Doyne Farmer - a physicist who has studied the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic - talks to Benjamin Skuse about lockdown easing and the prospects of financial recovery

Carbonyl sulfide (OCS) is the most stable and abundant sulfur-containing gas in the atmosphere. It is derived from both natural and anthropogenic sources and is of key interest to scientists investigating how much carbon dioxide (CO2) plants take out of the atmosphere for photosynthesis. Measuring CO2 alone cannot provide estimates of photosynthesis (taking up CO2) because plants also release CO2 through respiration. In contrast, OCS is taken up like CO2 but is not released by respiration, and can therefore provide valuable information about the rate of global photosynthesis.

we really need to understand how the immune system reacts to the coronavirus.

Land use change-for example, the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural or urban ecosystems-is widely recognized to influence the risk and emergence of zoonotic disease in humans1,2. However, whether such changes in risk are underpinned by predictable ecological changes remains unclear. It has been suggested that habitat disturbance might cause predictable changes in the local diversity and taxonomic composition of potential reservoir hosts, owing to systematic, trait-mediated differences in species resilience to human pressures3,4. Here we analyse 6,801 ecological assemblages and 376 host species worldwide, controlling for research effort, and show that land use has global and systematic effects on local zoonotic host communities. Known wildlife hosts of human-shared pathogens and parasites overall comprise a greater proportion of local species richness (18-72% higher) and total abundance (21-144% higher) in sites under substantial human use (secondary, agricultural and urban ecosystems) compared with nearby undisturbed habitats. The magnitude of this effect varies taxonomically and is strongest for rodent, bat and passerine bird zoonotic host species, which may be one factor that underpins the global importance of these taxa as zoonotic reservoirs. We further show that mammal species that harbour more pathogens overall (either human-shared or non-human-shared) are more likely to occur in human-managed ecosystems, suggesting that these trends may be mediated by ecological or life-history traits that influence both host status and tolerance to human disturbance5,6. Our results suggest that global changes in the mode and the intensity of land use are creating expanding hazardous interfaces between people, livestock and wildlife reservoirs of zoonotic disease.

Now, a research group under the leadership of professor and virologist Søren Riis Paludan from the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University, Denmark, has identified a mechanism which is activated in the cells of the immune system when they are attacked by disease. The discovery involves the protein STING, which sends signals to the nucleus of the cell when an infection threatens.

Many books have been written about our cosmic origins: the creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago; the Big Bang and all that followed. The denouement, presumably tens of billions of years away, remains comparatively mysterious. How does it all end? For that matter, does it all end, or can we keep on in our merry way indefinitely? In "The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)," Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at North Carolina State University, attempts to answer what might seem the most remote of scientific questions.