Volume 628 Issue 8008, 18 April 2024

Tackling plastic pollution needs scientists to be in the negotiating room at upcoming talks.

A United Nations-backed agreement to end plastic pollution is within reach — but only if scientists, civil society and businesses unite against powerful vested interests.

Everyone who reviews a manuscript should answer a transparent set of questions, to ensure that scientific literature is subject to reliable quality control.

People who survived paediatric cancers age faster and are at higher risk of early death.

Discovery in sharks suggests that these sensory receptors date back to some 450 million years ago.

Long-lived compounds emitted by industry reach the oceans and are then ferried by bubbles into the atmosphere.

Astronomers spot the first planet outside the Solar System to boast a phenomenon reminiscent of a rainbow.

Amateur and professional astronomers share with Nature what they observed and what data they collected when the Moon blocked the Sun.

The confidential 124-page report from the University of Rochester, disclosed in a lawsuit, details the extent of Ranga Dias’s scientific misconduct.

A study of review reports identifies dozens of adjectives that could indicate text written with the help of chatbots.

A virus that has killed hundreds of millions of birds has now infected cattle in six US states, but the threat to humans is currently low.

The bioengineered immune players called CAR T cells last longer and work better if pumped up with a large dose of a protein that makes them resemble stem cells.

Many researchers think that Wegovy and Ozempic should be taken for life, but myriad factors can force people off them.

Wastewater testing grew tremendously during the pandemic. But is it ready to tackle the opioid crisis, air pollution and antibiotic resistance?

A moving memoir of botany and motherhood explores the historical pressures on female scientists.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Researcher and prolific science communicator who laid bare the social lives of apes.

Researchers from the global south face often-distressing immigration bureaucracy that most from the global north do not. Six steps can begin to counteract this inequity.

Will a growth in postdoctoral positions across Africa cause bottlenecks, replicating the career-progression challenges faced by scientists elsewhere?

A pioneering ‘connectomics’ collaboration has successfully reconstructed one cubic millimetre of brain tissue, but researchers are still just scratching the surface of the complexity it contains.

Hanik Humaida monitors the activity of Indonesia’s volcanoes to help protect the public.

Is there a conservation benefit if tropical forests that are affected by logging gain certification from the Forest Stewardship Council? An analysis of the biodiversity outcomes in such tropical forests provides answers.

Microscopic magnetic fields form in non-magnetic materials when light makes the atoms rotate. A similar macroscopic effect has long been known, but proof of its atomic equivalent could give rise to ultrafast data processing.

The sensing of bitter taste results from the complex interplay of many chemical cues and a range of receptors. It emerges that this complexity might be built-in even at the level of individual receptors.

Scientists have designed a liquid that behaves as both a solid and a fluid owing to the presence of tiny gas-filled capsules. An unusual relationship between pressure and volume enables this material to grasp fragile objects.

Paring down the astronomical complexity of the protein-folding problem, plus Isaac Newton’s ambiguous use of the word ‘axiom’, in the weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

Organelles called lysosomes fuse with cargo-carrying vesicles and degrade the cargo molecules. How lysosomes maintain their size despite constant vesicle fusion was unclear, but now factors that aid organelle fission have been found.

Methane emission from a very cool brown dwarf, perhaps arising from an aurora, has been detected in James Webb Space Telescope observations.

A study reports a dual quantum spin Hall insulator in monolayer TaIrTe₄, arising from the interplay of its single-particle topology and density-tuned electron correlations.

Transport evidence of a fractional quantum spin Hall insulator is reported in 2.1°-twisted bilayer MoTe₂, which supports spin-S_z conservation and flat spin-contrasting Chern bands.

A hybrid topological phase of matter is discovered in the simple elemental-solid arsenic and explored using tunnelling microscopy, photoemission spectroscopy and a theoretical analysis.

We demonstrate the emergence of magnetism induced by a terahertz electric field in SrTiO₃.

Ultrafast light-induced driving of phonons at resonance in a substrate facilitates the permanent reversal of the magnetic state of a material mounted on it.

A metafluid with programmable compressibility, optical behaviour and viscosity is realized by mixing deformable spherical shells that undergo buckling within an incompressible fluid; the versatility of these metafluids opens up numerous opportunities for functionality.

Analysis of projected sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation show an income reduction of 19% of the world economy within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices.

Using observations of double-difference relocated earthquakes in a local three-dimensional velocity model for Ecuador, a detailed image of seismicity is created, forming the base for more realistic models of earthquake rupture, slip and hazard in subduction zones.

Camera-trap images of 55 mammal species in 14 logging concessions in western equatorial Africa reveal greater animal encounter rates in FSC-certified than in non-certified forests, especially for large mammals and species of high conservation priority.

A newly described fossil mammaliaform from the Jurassic period of China shows that the shuotheriids are allied to the docodonts, and provides details on the processes of tooth evolution in early mammals.

A new morganucodontan-like species from the Jurassic in China shows evidence of a loss of load-bearing function in the articular–quadrate jaw joint, which probably had a role in the evolution of the mammalian middle ear.

Long conversations online consistently exhibit higher toxicity, yet toxic language does not invariably discourage people from participating in a conversation, and toxicity does not necessarily escalate as discussions evolve.

The hippocampal dentate spike, an understudied population event that frequently occurs between sharp-wave ripples, may underlie a mechanism re-engaging the brain with the external world during synchronous population events, and support memory during non-locomotor behaviour.

Single motor neurons in Drosophila are stimulated to show that they direct head movements towards specific postures rather than generating fixed movement vectors, suggesting that the brain controls movements through a continuing proprioceptive–motor loop.

Experiments in mouse models show that Na_V1.8⁺ nociceptors innervate sites of injury and provide wound repair signals to immune cells by releasing calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP).

Dural-associated lymphoid tissues are lymphoid structures around vascular hubs in the dura mater that sample antigens and rapidly support humoral immune responses after local pathogen challenge.

IL-27RA–IL-27 has a critical role in the immunity to EBV, and this defence is hijacked by Epstein–Barr virus to promote the expansion of infected transformed B cells

The conserved HEAT repeat protein HPO-27 is identified as a lysosome scission factor in Caenorhabditis elegans, and the human homologue MROH1 also serves the same function to maintain lysosomal homeostasis.

Genome-scale genetic screens identify the small RNA-binding protein La as a strong mediator of prime editing.

We introduce multinucleic acid interaction mapping in single cells (MUSIC), for concurrent profiling of multiplex chromatin interactions, gene expression and RNA–chromatin associations within individual nuclei, as a tool for exploring chromatin architecture and transcription.

Cryo-electron microscopy and molecular dynamics studies of a Vitiosangium gasdermin pore reveal insights into the assembly of this large and diverse family of membrane pore-forming proteins.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the type 2 taste receptor TAS2R14 in complex with Ggust and Gi1 identify cholesterol as an orthosteric agonist and the bitter tastant cmpd28.1 as a positive allosteric modulator and agonist.