Articles in 2024

The discovery that an evolutionarily conserved molecule used to make cholesterol also acts as a defence against a cell-death mechanism called ferroptosis might lead to new ways to treat cancer and other clinical conditions.

PhD candidate Dirley Cortés says that it takes grit and guts to navigate the challenges of being a Latin American woman in palaeontology.

A neural probe has been used to capture the activity of large populations of single neurons as people are speaking or listening, providing detailed insights into how the brain encodes specific features of speech.

A technique for embedding fibres with semiconductor devices produces defect-free strands that are hundreds of metres long. Garments woven with these threads offer a tantalizing glimpse of the wearable electronics of the future.

Environmental workers in the government have stopped field operations, and might halt work altogether.

Early embryonic development in humans remains poorly understood. A 3D cellular model called bilaminoids, generated using ‘naive’ pluripotent stem cells and derived cell types, successfully recapitulates early development and enables mechanistic studies to examine how various cellular components interact to regulate early embryogenesis.

Analysis of stone tools and DNA reveals when modern humans reached northern Europe, and why human brain cells grow so slowly.

We investigate the mechanism underlying the sulfur reduction reaction that plays a central role in high-capacity lithium sulfur batteries, highlighting the electrocatalytic approach as a promising strategy for tackling the fundamental challenges associated with these batteries.

A machine learning model for generating crop-specific and spatially explicit NH₃ emission factors globally shows that global NH₃ emissions in 2018 were lower than previous estimates that did not fully consider fertilizer management practices.

Proferroptotic activity of 7-dehydrocholesterol reductase is shown along with an unexpected prosurvival function of its substrate, 7-dehydrocholesterol, indicating a cell-intrinsic mechanism that could be used by cancer cells to protect phospholipids from oxidative damage and escape ferroptosis.

The slow maturation of human neurons is regulated by epigenetic modification in nascent neurons, mediated by EZH2, EHMT1, EHMT2 and DOT1L.

Structural changes mediated by advanced glycation end-products enhance extracellular matrix viscoelasticity, and that viscoelasticity can promote cancer progression in vivo, independent of stiffness.

Excitonic single-photon superradiance is reported in individual perovskite quantum dots with a sub-100 ps radiative decay time, almost as short as the reported exciton coherence time.

Neuropixels recordings from the language-dominant prefrontal cortex reveal a structured organization of planned words, an encoding cascade of phonetic representations by prefrontal neurons in humans and a cellular process that could support the production of speech.

Serial femtosecond crystallography reveals the structural dynamics of photosystem II during the S-state transitions that produce dioxygen, providing insight into electron transfer, water insertion, proton release and O–O bond formation on sub-microsecond timescales.

Through archaeological excavation, morphological and proteomic taxonomic identification, mitochondrial DNA analysis and direct radiocarbon dating of human remains, a study reports the presence of Homo sapiens in Germany north of the Alps more than 45,000 years ago.

A computational model generates conformational ensembles of 28,058 intrinsically disordered proteins and regions (IDRs) in the human proteome and sheds light on the relationship between sequence, conformational properties and functions of IDRs.

Sea otters recolonizing an estuary in California indirectly reduce erosion by reducing burrowing crab abundance, suggesting that restoring predators could be a key mechanism to improve the stability of coastal wetlands and other ecosystems.

The E3 ligase SIFI is identified as a dedicated silencing factor of the integrated stress response, a finding that has implications for the development of therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases caused by mitochondrial protein import stress.

We develop a proton-exchange membrane system that reduces CO₂ to formic acid at a catalyst that is derived from waste lead–acid batteries and in which a lattice carbon activation mechanism contributes.