Volume 627 Issue 8005, 28 March 2024

Why are companies and governments determined to start commercial-scale mining for rare metals, when so little is known about its wider impacts?

Institutions and individuals from low- and middle-income countries are wasting time, effort and money trying to get visas for research travel, only to be rejected. A new approach is needed.

Scientists identify a molecule that halts cholesterol production in the liver when dietary consumption is high.

House prices drop by 1% if wind turbines are close and visible, but they rebound quickly.

Data from billions of proton collisions reveal that subatomic particles called W⁺ and W⁻ bosons keep company with a photon.

Scientists turn waste wood into an ‘ink’ that can be printed into a variety of structures.

The treatment, called NexCAR19, raises hopes that this transformative class of medicine will become more readily available in low- and middle-income countries.

Pig organs could provide temporary detox for people whose livers need time to recover or who are awaiting human donors.

The entrepreneur endorses the drug, but researchers caution that it’s not to be taken lightly.

Researchers in Russia expect growing isolation as Vladimir Putin embarks on six more years as president.

Michel Talagrand laid mathematical groundwork that has allowed others to tackle problems involving random processes.

Due to come online this year, the JUNO facility will help to determine which type of neutrino has the highest mass — one of the biggest mysteries in physics.

A popular theory about how trees cooperate has enchanted the public and raised the profile of forest conservation. But some ecologists think its scientific basis has been oversold.

Researchers are tracing sources of racial and gender bias in images generated by artificial intelligence, and making efforts to fix them.

Astronomer Fred Hoyle supposedly coined the catchy term to ridicule the theory of the Universe’s origins — 75 years on, it’s time to set the record straight.

Pathologist whose finding that viruses can trigger tumours in humans transformed medical research.

Fifty years ago, a group of women from the villages of the Western Himalayas sparked Chipko, a green movement that remains relevant in the age of climate change.

Four scientists reflect on how to foster a more sustainable relationship between water and society amid complex and wide-ranging challenges.

Molecular biologist Alka Rao brought together her research group and sign-language specialists to broaden access to science for deaf students in India.

Digvijay Singh, a deaf sign-language educator, works with biology researchers and sign-language specialists to add to the scientific lexicon for deaf students in India.

Megan Majocha is gearing up to complete her PhD. But developing a sign-language lexicon to help her succeed took an immense toll during her scientific research.

Mariton Antonia Bornas runs a Filipino volcano research and response organization.

Clever manipulation of electrons has enabled scientists to change a key property of light emitted by a device using electrically controlled magnetization. The method could lead to stable and energy-efficient information transfer.

For a century, scientists pondered whether bird flight evolved by animals gliding down from trees or by creatures running and flapping from the ground up. A landmark 1974 paper reset the debate to focus on the evolution of the flight stroke instead.

Reconstructions of the strength of a powerful current that circles the South Pole reveal that it has undergone no long-term change in the past five million years, even though Earth cooled substantially over that time.

A method for imaging the production of blood cells in the bones of mice has revealed the organization of cell lineages, both in a steady state and in response to stressors, such as bleeding and infection.

Diamond layers can help to dissipate the heat generated by high-power semiconductor devices. This effect has now been enhanced by adding layers of materials and engineering their crystal-lattice vibrations to be compatible at the interfaces.

The central nervous system’s astrocyte cells respond to injury and disease. The finding that they form molecular memories of certain responses, and that these modify inflammatory signalling, sheds light on autommunity.

Efficiency roll-off in a wide range of TADF OLEDs is analysed and a figure of merit proposed for materials design to improve efficiency at high brightness, potentially expanding the range of applications of TADF materials.

A type II supernova (SN 2023ixf) was observed in the galaxy M101 at a distance of 6.85  ±  0.15 Mpc, at about 1.0  h after the explosion.

Using ultraviolet data as well as a comprehensive set of further multiwavelength observations of the supernova 2023ixf, a reliable bolometric light curve is derived that indicates the heating nature of the early emission.

Relativistic jets observed from transient neutron stars throughout the Universe produce bright flares for minutes after each X-ray burst, helping to determine the role individual system properties have on the speed and revealing the dominant launching mechanism.

We report the experimental realization of a bosonic Kitaev chain in a nano-optomechanical network.

Initialization and operation of spin qubits in silicon above 1 K reach fidelities sufficient for fault-tolerant operations at these temperatures.

An end-to-end quantum error correction protocol that implements fault-tolerant memory on the basis of a family of low-density parity-check codes shows the possibility of low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum memory within the reach of near-term quantum processors.

The helicity of light from a light-emitting diode can be electrically controlled by spin–orbit torque effects, enabling a seamless integration of magnetization dynamics with photonics.

The strength of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, as traced in sediment cores from the Pacific Southern Ocean, shows no linear long-term trend over the past 5.3 Myr; instead, the strongest flow occurs consistently in warmer-than-present intervals.

A global high-resolution disaster footprint analytical model is developed to show substantial socioeconomic impacts from climatic change-driven heat stress through the global supply chain by 2060 due to direct and indirect effects on health and labour productivity.

Burial-dating methods using cosmogenic nuclides indicate that the oldest stone tools at Korolevo archaeological site in western Ukraine date to around 1.4 million years ago, providing evidence of early human dispersal into Europe from the east.

A chromosome-scale genome assembly for the hagfish Eptatretus atami, combined with a series of phylogenetic analyses, sheds light on ancient polyploidization events that had a key role in the early evolution of vertebrates.

Longitudinal calcium imaging reveals the ability of corner cells to synchronize their activity with the environment, with the results implying the potential of the subiculum to contain the information required to reconstruct spatial environments.

A specific neural reflex of the vagus nerve is identified that induces gasping in response to airway closure.

This study develops a method for spatially resolving multipotent haematopoiesis, erythropoiesis and lymphopoiesis in mice and uncovers heterogeneous haematopoietic stress responses in different bones.

Binding of the substrates NAD⁺ and ATP to the plant Toll/interleukin-1 receptor (TIR) domain proteins induces phase separation and, thereby, activation of TIR enzymatic and immune signalling activity.

Combining single-cell RNA-sequencing with high-resolution multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization reveals in detail the cellular interactions and specialization of cardiac cell types that form and remodel the human heart.

In an experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis model in mice, a subset of astrocytes retains an epigenetically regulated memory of past inflammation, causing exacerbated inflammation upon subsequent rechallenge.

The ubiquitin proteasomal system degrades nuclear cGAS in cycling cells.

We uncover key processes of the genomic evolution of small cell lung cancer under therapy, identify the common ancestor as the source of clonal diversity at relapse and show central genomic patterns associated with drug response.

Structures of the yeast replisome associated with the FACT complex and an evicted histone hexamer offer insights into the mechanism of replication-coupled histone recycling for maintaining epigenetic inheritance.

A study describes an approach using designed building blocks that are far more regular in geometry than natural proteins to construct modular multicomponent protein assemblies.

Multiresolution computational simulations generate all-atom models of a complete packaged virus particle.

Cultivation of a new anoxygenic phototrophic bacterium from Boreal Shield lake water—representing a transition form in the evolution of photosynthesis—offers insights into how the major modes of phototrophy diversified.