Volume 622 Issue 7981, 5 October 2023

Researchers in Europe have a golden opportunity to help defend democratic principles and bring science to bear against online disinformation.

Incoherent new climate-policy messages by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will dissolve the UK’s climate leadership, stifle innovation’s momentum and cost consumers.

Insects that traipse across winter snowfields use harsh technique to keep their internal organs from freezing.

Synthetic diamond recovers from fracture when carbon atoms on both sides of the gap form bonds with each other.

Ozone recovery is predicted to shift westerly winds, which will reduce the amount of warm water flowing into the Southern Ocean.

People with a specific variant had more active thymus glands, which produce immune cells that fight off infection.

Samples collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission excite scientists with their potential to reveal secrets of the Solar System.

Observing this simple phenomenon had eluded physicists for decades.

Questions remain about whether the AI tool for predicting protein structures can really shake up the pharmaceutical industry.

A pattern of brain activity linked with recovery from severe depression could be used to improve therapies such as deep-brain stimulation

Dolly-style animal cloning underpins CRISPR livestock, but changes loom for the field.

The US National Science Foundation announces plan to use the historic site for biology and computer science education.

Only a fraction of the planet’s surface will be habitable to mammals when the next supercontinent, Pangaea Ultima, forms.

The commercial success of RNA vaccines for COVID-19 has revved up interest in circular RNAs as the next generation of therapies.

The female perspective is often missed in evolutionary tales, but it is at the centre of what makes us human.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Large language models and other artificial-intelligence systems could be excellent at synthesizing scientific evidence for policymakers — but only with appropriate safeguards and humans in the loop.

Being open to the limitations of their knowledge can help researchers to foster interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaborations.

A plethora of standards mean shareable and verifiable microscopy data often get lost in translation. Biologists are working on a solution.

Marine biologist Long Ying studies how warmer, more-acidic oceans are affecting these ‘trees of the seas’.

Astronomers have obtained spectacular images of an interstellar jet launched from a newly forming star. Careful comparison with archival data offers a fresh take on the chemistry of the environment that surrounds it.

Understanding the timeline of technological developments sheds light on early societies. A remarkable finding in Africa of a structure made from shaped wood provides clues about our hominin relatives.

Layers of a thin semiconductor material overlap in a particular pattern, giving rise to particle currents carrying a fraction of the charge of an electron — with potential for encoding quantum information.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

An impressive combination of computational modelling and experimental techniques in live zebrafish embryos reveals how the heart initiates its organized and rhythmic beating.

Are protected areas slowing down global biodiversity declines? A global analysis provides evidence that they are, although effects vary across groups of species, and what happens outside protected areas matters, too.

Although the catalogue of human protein-coding genes is nearing completion, the number of non-coding RNA genes remains highly uncertain, and for all genes much work remains to be done to understand their functions.

Near-infrared imagery and spectroscopy from JWST of the Herbig-Haro 211 system, an analogue of the young Sun, reveals  supersonic jets of hot molecules that can explain the origin of the ‘green fuzzies’ phenomenon.

A high-precision, high-field test of quantum electrodynamics measuring the bound-electron g factor in hydrogen-like tin is described, which—together with state-of-the-art theory calculations—yields a stringent test in the strong-field regime.

Many different homogeneous metrics on Lie groups, which may have markedly different short-distance properties, are shown to exhibit nearly identical distance functions at long distances, suggesting a large universality class of definitions of quantum complexity.

Signatures of fractional quantum anomalous Hall states at zero magnetic field are observed in a fractionally filled moiré superlattice in a molybdenum ditelluride twisted bilayer.

Thermodynamic evidence of both integer and fractional Chern insulators at zero magnetic field is reported in small-angle twisted bilayer MoTe₂ by combining the local electronic compressibility and magneto-optical measurements.

Transport measurements in twisted bilayer MoTe₂ reveal quantized Hall resistance plateaus and composite Fermi liquid-like behaviour under zero magnetic field, constituting a direct observation of integer and fractional quantum anomalous Hall effects.

Ligands enable alcohol-directed arylation of δ-C(sp³)–H bonds by stabilizing hydroxyl coordination to palladium through charge balance and hydrogen bonding.

Analysis of high-resolution annual data shows that global human settlements have expanded continuously and rapidly into flood zones, with those in the most hazardous zones increasing by 122% from 1985 to 2015.

Analysis of a new annually resolved, multi-method, palaeoproxy-derived reconstruction ensemble for the period 1200–2000 suggests that recent variability in the Pacific Walker circulation is unusual but not unprecedented over the past 800 years.

An analysis of 2,239 terrestrial vertebrate populations shows that they decline more slowly in protected areas than outside protected areas, but the benefits vary across vertebrate classes and depend on the regional context of the protected area.

Wooden artefacts from waterlogged deposits in Zambia dating back 477 ka indicate hitherto unknown sophistication in woodworking at an early date.

A study presents a cross-species proteomic map of synapse development in neocortex and reveals that the human postsynaptic density assembly develops two to three times slower than that in macaques and mice.

A subpopulation of astrocytes selectively expresses synaptic-like glutamate-release machinery, actively secretes the transmitter and is localized to discrete sites in the hippocampus.

This study demonstrates how activity in the cingulate cortex tracks depression recovery, providing symptom relief using deep brain stimulation.

Aphid-transmitted viruses encode proteins that suppress the plant airborne defence response—which is triggered by volatile chemicals released by neighbouring plants after aphid attack—and the plants consequently become less repellent to aphids and more suitable for aphid survival, infestation and viral transmission.

The first heartbeat of a zebrafish was captured, and development of cardiac excitability and conduction around this singular event were analysed, showing how development of single-cell properties produces a transition from quiescence to coordinated beating.

RETFound, a foundation model for retinal images that learns generalizable representations from unlabelled images, is trained on 1.6 million unlabelled images by self-supervised learning and then adapted to disease detection tasks with explicit labels.

Multiomic analyses of mouse thymic epithelial cells identify several unconventional subsets that are mimetics of various populations of terminally differentiated parenchymal cells and provide insights into their development, molecular features and function.

Cellular lysine residues can be both methylated and acetylated on the same sidechain to form N^ε-acetyl-N^ε-methyllysine (Kacme), which is found on histone H4 across a range of species and across mammalian tissues and is associated with active chromatin.

A collection of RNA polymerase mutants spanning all possible substitutions of the rifampicin binding site is generated and characterized, increasing our understanding of antibiotic mechanisms and bacterial physiology.

Structural and mutational studies and cellular assays show that the inflammasome sensor NLRP1 forms a complex with thioredoxin, which acts as a negative regulator of inflammasome activity.

Using cryo-EM, structures of three major assemblies of type A GABA receptors, which regulate brain excitability, are revealed in the mouse brain and provide a basis for the development of subtype-specific drugs.