Volume 618 Issue 7965, 15 June 2023

Wild polio has almost been eradicated, but vaccine-derived strains retain the potential to paralyse. Better vaccines have arrived — but they are only part of the answer.

Lessons in advancing gender equity in research from my time in the United States at Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and in Australia.

Goopy ‘biofilms’ normally serve as a protective shield, but Vibrio cholerae uses them to kill immune cells.

Even stringent emission limits will not preserve the end-of-summer ice on Arctic seas.

After gulls switched their focus from southern right whale mothers to calves, scientists recorded a drop in calf survival.

Digits made of soft materials tap out a melody from the composer’s Ninth Symphony on a keyboard.

Hot, dry weather and human carelessness have led to a huge burnt area — and to a choking haze that is affecting millions of people.

Extensive flooding could have severe consequences for farming, health and the environment.

Surveys show people around the world have believed for decades that morals are decaying — but other survey data contradict that perception.

The latest surge is unlikely to crash the country’s health-care system, but scientists fear hundreds of millions of infections.

The technology developed by DeepMind that plays Go and chess can also help to write code.

The most comprehensive census yet reveals that there could be twice as many of the invasive animals than previous estimates indicated.

Kathleen Folbigg, who was jailed in Australia in 2003 over the sudden deaths of her four young children, has been pardoned and released in the wake of new scientific evidence.

The move is designed to encourage research and help boost institutions’ rankings. But some researchers say it will reward those already established in their careers.

Armed with technologies to track a creature’s every move, neuroscientists are gaining insights into animal — and human — behaviour.

The FDA’s decision, expected this month, follows several setbacks and delays and will pose difficult choices for the families of children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Thomas Young’s double-slit experiment originally served to prove that light is a wave — but later quantum versions have made for a much fuzzier picture.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Early exposure to science inspired four researchers to pursue research careers.

Jean-Luc Kanapé combines the ancestral knowledge of his Indigenous Canadian community, the Innu, with technology to protect the region’s caribou from predators and environmental damage.

Evidence of phosphates in the subsurface ocean of Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, confirms that the water is alkaline. The finding provides clues about the geochemistry and origin of this moon and its ability to support life.

Genomic data from bones and teeth found at archaeological sites across Morocco paint a picture of how Neolithic farmers and pastoralists spread into northwest Africa that is more complex than previously thought.

An analysis unpicks the various forms of violence that women face when they stand up to polluters and natural-resource extractors.

A post-processing technique for handling errors has enabled a quantum computer comprising 127 quantum bits to calculate the physical properties of a complex model system — a task that cannot be performed by a classical computer.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

The compilation and analysis of a compendium of single-cell RNA-sequencing studies across various cancers reveals recurring gene-expression programs that underpin tumour heterogeneity.

The large language models popularized by chatbots are being taught to alternate reasoning with calls to external tools, such as Wikipedia, to boost their accuracy. The strategy could improve fact-finding outcomes, as well as online shopping.

This Review examines the interplay between the nervous system and tumours, from cancer initiation to progression and metastasis.

The JWST, with the aid of gravitational lensing, confirms the extreme distance of an ultra-faint galaxy at a redshift of 9.79, showing it to have a luminosity typical of the sources responsible for cosmic reionization and highly compact and complex morphology.

The observation of pulsar emission at various orbital phases of a companion star probes the diverse magnetic structure in a binary system, and exhibits varying polarization behavior, akin to that observed in certain fast radio bursts.

Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer mass spectra of ice grains emitted by Enceladus show the presence of sodium phosphates, suggesting that phosphorus is readily available in Enceladus’s ocean in the form of orthophosphates.

Nearly integrable one-dimensional Bose gases are used to explain the behaviour of many-body quantum systems immediately after a rapid, high-energy quench, which shows two distinct timescales, one for hydrodynamization and the other for local prethermalization.

Experiments on a noisy 127-qubit superconducting quantum processor report the accurate measurement of expectation values beyond the reach of current brute-force classical computation, demonstrating evidence for the utility of quantum computing before fault tolerance.

We describe globally frustrated matter as deformations of non-orientable surfaces, with the concept of non-orientable order we demonstrate topologically protected mechanical memories, suggesting a design principle for effectively storing information in frustrated metamaterials.

The synthesis of 1,3- and 1,2-disubstituted cubanes is achieved using a cyclobutadiene precursor and a photolytic carboxylation reaction, respectively, and copper-catalysed amination, arylation, alkylation and trifluoromethylation reactions have been developed enabling the use of cubanes as bioisosteres of benzenes in drug design.

Quinuclidine-pyridone and sulfonamide-pyridone ligands enable transannular γ-methylene C–H arylation of cycloalkane carboxylic acids with a range of ring sizes, bringing us closer to molecular editing of saturated carbocycles.

A multi-decadal sediment-trap time series reveals that the body size, not the abundance, of Antarctic krill drives the particulate organic carbon flux on the continental shelf of the West Antarctic Peninsula.

Magnetic palaeointensity data from the Barberton Greenstone Belt (South Africa) as well as the Jack Hills (Western Australia) show nearly constant palaeofield values between 3.9 Ga and 3.4 Ga, providing evidence for stagnant-lid mantle convection.

This study shows through a field experiment that tropical intertidal communities switch from a niche- to a dispersal-assembled regime as immigration rates rise.

We identify that the larval zebrafish unpaired pre-anal fin fold is derived from the lateral plate mesoderm, can be readily duplicated, and thus may represent a developmental intermediate between median and paired fins.

Genome sequencing of nine individuals shows ancestry shifts in the Neolithization of northwestern Africa that probably mirrored a heterogeneous economic and cultural landscape in a more multifaceted process than observed in other regions.

Inter- and intra-species comparison of Arabidopsis centromere variation identifies rapid cycles of transposon invasion and purging through satellite homogenization that drive centromere evolution.

Cortical and subcortical activity can be parsimoniously understood as resulting from excitations of fundamental, resonant modes of the brain’s geometry rather than from modes of complex interregional connectivity.

A survey of mortality data from low- and middle-income countries shows that government-led cash transfer programmes are associated with decreased mortality among women and children under five years of age.

A structural and functional analysis of the systems involved in oligosaccharide uptake in gut Bacteroidetes describes multicomponent complexes termed utilisomes that include pre-processing and transport subunits.

The neuraminidase-targeting monoclonal antibody FNI9 potently inhibits the enzymatic activity of influenza A and B viruses via receptor mimicry.

A study identifies 41 consensus gene expression meta-programs that are coordinately upregulated in subpopulations of malignant cells across tumour types, providing a comprehensive picture of hallmarks of intratumour heterogeneity.

Agonists of α2-adrenergic receptors could substantially improve the clinical efficacy of cancer immunotherapy.

A context-aware, attention-based deep learning model pretrained on single-cell transcriptomes enables predictions in settings with limited data in network biology and could accelerate discovery of key network regulators and candidate therapeutic targets.

Detailed atomic models of axonemes from algal flagella and human respiratory cilia, which are hair-like protrusions from cells that enable motility and clear mucus from human airways, could provide insights into how they function.