Volume 624 Issue 7991, 14 December 2023

As large-scale neuroscience projects start to yield results, sharing data standards will become increasingly important.

Digital archivists are already experts at tackling the complex challenges of making research data open and accessible. We can help to smooth the transition.

Scientists studying the electrical charge on coffee particles stumble on a secret to a better cup of joe.

Insects trapped in amber reveal that male mosquitoes, too, could once extract blood.

The western coast of Colombia can get more than 26 metres of rain a year, thanks to the influence of air jets hitting the Andes range.

The extravagantly feathered Seychelles paradise flycatcher lacks genetic diversity, which might hamper its resilience to climate change and other threats.

Report also supports projects of unprecedented scale to study dark matter, neutrinos and the Higgs boson.

Polar ice, coral reefs and other Earth systems could cross irrevocable thresholds soon, but urgent action could stave off the worst effects.

Landmark approval of the first CRISPR therapy paves the way for treatments based on more efficient and more precise genome editors.

Researchers look ahead to the potential uses and benefits of a technology that has been more than 20 years in the making.

One organ in a person’s body can age faster than the rest — with implications for health and mortality.

The company announces its latest huge chip — but will now focus on developing smaller chips with a fresh approach to ‘error correction’.

Ten years after cannabis was first legalized for casual use in adults, scientists are struggling to provide evidence-based recommendations about the risks to young people.

The area surrounding the nuclear reactor was a science hotspot — until it was on the front line of the Ukraine war.

To understand the true otherness of Neanderthals, researchers must rethink the meaning they give to their archaeological finds, argues a new book.

A hundred years after the birth of modern Turkey, a monumental research project is uncovering the untold story of science and technology during six centuries of the Ottoman Empire.

Just 100 years ago, we understood astoundingly little about sleep and dreaming. A tight-knit band of researchers changed things, against sometimes considerable odds.

A career leap into the unknown can be unsettling, but you can take steps to ease the transition.

Sthabile Kolwa uses data from South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope to shed light on black holes and how the Universe evolves.

A transcription factor in immune cells forms an unexpectedly ladder-like complex with two DNA molecules, allowing the expression of genes that these cells need to suppress harmful immune responses.

Researchers have made a key breakthrough in how light is used to control time signals from the world’s most precise clocks. The technique marks a crucial step in bringing this technology into everyday life.

A meta-analysis of the diets of domestic cats.

Identifying nutrient dependencies of cancer cells is crucial for developing new therapies. The discovery that an aggressive type of cancer cell has a high uptake of vitamin B5 sheds light on the link between vitamin availability and tumour growth.

Ultrathin semiconductor materials that mimic twisted layers of atoms have been used to build synchronized arrays of nanometre-scale lasers. The systems can be configured — and easily reconfigured — to form intricate patterns.

Fatal renal dysfunction is often associated with tumour development. Fly and mouse data reveal evolutionarily conserved mechanisms that link tumours to renal failure and offer potential for future therapeutic approaches.

In a huge collaborative effort, millions of cells in the mouse brain have been mapped in detail. Two scientists examine the resulting wealth of insights into gene regulation in brain cells, neuronal connections and how our own brains evolved.

Observations from the JWST MIRI showed the detection of ¹⁴NH₃ and ¹⁵NH₃ isotopologues in the atmosphere of a cool brown dwarf, along with a ¹⁴N/¹⁵N value consistent with star-like formation by gravitational collapse.

The passive and electronics-free Kerr-induced synchronization of optical-frequency combs could be used in their control and stabilization and to simplify optical clock systems.

Imaging of quantum oscillations in Bernal-stacked trilayer graphene with dual gates enables high-precision reconstruction of the highly tunable bands and reveals naturally occurring pseudomagnetic fields as low as 1 mT corresponding to graphene twisting by 1 millidegree.

A reconfigurable coherent moiré nanolaser array based on optical flatbands in twisted photonic graphene lattices enables arrays with phase synchronization and high spatial and spectral coherence across a range of distinct patterns.

A co-adsorbent is used to achieve a uniform self-assembled phosphonic acid monolayer on a textured substrate, leading to more efficient inverted perovskite solar cells.

Water-responsive supercontractile polymer films composed of poly(ethylene oxide) and poly(ethylene glycol)-α-cyclodextrin inclusion complex contract by more than 50% of their original length within seconds after wetting and become soft and stretchable hydrogel thin films that can be used in bioelectronic interfaces.

A rubber in which highly entangled long polymers strongly adhere with rigid particles deconcentrates stress across multiple scales, amplifying the fatigue threshold.

A Sobol attribution analysis unveils the roles of mitigation targets, model differences and scenario assumptions in shaping climate policy scenario outcomes.

 A transcriptomic cell-type atlas of the whole adult mouse brain with ~5,300 clusters built from single-cell and spatial transcriptomic datasets with more than eight million cells reveals remarkable cell type diversity across the brain and unique cell type characteristics of different brain regions. 

To construct a comprehensive atlas of cell types in each brain structure, we paired high-throughput single-nucleus RNA sequencing with Slide-seq, a recently developed spatial transcriptomics method with near-cellular resolution, across the entire mouse brain.

A comprehensive cell atlas of the whole mouse brain with high molecular and spatial resolution is generated.

This study uses epi-retro-seq to link single-cell epigenomes and cell types to long-distance projections for neurons dissected from different regions projecting to different targets across the whole mouse brain.

Methylome-based clustering and cross-modality integration with companion datasets from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network enabled the construction of a 3D multi-omic genome atlas of the adult mouse brain featuring thousands of cell-type-specific profiles.

An atlas of candidate cis-regulatory DNA elements (cCREs) in the adult mouse brain unravels the transcriptional regulatory programs that drive the heterogeneity and complexity of brain structure and function.

A single-cell multiomics analysis of over 200,000 cells of the primary motor cortex of human, macaque, marmoset and mouse shows that divergence of transcription factor expression corresponds to species-specific epigenome landscapes, and conserved and divergent gene regulatory features are reflected in the evolution of the three-dimensional genome.

In this study, the authors develop a comprehensive taxonomy of brain-wide SPNs, identifying several novel subsets via their transcriptional signatures.

Single-cell and single-nucleus transcriptomic analysis of retina from 17 vertebrate species shows high conservation of retinal cell types and suggests that midget retinal ganglion cells in primates evolved from orthologous cells in ancestral mammals.

Experiments using conserved tumour models show that the G-protein-coupled receptor TkR99D in Drosophila Malphigian tubular stellate cells and NK3R in mouse renal tubules link malignant tumours to defective excretory functions.

FOXP3 uses the forkhead domain to form a higher-order multimer after binding to T_nG repeat microsatellites.

Activated human caspase-4 directly and efficiently processes IL-18 in vitro and during bacterial infections, cleaving the same tetrapeptide site in pro-IL-18 as caspase-1.

The human lipopolysaccharide receptor caspase-4 captures its cytokine substrate pro-IL-18 via a mechanism that is distinct from known caspase–substrate interactions, leading to inflammasome-independent IL-18 release from macrophages.