Volume 624 Issue 7990, 7 December 2023

Science is starting to recognize the movement to create mass-market products using local knowledge and materials to improve lives around the world.

Scientific institutions must create roles so that researchers can provide the deep public engagement necessary to respond effectively to the escalating impacts of climate change.

Bespoke cryo-electron microscope reveals 3D details of cellular structures — and is an order of magnitude cheaper than its rivals.

The bottlenose dolphin’s keen ‘electroreception’ sense might help it to locate buried prey and navigate the seas.

Tumours respond more readily to radiation and other therapies in mice without a specific protein in their dendritic cells.

Sensors deployed at magnetically quiet rural sites looked for axions and ‘hidden photons’ — with no luck yet.

Draft resolution on a ‘loss and damage fund’ has attracted more than $400 million, but climate-vulnerable countries say more cash is needed.

Health is on the agenda at the COP28 climate meeting. Rising temperatures increase the spread of infectious diseases, claim lives and drive food insecurity.

The massive buried structures at Gunung Padang in Indonesia would be much older than Egypt’s great pyramids — if they’re even human constructions at all.

The whole genomes of 500,000 people in the UK Biobank will help researchers to probe our genetic code for links to disease.

An algorithm that can analyse hundreds of millions of genetic sequences has identified DNA-cutting genes and enzymes that are extremely rare in nature.

Under the proposal, technology with potential military use would need authorization to be shared with non-Australian colleagues.

Mimicking the snatch and grab of an octopus snaring its prey required a new way of thinking about robotics.

Analysis of millions of papers shows that farflung collaborators produce fewer foundational discoveries than groups working together in person.

Scientists worry that ill-informed use of artificial intelligence is driving a deluge of unreliable or useless research.

Ancient humans painted scenes in Indonesian caves more than 45,000 years ago, but their art is disappearing rapidly. Researchers are trying to discover what’s causing the damage and how to stop it — before the murals are gone forever.

Mathematical biologist, philosopher and historian of science who challenged the vision of science as a masculine activity.

Assessing global mean temperature rise using the average warming over the previous one or two decades will delay formal recognition of when Earth breaches the Paris agreement’s 1.5 °C guard rail. Here is what’s needed to avoid the wait.

Large language models such as that used by ChatGPT could soon become essential tools for diagnosing and treating patients. To protect people’s privacy and safety, medical professionals, not commercial interests, must drive their development and deployment.

In just a year, ChatGPT has permeated scientific research. Seven scientists reveal what they have learnt about how the chatbot should — and shouldn’t — be used.

A refusal to fly to Papua New Guinea for fieldwork took Gianluca Grimalda the long way across 22,000 kilometres and 12 countries.

Louis De Grandpré studies the traditional lands of Canada’s Pessamit people in the face of widespread logging.

Genomic data from ancient humans who lived up to 7,400 years ago, sampled from across California and Mexico, unveil patterns of migration that could explain how some Indigenous languages spread in parts of North America.

Causal evidence shows that referring people who are at risk of developing diabetes to a nationwide lifestyle-change programme can result in health improvements — but only if programme participation can be sustained.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

A mismatch in how carbon emissions are reported could endanger nations’ best efforts to meet targets for curbing climate change. A method for translating between reporting conventions offers a path forward.

Scientists have long sought to understand what drives biodiversity changes. A study unifies ideas about marine and terrestrial biodiversity in one explanatory framework, pointing to physical geography as dictating life’s trajectory.

An innovative method uses the intrinsic attractive force between silicon surfaces that are separated by a tiny gap to engineer structures that can confine light — offering an ideal set-up for manipulating single photons.

Monitoring complex hyena societies in the wild sheds light on factors that predict whether individuals will engage in a risky collective activity.

The time frame of a species’ origins provides context for evolutionary questions. However, dates from fossils are often inconsistent with estimates from genetic data. Emerging evidence points to a new explanation for this discrepancy.

