Volume 620 Issue 7972, 3 August 2023

To protect millions from unnecessary power outages, utility companies need one thing above all: data.

A double layer of twisted, folded DNA protects cells from mechanical forces while allowing them freedom to assemble.

Analysis of data from China shows that calm driving in that country alone can save nearly half a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050.

Scientists identify traces of ginger, nutmeg and other spices on ancient kitchen tools that were found in Vietnam.

An immune response triggered by cardiac disease affects the function of a gland with a key role in the sleep–wake cycle.

High-profile researchers say small-brained Homo naledi exhibited advanced behaviours such as burials, but peer reviewers say there’s no evidence.

Ranga Dias will have a second paper revoked. A journal’s investigation found apparent data fabrication.

Atomic bomb historian Richard Rhodes talks to Nature about how researchers fare in the film, and what it gets right and wrong.

Devices that can record and change brain activity will create privacy issues that challenge existing human-rights legislation, say researchers.

Unprecedented genealogical tree reveals details of prehistoric social relationships.

By assessing traded animals’ unique traits and their role in ecosystems, researchers can gauge the potential impact of losses.

A vast telescope buried beneath Antarctica has captured high-energy neutrinos from the Galactic Centre, ushering in a new era for observing the Universe.

A European agency is considering sweeping restrictions on fluorinated chemicals used in jet engines, electric cars, refrigeration systems, semiconductors and many consumer products.

Scientists want to know who will benefit most, what the long-term effects might be and whether the treatments will change views on obesity.

A compilation of 550 original plates reveals the dedicated work of the nineteenth-century woman who was the first to publish a book with cyanotypes of specimens.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Halting the loss of jobs and knowledge from small-scale producers requires investing in rural sustainability, addressing poverty and inequity and ensuring the economic gains stay local. The benefits would be shared globally.

An eye-catching logo says a lot about your lab’s research, workplace culture and collaborative potential. Take time to get it right.

Geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos finds that fishing gear and packaging are creating a new type of pollution.

A landmark collaboration shows that Facebook’s news feed filters partisan political news to users with the same views. But changing the feed algorithm to reduce exposure to like-minded content does not reduce political polarization.

A revised conceptual model of the chemical and physical forms of iron in the ocean reconciles the mismatch between observations and simulations of the amount of dissolved iron in seawater — and might aid climate predictions.

The protein UCP1 helps to release energy as heat in brown fat. Structures of human UCP1 provide crucial information about its mechanism of action, and might aid drug design for obesity and various metabolism-associated complications.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Economic modelling of the global carbon cost of harvesting wood from forests shows a much higher annual cost than that estimated by other models, highlighting a major opportunity for reducing emissions by limiting wood harvests.

The advances in artificial intelligence over the past decade are examined, with a discussion on how artificial intelligence systems can aid the scientific process and the central issues that remain despite advances.

The Zwicky Transient Facility has observed a transitioning white dwarf with two faces, with one side of its atmosphere dominated by hydrogen and the other by helium.

A spectroscopic thermal phase curve of GJ 1214b obtained with the JWST in the mid-infrared is reported and a planet with a high metallicity atmosphere blanketed by thick and reflective clouds or haze is found.

Nitrogen-doped lutetium hydrides LuH_2±xN_y synthesized using a high-pressure and high-temperature synthesis technique did not show near-ambient superconductivity at pressures below 40.1 GPa.

Three-dimensional integration of distributed-feedback lasers and ultralow-loss silicon nitride waveguides results in ultralow-noise lasers without the need for optical isolators.

We report the discovery of lithium metal’s intrinsic growth morphology, a rhombic dodecahedron, and leverage these rhombic dodecahedra as nucleation seeds for improved battery performance.

The design, synthesis and characterization of a series of circular sandwich compounds, cyclocenes, is described, and these cyclic sandwich compounds are expected to lead to further innovations in new functional organometallic materials.

Annually resolved Fennoscandian tree-ring anatomy records show that the climate of the current industrial era is substantially warmer than that of the medieval period.

Analysis of a new dissolved iron, ligand and particulate iron seasonal dataset shows that authigenic iron phases help control ocean dissolved iron distributions and the coupling between dissolved and particulate iron pools.

A new model uses time discounting to estimate the present and future carbon costs of global wood harvests under different scenarios, suggesting an underappreciated option to address climate change.

Measurements from the Chang’e-1 and Chang’e-2 microwave instruments reveal an anomalously hot geothermal source on the Moon that is best explained by a roughly 50-kilometre-diameter granitic system below the geological feature known as Compton–Belkovich.

An engineered minimal cell evolves to escape the negative consequences of genome streamlining.

The human leukocyte antigen allele HLA-B*15:01 is associated with asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection due to pre-existing T cell immunity.

A large-scale field intervention experiment on 23,377 US Facebook users during the 2020 presidential election shows that reducing exposure to content from like-minded social media sources has no measurable effect on political polarization or other political attitudes and beliefs.

A single-cell genomics analysis of humans, chimpanzees and rhesus macaques reveals the molecular features that drive cellular and regulatory complexity of human brain evolution.

Fasting-activated hypothalamic AgRP-expressing neurons trigger fasting-induced hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis activation through projections to the paraventricular hypothalamus, where they activate CRH neurons by presynaptically inhibiting the terminals of tonically active GABAergic afferents from the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis.

Rapid activation of protein synthesis in the axolotl highlights the unanticipated impact of a translatome on orchestrating the early steps of wound healing and provides a missing link in our understanding of vertebrate regenerative potential.

Med-PaLM, a state-of-the-art large language model for medicine, is introduced and evaluated across several medical question answering tasks, demonstrating the promise of these models in this domain.

The Human Breast Cell Atlas identifies 12 major breast cell types and 58 biological cell states, revealing abundant pericyte, endothelial and immune cell populations, and highly diverse luminal epithelial cell states.

In mice, sympathetic nerves associated with female mammary glands control the secretion of thermogenesis-controlling factors by epithelial cells in the adipocyte niche, revealing sex-specific differences in adipose thermogenesis.

Competition for glutamine between type-1 conventional dendritic cells and tumour cells has a central role in tuning the anti-tumour immune response and in immune evasion by cancer cells.

High-throughput DNA or RNA labelling with optimized Oligopaints (HiDRO) reveals more than 300 factors that influence genome folding during interphase, including 43 genes that were validated as either increasing or decreasing interactions between topologically associating domains.

Retrotransposons hijack the alternative end-joining DNA repair process of the host for a circularization step to synthesize their second-strand DNA.

Using cryo-electron microscopy, the structures of human UCP1 in the nucleotide-free state, the DNP activator-bound state, and the inhibitory ATP-bound state are resolved, providing details of how purine nucleotides inhibit UCP1.