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Hello Nature readers, Today we learn what it would take to prove how the coronavirus passed from bats to people, gape at the oldest (and largest) Mayan monument ever found and explore the evidence for how lack of sleep kills.

Research into pathogens is key to tackling the mystery of the coronavirus’s origins (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty)

The mystery at the heart of the pandemic The SARS-CoV-2 virus almost certainly originated in bats, then probably passed to an intermediate animal, which spread it to people. But it’s been very difficult to identify that animal — or to completely rule out the unsubstantiated idea that the virus escaped from a laboratory. Pinpointing the source of SARS-CoV-2 would require extensive sampling of coronaviruses in wildlife and livestock, and could take years. Nature | 9 min read

Two high profile COVID-19 papers retracted The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) have retracted two separate studies that relied on de-identified electronic health records from a company called Surgisphere. The Lancet study raised safety concerns about the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, which prompted some regulators to temporarily pause trials of the drug. The NEJM study found no evidence that blood-pressure medications were harmful for people with COVID-19 and underlying cardiovascular disease. The authors requested that the papers be retracted after questions were raised about the underlying data, and Surgisphere refused to provide them for legal and confidentiality reasons. A third study using Surgisphere data, uploaded to and then removed from social-sciences preprint server SSRN, has contributed to enthusiasm for the antiparasitic drug ivermectin in South America. “Who retracts this ivermectin ghost in Latin America?” asks global-health researcher Carlos Chaccour. “There’s no high-profile journal saying this was wrong.” Nature | 7 min read Reference: retracted Lancet paper & retracted New England Journal of Medicine paper

Features & opinion

How lack of sleep kills When fruit flies endure sleeplessness, cells in their guts accumulate toxic molecules that break down their DNA. Similar toxins were spotted in sleep-deprived mice. And when the sleepless flies were given antioxidants that prevent such build-up, they reached a normal fly life span. “‘They’re alive!’ And not only were they alive, they looked good,” says developmental neuroscientist Dragana Rogulja. The results suggest that although most sleep studies focus on the brain, lack of sleep kills by damaging other organs. Quanta | 14 min read Reference: Cell paper

Podcast: Lab-made skin grows its own hair Lab-grown skin has, up until now, had something missing: hair. Stem-cell researcher Karl Koehler tells the Nature Podcast how he and his colleagues made the leap — which could someday lead to skin grafts that include many more of the cells, glands, nerves and other components found in normal skin. “We are starting from pluripotent stem cells — these are cells that can become any cell in the body,” Koehler says. “We’re essentially recreating the entire developmental process of the skin.” Nature Podcast | 24 min listen Go deeper in the Nature News & Views article. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts or Spotify. Reference: Nature paper

Science after the COVID-19 pandemic (Illustration by The Project Twins) Some scientists will never go back Around the world, thousands of scientists have changed their focus to researching COVID-19, or are using their equipment to run diagnostic tests. If enough researchers embrace this change, it could prompt a vast shift in the scientific landscape. Nature | 6 min read Read more in our series on science after the pandemic: Universities will never be the same (9 min read) How scientific conferences will survive (5 min read) The pandemic will make or break research funding (5 min read) The risk to China’s race to the top of science (5 min read) Is this scientific publishing’s new normal? (6 min read) Outbreak could alter the drug development landscape (6 min read) Scientists’ worlds will shrink (6 min read)

Books & culture

New ways of knowing in a time of overload Information overload can make you feel numb or cause anxiety, says Heather Houser, co-director of a climate-resilience project in the United States and author of a new book, Infowhelm. For scientists, the emotional impact of studying topics such as ecological collapse can be devastating — yet they must maintain professional detachment. “I think the arts are a great way to allow all these other aspects of understanding and processing, as a person, to come into the narrative,” says Houser. Nature | 4 min read

Migration can be the solution The shifting climate means that we must allow — and assist — people, plants and animals who are forced to relocate to survive, argues a book by journalist Sonia Shah. Shah draws on affecting anecdotes and reflects on animal movements — both natural and human-caused — to explore our attitudes in advance of the vast human migration that will be caused by climate change. “The altered communities that result won’t just be different, they’ll often be better adapted to thrive in our warming world,” writes reviewer Emma Marris. Nature | 5 min read

Where I work

Working staggered shifts to respect social distancing, Christian Happi and his team perform PCR on human-tissue samples to detect infectious pathogens. The molecular biologist has deployed his lab in Ede, Nigeria, against the current pandemic. “People might have thought that this work was impossible in Africa,” he says, “but we are demonstrating that the continent’s scientists can generate crucial data in the global fight against COVID-19.” (Nature | 3 min read) (ACEGID)

Quote of the day “The best tool to blow something up is a university.” Universities train scientists and engineers to do powerful things, such as when Rio Tinto engineers blasted a site sacred to Indigenous Australians last month. But students are not trained in the ethical and moral reasoning needed to use their powers for good, argues Gomeroi mathematician and behavioural ecologist Jared Field. (The Guardian | 7 min read)

Today, our aquatic explorer Leif Penguinson is drying off among the spiny treasures of the Huntington Library Desert Garden in California. Can you spot the penguin? The answer will be in Monday’s e-mail, all thanks to Briefing photo editor and penguin wrangler Tom Houghton. Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing With contributions by Davide Castelvecchi