. Caloric cooling is a different strategy that instead relies on moving solids through a phase

Cardiac redifferentiation and maturations
Unlike mammals, some animal species such as zebrafish can regenerate their heart after injury by using their surviving cardiomyocytes to produce new cells. It is unclear how these cells stop dividing and mature enough to contribute to heart function. Nguyen et al. used ex vivo imaging to visualize intracellular calcium dynamics in the regenerating zebrafish heart to study cardiomyocyte maturation. The formation of the cardiac dyad, a structure responsible for regulating intracellular calcium handling, played a critical role in determining whether cardiomyocytes proliferated or progressed through maturation. Furthermore, LRRC10, a component of the cardiac dyad, was implicated in the regulation of cardiomyocyte maturation in zebrafish, mouse, and humans. -SMH Science, abo6718, this issue p. 758

QUANTUM OPTICS
Entangling microwaves with optical photons S everal platforms are under development for quantum computation, simulation, and metrology applications, with each platform operating at different operational wavelengths for optimized performance. For practical technologies, the reality will likely be a hybrid of platforms that require quantum entanglement to be generated and shared across platforms with a large energy disparity. Sahu et al. introduce an electro-optical device that allows the generation of quantum entanglement between microwaves (the operational wavelengths of superconducting circuits) with optical photons (the operational wavelength of long-distance quantum communication). Bridging platforms with more than five orders of magnitude difference in energy scales and maintaining the fragile entanglement provides a route to efficiently linking up hybrid quantum systems. -ISO Science, adg3812, this issue p. 718

Engineering carbon fixation
The plant carbon dioxide (CO 2 )fixation enzyme Rubisco has low catalytic efficiency. However, some bacteria have mechanisms to internally concentrate CO 2 by surrounding Rubisco in a polyhedral protein complex called the carboxysome. Chen et al. introduced nine carboxysome genes from Halothiobacillus neapolitanus into tobacco chloroplasts, which do not normally have a CO 2 -concentrating mechanism. The authors observed functional carboxysomes forming in tobacco with greater Rubisco levels than was found in previous attempts. When carboxysomes replaced native tobacco Rubisco, plants were able to grow, albeit in an elevated CO 2 environment. Future improvements, for example,

ECONOMICS
Searching for jobs, finding gender gaps G ender differences in how the first postcollege job hunt is navigated contribute to women earning less than men early in their careers. Drawing upon survey data from recent college graduates, Cortés et al. show that women accepted job offers earlier than men on average, and for lower pay. Sizable proportions of these gaps were explained by women being more risk averse and men being more overconfident in their earnings expectations, findings corroborated by laboratory experiments. Over time, men accepted jobs aligned with lower, more realistic earnings expectations, narrowing the earnings gender gap.

Junction dysfunction
The foodborne pathogen Bacillus cereus damages intestinal epithelial cells through various secreted toxins, such as the poreforming toxin alveolysin. Sun et al. identified a strain of B. cereus that uses alveolysin to compromise the barrier function of the mouse intestinal epithelium and colonic epithelial cell monolayers. Alveolysin persistently disrupted cell-cell junctions by increasing the production of the microtubule-binding protein CFAP100. CFAP100 promoted microtubule polymerization and stability, resulting in disorganization of the microtubule network and junction impairment. -AMV

Kissing as a vector of disease transmission
There are two main types of kissing: friendly-parental and romantic-sexual. Although friendly-parental kissing appears to be ubiquitous among human societies past and present, romantic-sexual kissing is not a universal behavior. Additionally, the emergence of sexualromantic kissing may have had a secondary effect on disease transmission, propagating the spread and evolution of orally transmitted pathogens. In a Perspective, Arbøll and Rasmussen draw from case studies in Mesopotamia of medical records, artwork, and ancient DNA analysis to posit that sexual-romantic kissing was probably common practice in ancient times and did not have a singular origin. The authors explain why such kissing is not likely to have contributed to changing patterns of disease transmission in ancient cultures. -GKA Science, adf0512, this issue p. 688

The use of science in rights-of-nature laws
Laws that establish legal rights for nature are being pursued in a growing number of countries to protect the environment. The success or failure of these rightsof-nature laws can depend in large part on how scientific concepts and expertise have been used to develop, interpret, and implement them. Epstein et al.
reviewed key scientific aspects of rights-of-nature laws and the use of science in court decisions that have interpreted them. They examined the "right to evolve" to illustrate challenges in applying scientific concepts in rights-ofnature laws and identify some possible solutions. -BW Science, adf4155, this issue p. 704