An ultra-deep MUSE image of the mean Mg II emission for a sample of galaxies at redshift z ≈ 1 suggests the presence of bipolar outflows on scales of 10 kpc or more.

Silicon photonic nanocavities based on surface forces and conventional lithography and etching are developed, demonstrating pioneering technology that integrates atomic dimensions with the scalability of planar semiconductors.

By using a pump–probe atomic force microscopy detection scheme, electron spin transitions between non-equilibrium triplet states of individual pentacene molecules, as well as the ability to manipulate electron spins over tens of microseconds, is demonstrated.

AspCl doping in Sn–Pb perovskite solar cells improves their performance and stability.

A miniaturized narrow-channel in-plane electrochemical capacitor shows drastically reduced ionic resistances within both the electrode material and the electrolyte and an ultrahigh areal capacitance by downscaling the channel width with femtosecond-laser scribing.

A protocol using large-scale training of graph networks enables high-throughput discovery of novel stable structures and led to the identification of 2.2 million crystal structures, of which 381,000 are newly discovered stable materials.

An autonomous laboratory, the A-Lab, is presented that combines computations, literature data, machine learning and active learning, which discovered and synthesized 41 novel compounds from a set of 58 targets after 17 days of operation.

Analysis of ground-sourced and satellite-derived models reveals a global forest carbon potential of 226 Gt outside agricultural and urban lands, with a difference of only 12% across these modelling approaches.

Aligning the IPCC-assessed mitigation pathways with the national greenhouse gas inventories shows that key global mitigation benchmarks become harder to achieve, requiring achieving earlier net-zero and lower cumulative emissions.

The prevalence of annual plants worldwide rises in response to hot-dry summers, year-to-year variations, and disturbances, potentially impacting the future of ecosystem services provided by perennials.

A model of sediment flux from the land to the oceans over the Phanerozoic eon explains differences in the fossil records of marine animal genera and land plant genera.

Genome-wide analyses of ancient DNA from individuals from California and Mexico shed light on the spread of Mexican ancestry to California and how it correlates with linguistic flow.

Genetically distinct neural circuits in the caudal brainstem receive feedback from the mouth and gut to regulate feeding behaviour on short and long timescales.

Analysis of the largest behaviour change programme for prediabetes globally provides causal evidence that lifestyle advice and counselling implemented at scale can improve key cardiovascular risk factors.

We use a whole-cell accumulation assay to assess the ability of non-antibiotic, structurally diverse small molecules to accumulate in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, with potential application in developing drugs to target this pathogen.

Analyses of causal gene regulatory networks have identified key checkpoints mediating the progressive differentiation of CD8⁺ cytotoxic T cells, findings that have implications for anticancer immunotherapies such as adoptive cell therapy and immune checkpoint blockade.

Blood plasma protein data was combined with machine learning models for a simple method to determine differences in organ-specific aging; the study provides a basis for the prediction of diseases and aging effects using plasma proteomics.

After loss of MSL2, a class of dosage-sensitive genes transitions from biallelic to monoallelic expression, whereby one allele remains active, retaining active histone modifications and transcription factor binding, and the other allele is silenced, exhibiting loss of promoter–enhancer contacts and the acquisition of DNA methylation.

We show how neuroactive alkaloids from clubmosses are biosynthesized, which reveals an unexpected role for carbonic anhydrase-like enzymes in alkaloid scaffold formation.

A protein interaction network constructed with data from high-throughput affinity enrichment coupled to mass spectrometry provides a highly saturated yeast interactome with 31,004 interactions, including low-abundance complexes, membrane protein complexes and non-taggable protein complexes.

Binding of a sialoglycan-based primary receptor by the spike protein of the common cold human coronavirus HKU1 triggers conformational changes to a state that would allow binding to a second receptor required for cell entry.

We demonstrate that the transmembrane protease TMPRSS2 is a receptor for coronavirus HKU1; it triggers HKU1-mediated cell–cell fusion and viral entry by binding to both HKU1A and HKU1B spikes.