Volume 612 Issue 7940, 15 December 2022

Without a global, publicly funded strategy, the market will fail to deliver vaccines to stop pandemics before they surge.

Scientists refine a technology that peers through bone to image sub-surface body parts.

Two carved panels discovered in what is now Turkey illustrate a tale involving leopards and a bull.

Immune-cell-based therapy quashed tumour growth in some people with treatment-resistant melanoma.

Rapid growth in a city in Central Africa is causing a landslide to speed up.

Tracking data show that the birds fly farther than usual on the last evening of the year and are more likely to switch roosting spots.

Exceptionally preserved fossil suggests the armoured species Zuul crurivastator used its ‘tail club’ for battles with rivals.

A method to edit the backbones of molecules allows chemists to modify ring-shaped chemical structures with greater ease.

The latest science news, in brief.

Researchers say the rule changes will lead to a rise in infections that could overwhelm hospitals.

Genetic material collected from permafrost shows northern part of the island was once a lush forest, home to poplar trees and other surprising organisms.

European researchers are developing batteries that use a radioactive isotope to power long missions in the Solar System.

Online integrity hub will contain tools to help publishers combat bogus research and image manipulation.

Sequences of early forms of the fast-spreading variant reported to have been circulating in West Africa could have resulted from contamination.

The world’s most expensive drug has the potential to save lives. But it cannot treat the most common form of the disease.

Key genes that are active in the brains of older people are also active in the brains of people who developed serious COVID-19.

Data show that the representation of scientists from marginalized ethnicities dwindles at each stage of UK academia.

The launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission aims to rekindle the spirit of Apollo a half century after the United States left the lunar surface. As ever, science is the least of the driving forces.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.

Bias and discrimination are rife in master’s and PhD programmes worldwide, a Nature survey finds.

Graduate scholars are eager to launch their careers, eschewing the years of further study required for doctoral degrees.

In the fast-paced field of single-cell biology, studies that compare methods can help scientists to pick the right technique for their research.

Shannon Olsson examines the behaviour of insect pollinators to understand their reaction to a changing climate.

Parental-care behaviours include mammalian lactation to provide milk for offspring. The discovery that adult ants harvest nutritious fluid from pupae and give larvae this fluid reveals social feeding that aids colony success.

Analysis of radio emission from matter near the Milky Way’s central black hole sheds light on this previously unobservable region, revealing that the local magnetic field is carried around in complete loops by the matter orbiting the centre.

Organisms use various strategies for sex determination. The non-genetic mechanism in the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum, involving a male-specific factor, has now been revealed.

A versatile nanowire system has enabled the hunt for particles that could be useful for quantum computers. The platform can be probed with two techniques simultaneously — minimizing the possibility of false-positive signals.

In mature tropical forests, trees that can capture nitrogen experience high levels of herbivory. This could explain the low abundance of such trees, and demonstrates that herbivores can limit nitrogen availability on land.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Atmospheric methane concentrations rose unexpectedly during the lockdowns of 2020. It now seems that this was due to warm, wet weather in the Northern Hemisphere and, ironically, a slowdown in air-pollutant emissions.

How do environmental cues steer the branching of plant roots? Insights into how water availability shapes root growth reveal an unexpected mechanism behind the hormone-mediated regulation of this process.

Anatomical, cellular and molecular immune interactions at the borders of the central nervous system control homeostatic brain function and can lead to neurological or psychiatric diseases, representing potential therapeutic targets.

A series of early-time, multiwavelength observations of an optical transient, AT2022cmc, indicate that it is a relativistic jet from a tidal disruption event originating from a supermassive black hole.

Using particle-by-particle assembly and adiabatic manipulation of disorder, low-entropy, strongly correlated quantum fluids of light are constructed, opening up new possibilities for the preparation of exotic phases of synthetic matter.

Valentini et al. devise a method through which they can perform both tunnelling spectroscopy and Coulomb blockade spectroscopy on the same hybrid nanowire island to reduce ambiguities in the detection of Majorana.

Controllable detection of singlet and triplet Cooper pair splitting via crossed Andreev reflection is demonstrated in spin-polarized quantum dots on a superconducting nanowire platform with strong spin–orbit coupling.

Spin correlation experiments are demonstrated in an electron entangler device based on the ‘splitting’ of Cooper pairs from a superconductor, which can potentially be used to investigate many fundamental phases and processes related to the electron spin.

Competition between three- and four-phonon scattering processes is shown to be the source of a unique anomalous thermal conductivity in boron arsenide at high pressures.

Surface potential measurements of parallel WSe₂ and MoS₂ multi-layers with aligned and anti-aligned configurations of the polar interfaces were conducted showing evenly spaced, nearly decoupled potential steps, indicative of highly confined interfacial electric fields.

An array of 2D crystals of isotropic, 432-symmetric chiral gold nanoparticles is shown to exhibit collective resonances with a strong and uniform chiral near field, allowing enantioselective detection by the collective circular dichroism.

Using both bottom-up and top-down approaches, the record high increase in the methane growth rate in 2020 is attributed mainly to emissions from wetlands, which have been exacerbated by a warmer and wetter climate, and to the reduced atmospheric methane sink, in response to emissions reduction of air pollutants during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Nitrogen-fixing trees are favoured by herbivorous animals relative to non-fixing trees, increasing their carbon opportunity cost and potentially constraining global nitrogen fixation.

Ant pupae secrete a fluid, derived from the moulting fluid, that elicits parental care behaviour, provides nutrients for larvae and must be removed for pupal survival.

Defective DNA interstrand crosslink repair in Fanconi anaemia drives extensive genomic rearrangements, thereby substantially increasing the risk of cancer development.

The diverse yet patterned expression of clustered protocadherins regulates the precise spatial arrangement and synaptic connectivity of excitatory neurons in the mouse neocortex.

Forward genetics analyses and targeted genetic manipulation in mice show that regulation of sleep quantity and quality is mediated by the LKB1–SIK3–HDAC4–HDAC5 pathway.

Virus-mediated somatic genetics experiments in adult mouse brain identify key roles of LKB1 and SIK3 upstream of HDAC4/5 and CREB in the transcriptional regulation of non-rapid eye movement sleep.

A non-genetic mechanism of sex determination in the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, is described, and the male development 1 gene is identified as a potential target for interventions that block malaria transmission.

Plasmodium falciparum sporozoites produced in vitro recapitulate the P. falciparum life cycle from gametocyte to gametocyte without mosquitoes or primates.

Results indicate that the sublineages BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants have similar pathogenicity to that of the BA.2 sublineage in rodents, highlighting the importance of evaluating viral replication and pathogenesis using clinical isolates.

Proof of concept of the viability of a plant-derived photosynthetic system based on nanothylakoid units encapsulated in a chondrocyte membrane to enhance cell anabolism in chondrocytes is demonstrated.

Aberrant crosstalk between cancer stem cells and their microenvironment triggers angiogenesis and TGFβ signalling, creating conditions that are conducive for hijacking leptin and leptin receptor signalling, which in turn launches downstream PI3K–AKT–mTOR signalling during the benign-to-malignant transition.

Results are presented that indicate that alterations to gene regulatory three-dimensional architecture are a critical mechanism that enables structural variant-based oncogene activation in cancer genomes and sheds light on the essential elements for such gene activation events.