Making sense of genetic findings
Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) identify links between individual gene variants and various traits and diseases. Unfortunately, the findings from these studies cannot be used to determine whether the gene variants associated with a disease directly cause the condition or just happen to be located near biologically relevant genes or regulatory regions. Most of the variants identified through GWASs are located in noncoding regions of the genome, further increasing the difficulty of interpretation. A workflow developed by Morris et al. addresses this problem by using CRISPR-based editing to directly introduce variants of interest and then assessing their effects on gene expression in individual cells, thereby identifying their contributions to specific blood cell traits. -YN Science, adh7699, this issue p. 705

Imaging the onset of symmetry breaking
The Jahn-Teller (JT) effect is a fundamental mechanism of geometric relaxation that leads to symmetry breaking in nonlinear molecular systems in degenerate electronic configurations. Despite being responsible for a variety of phenomena observed in many fields, direct imaging of this effect with high spectral resolution has remained a grand challenge. Using a combination of state-of-the-art experimental and theoretical time-resolved x-ray absorption techniques, Ridente et al. successfully reconstructed the ultrafast (few-femtosecond) molecular dynamics arising from the JT distortion in the prototypical example of the methane cation, as well as subsequent coherence and dissipation of energy to other internal degrees of freedom. In the future, the presented techniques could be used to study the JT distortion and other related dynamics in ultrashort time scales in more complex systems. -YS Science, adg4421, this issue p. 763

A truer skin mimic
Our skin provides a protective layer for our bodies, but it also enables detailed sensory feedback and soft interactions with our surroundings. Wang et al. devised a prosthetic electronic skin that incorporates organic semiconductor transistors and has no rigid components, thus mimicking the mechanical aspects of real skin (see the Perspective by Sekitani). At the same time, it can sense external stimuli such as temperature and pressure and encode these stimuli into electrical pulses. The authors showed that the prosthetic skin could evoke neuronal firings at the motor cortex in a rat in vivo, which triggered toe twitching. -MSL Science, ade0086, this issue p. 735; see also adf0262, p. 690

Losing lake water
The amount of water stored in large lakes has decreased over the past three decades due to both human and climatic drivers. Yao et al. used satellite observations, climate models, and hydrologic models to show that more than 50% of both large natural lakes and reservoirs experienced volume loss over this time (see the Perspective by Cooley). Their findings underscore the importance of better water management to protect essential ecosystem services such as freshwater storage, food supply, waterbird habitat, cycling of pollutants and nutrients, and recreation. -HJS Science, abo2812, this issue p. 743; see also adi0992, p. 693

Cholesterol triggers tolerogenic DCs
Dendritic cells (DCs) rapidly undergo immunogenic maturation in response to pathogen exposure, but the signals driving their homeostatic maturation into tolerogenic DCs that help to prevent autoimmunity remain unclear. Within the mouse spleen, Bosteels et al. identified engulfment of apoptotic cells as a key driver of the homeostatic maturation program among type 1 conventional DCs (cDC1s). Using single-cell transcriptomics, the authors found that pathways controlling cholesterol efflux, including the liver X receptor pathway, were induced during homeostatic cDC1 maturation. Cholesterol uptake through either apoptotic cells or unadjuvanted lipid nanoparticles promoted homeostatic DC maturation. Conversely, DCs lacking the key receptors initiated an immunogenic maturation program after engulfment of apoptotic cells, demonstrating that cholesterol-regulatory pathways control whether immunogenic or tolerogenic DC maturation occurs. -CO Sci. Immunol. (2023) 10.1126/sciimmunol.add3955

Screening for breadth
When chemists optimize catalysts, they typically work with a single substrate in a test reaction. Then, the catalyst producing the best outcome with that substrate is applied to a broader range of substrates. Rein et al. report a different approach: screening catalysts concurrently on a diverse pool of substrates with the aim of optimizing median enantioselectivity across the pool. Structural modification of a peptide-substituted aminoxyl radical framework using this method efficiently pinpointed a broadly versatile

False sense of security
In intact ecosystems, large carnivores have a regulating influence on smaller predators (mesopredators), limiting both their populations and distribution. In areas where humans are present, these smaller carnivores use developed areas to avoid larger predators. However, Prugh et al. found that their impression of the safety of these areas is a mistake, because the mortality rates of these species were more than three times higher than in the presence of large carnivores (see the Perspective by Darimont and Shukla). Such errors could both threaten these smaller species and influence the trophic structure of ecosystems. -SNV Science, adf2472, this issue p. 754; see also adh9166, p. 691