Volume 619 Issue 7968, 6 July 2023

Hundreds of millions of people are going hungry as conflicts affect food supplies. There is also growing evidence that food producers are exploiting the situation to increase their profits.

Fossil fuels should be used sparingly, in the areas where they contribute most to human welfare.

Tests show that certain types of plasticware give off high levels of microscopic plastic particles when heated in an microwave oven.

The calls of dolphin mothers had a higher pitch when they were accompanied by their young.

A trick to chill molecular ions to below the temperature of liquid helium might be useful for understanding reactions at Saturn’s moon Titan.

Complexes formed from ‘nanobodies’ and an antiviral drug halt infection in its tracks.

Using beacon stars called pulsars, a decades-long effort has found space-time ripples that are light years wide.

Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues.

See researchers’ favourites from a survey of the deep Universe by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Scientists and some opposing lawmakers say the passing of the legislation violated normal procedures.

Hormone mimics offer advantages even beyond those of the potent weight-loss jabs on the market now.

Studies are shedding light on rates of recovery as well as the prevention and treatment of the complex condition.

Companies making cultured meat are attracting billions of dollars of investment. Here are their biggest challenges.

Humanity needs to eat less meat. Here are seven alternatives.

Responses to financial crashes, pandemics and other crises spur progress, through cycles of inward and outward change.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

For all the controversy over decentralized contact-tracing apps, data show that these privacy-preserving tools saved thousands of lives during the pandemic. National and international authorities must invest in the technology now.

Subtle forms of misogyny attack female leadership and coerce women to conform to conventional gender norms. It’s time to call out these behaviours, say Alison Bentley and Rachael Garrett.

Anthropologist Nosipho Mngomezulu finds podcasting an authentic, immediate way to reach an audience.

Biophysical and sociopolitical factors have been integrated into a set of measures of planetary change that aim to pinpoint safe and just thresholds for all living things. The exercise is immensely ambitious and inevitably challenging.

Efforts to eradicate polio globally have been under way for more than 35 years. The development of modified versions of a vaccine in current use now makes eradication a real possibility.

An effect that transfers information using the rotational motion of electrons has been detected with light, forging a path towards technologies that are cheaper — and less harmful to the environment — than existing electronics.

The microenvironment of virus-infected cells and uninfected adjacent cells influences infection. Human cytomegalovirus dampens the immune response of neighbouring uninfected cells, but distant cells can mount an antiviral defence.

A study reports the measurement of the polarization degree and angle of X-rays from Sagittarius A^* reflected off a nearby cloud, indicating an X-ray flare about 200 years ago.

The discovery of an orbital Fulde–Ferrell–Larkin–Ovchinnikov state in the multilayer Ising superconductor 2H-NbSe₂, in which the translational and rotational symmetries are broken, enables the preparation of such states in other materials with broken inversion symmetries.

The orbital Hall effect is observed in the light metal titanium, confirming the orbital Hall effect and indicating that orbital angular momentum is an important degree of freedom in solids.

This study reports an excitonic topological order emerging in imbalanced electron–hole bilayers.

The cycles of laser light have been used to advance transmission electron microscopy to attosecond time resolution, revealing the interactions between light and matter in terms of their fundamental dimensions in space and time.

An algorithm has been developed that can provably predict the lowest energy structure of crystalline materials using a combination of combinatorial optimization and integer programming.

We discovered that liquid metal endowing negative mixing enthalpy with other elements could provide a stable thermodynamic condition and act as a desirable dynamic mixing reservoir, realizing the synthesis of high-entropy alloy nanoparticles.

A method is presented to harness the paper-folding mechanism of reconfigurable macroscale systems to create reconfigurable DNA origami structures, in anticipation that it will advance the development of complex molecular systems.

A self-adjustive catalytic system with nickel under visible-light-driven redox reaction conditions provides a general method for carbon–(hetero)atom cross-coupling reactions and is demonstrated for nine different bond-forming reactions.

Observations and samples from the central Himalayas show that a giant rockslide occurring around 1190 ad in the Annapurna massif led to the collapse of an elevated palaeo-summit, illustrating the episodic mode of erosion of the glaciated high relief by mega-rockslides.

We find that justice considerations constrain the integrated Earth system boundaries more than safety considerations for climate and atmospheric aerosol loading, and our assessment provides a foundation for safeguarding the global commons for all people.

A study reports data from the first phase of the Chinese Pangenome Consortium including 116 de novo assemblies from 58 core samples representing 36 minority Chinese ethnic groups.

The cuttlefish Sepia officinalis uses high-dimensional skin patterns for camouflage, and the pattern matching process is not stereotyped—each search meanders through skin-pattern space, decelerating and accelerating repeatedly before stabilizing.

Octopuses possess a distinct active sleep stage, with behavioural and neural correlates resembling vertebrate REM sleep, which may represent convergent features of complex cognition.

Mouse experiments and deep sequencing confirmed that two additional live attenuated vaccine candidates against type 1 and 3 polioviruses remained attenuated and preserved all documented nOPV2 characteristics concerning genetic stability following accelerated virus evolution.

GDF15 treatment in mice counteracts compensatory reductions in energy expenditure, resulting in greater weight loss and reductions in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease compared to caloric restriction alone.

A mouse model expressing T cell antigens in the skin epidermis is used to demonstrate that local self-tolerance is maintained by PD-1, which prevents terminal CD8 T cell differentiation, effector molecule secretion and access to antigen-expressing cells.

A non-covalent inhibitor that binds preferentially to the inactive state of KRAS while sparing NRAS and HRAS is reported, indicating that most KRAS oncoproteins cycle between an active state and an inactive state in cancer cells.

Following skin injury, wild-type epithelial cells outcompete oncogenic Ras G12V mutant cells owing to differential activation of the EGFR signalling pathway during injury repair.

Missegregated chromosomes that are sequestrated in micronuclei are subject to changes in histone modifications leading to abnormalities in chromatin accessibility that remain long after the chromosomes have been reincorporated into the primary nucleus.

Micronuclei, which are common features of nuclei in cancer cells, can generate heritable sources of transcriptional suppression, a finding that establishes an inherent relationship between chromosomal instability and variation in chromatin state and gene expression.

TCRα repertoire diversity is best explained by species-specific extents of sequence microhomologies marking the ends of recombining elements, and germline sequence composition of rearranging elements determines the degree of diversity of somatically generated antigen receptors.

Break-induced telomere synthesis initiates recruitment of the SNM1A nuclease, which promotes DNA end resection that in turn allows template switching to enable bypass of lesions.