Volume 619 Issue 7971, 27 July 2023

Scientific strength does not come from severing long-standing relationships or turning away talent from around the world.

Deep-sea mining could wreck more than just the ocean floor in ways we have no idea how to repair.

Funding to help nations eliminate lead paint and other sources of exposure would avert millions of deaths and one trillion dollars a year in income loss.

Bloodstream infections by a common fungus are less deadly in mice engineered to have lower levels of a protein secreted by immune cells.

The eighteenth-century American patriot developed a host of measures to foil criminals trying to pass fake paper notes.

Researchers who summited the world’s tallest peak found much more snow there than expected.

The Large Hadron Collider yields a five-quark particle that includes a ‘strange’ quark, as predicted by theory.

The spike in childhood type 1 diabetes opened new avenues for researchers to explore the cause of the disease.

Survey quantifies the extra time that researchers whose first language isn’t English need to read, write and present data.

A common variant in an immune-system gene is linked with a much higher chance of dodging symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Energy firm Petrobras says any leaked oil would not reach the Brazilian coast, but scientists are concerned about a vast reef nearby.

India’s proposed National Research Foundation will shake up the scientific landscape to encourage a culture of research.

But the drug, an antibody that attacks the protein amyloid, does not work as well in people with more advanced disease.

Organ mapping studies show how kidney cells become diseased, and how cells from a fetus invade and remodel blood vessels in the lining of the uterus.

The creatures at the bottom of the ocean are little-studied, but emerging data hint at long-term damage from efforts to harvest metals on the sea floor.

Large language models mimic human chatter, but scientists disagree on their ability to reason.

A fresh look at the early history of genetics reveals why a simplified view of biological inheritance came to hold sway — and argues for a revision of how genetics is taught today.

Nobel laureate who laid the foundations for vaccines to prevent cervical cancer.

One of the most effective ways to keep people cool is often neglected in urban planning. Cities must work to provide cover and reverse the ‘shade deserts’ common in low-income communities.

Global-south researchers want equal partnerships that value intellectual exchange.

Fisheries engineer Ekrem Cem Çankırılıgil probes the chemical make-up of aquatic creatures to determine their possible health benefits for humans.

An imaging technique that uses a neural-network model to obtain physical information from infrared radiation improves on existing techniques in low-visibility situations, and could be deployed immediately in autonomous vehicles.

Many biological processes rely on proteins that aggregate into droplets governed by dynamics that span myriad scales. A clever combination of spectroscopy and simulation offers a way to probe these diverse dynamics.

La Niña events involve a cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean, and can last for two years or more, prolonging their impact. Climate simulations reveal that global warming could cause multi-year La Niña events to become more frequent.

A trial in Senegal has tested an innovative method for tackling a common human parasitic disease. The approach reduced infection numbers and also offered agricultural and economic benefits.

The 1963 discovery that even the vast oceans were highly contaminated with lead from car exhausts sparked debate and policy changes that benefited the health of millions — and revolutionized the practices of marine biogeochemistry.

The rationale behind chimaeric antigen receptor T cell therapy is reviewed, and current challenges in oncology, preliminary reports in noncancerous diseases and relevant emerging technologies are discussed.

GS-9209 is spectroscopically confirmed as a massive quiescent galaxy at a redshift of 4.658, showing that massive galaxy formation and quenching were already well underway within the first billion years of cosmic history.

Using James Webb Space Telescope observations, spectroscopic identification of a coma of water vapour but no significant CO₂ gas coma is found for the main-belt comet 238P/Read, indicating water–ice sublimation.

Raman and fluorescence spectra, consistent with several species of aromatic organic molecules, are reported in the Crater Floor sequences of Jezero crater, Mars, suggesting multiple mechanisms of organic synthesis, transport, or preservation.

Analysis of radio science data from the NASA InSight Mars lander reveals details of the rotation of the planet, which have been used to determine fundamental information about its core, mantle and atmosphere.

A scalable approach is provided for preparing and verifying intermediate-scale genuine entanglement on a 66-qubit superconducting quantum processor.

Heat-assisted detection and ranging is experimentally shown to see texture and depth through darkness as if it were day, and also perceives decluttered physical attributes beyond RGB or thermal vision.

The potential of water-window X-ray absorption spectroscopy for disentangling individual aspects of the respective electronic and structural dynamics in ultrafast non-adiabatic dynamics of molecular systems in a liquid environment is established.

A MicroLED lighting panel, assembled in 60 s by a surface-tension-driven fluidic self-assembly technique, gave a yield as high as 99.90% through the addition of a small amount of poloxamer to the assembly solution.

To meet China’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2060, substantial investment in upgrading power systems needs to be made to optimize the deployment of new photovoltaic and wind power plants.

An analysis proposes the social value of offsets to measure the amount of carbon that should be stored in temporary and risky offsets to compensate one ton of CO₂ emissions.

Analysis of climate models under future greenhouse-gas forcings shows that the frequency of consecutive La Niña events will increase, driven by ocean–atmosphere feedbacks that slow the heat recharge of the equatorial Pacific.

By harvesting aquatic vegetation that provides habitat for snails that harbour Schistosoma parasites and converting it to compost and animal feed, a trial reduced schistosomiasis prevalence in children while providing wider economic benefits.

A numerical analysis of mutualistic interactions between species shows that indirect effects from species they do not interact with directly are the biggest source of variation and cause the largest decreases to species fitness.

A study reports the development of an algorithm, BISCUT, that detects genomic loci under selective pressure by relying on the distribution of breakpoints across chromosome arms, and uses it to explore how aneuploidies affect tumorigenesis.

Single-cell and spatial transcriptomic analysis of eight human heart tissues reveals the cellular profiles and tissue architecture of niches including the cardiac conduction system, and a new tool, drug2cell, identifies drug target expression.

Hepatitis C virus utilizes flavin adenine dinucleotide as a non-canonical initiating nucleotide for the viral RNA polymerase, resulting in 5′ capping of viral RNA, which provides protection against the host innate immune response.

Phospholipid scramblase 1 (PLSCR1), a protein induced by IFNγ, acts as a defence factor against SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses by inhibiting the fusion of the virus with host-cell membranes.

Whole-genome sequencing analyses in a cohort of individuals with ataxia-telangiectasia are used to identify genetic variants that might be amenable to treatment with splice-switching antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs), and develop ASOs with therapeutic potential.

A diet–microorganism pathway involving conjugated linoleic acid, interleukin-18, intraepithelial lymphocytes and the transcription factor hepatocyte nuclear factor  4γ modulates the host mucosal immune system.

Callosal projection neurons located in the hemisphere contralateral to primary glioblastoma promote progression and widespread infiltration, and screening of axon guidance genes identified SEMA4F as a key regulator of tumourigenesis and activity-dependent progression.

p53 is shown to have a pivotal role in the differentiation of alveolar type 1 cells in cancer and alveolar repair after injury, and loss of this governance can promote diseases such as lung adenocarcinoma.

A study identifies the AT1 cell as a cell of origin for lung adenocarcinoma, and demonstrates that expression of oncogenic KRAS in differentiated AT1 cells reprograms them back into AT2 stem cells that generate indolent lepidic tumours.

Using RNA in situ conformation sequencing technology, the role of Alu elements in mediating the interaction between enhancers and promoters is shown.

Two highly charged disordered human proteins phase-separate into viscous complex coacervates while retaining their rapid conformational dynamics through pico- to nanosecond exchange of short-lived side-chain interactions.