Perspectives

The Impact of Genomic Variation on Function Consortium is combining single-cell mapping, genomic perturbations and predictive modelling to investigate relationships between human genomic variation, genome function and phenotypes and will provide an open resource to the community.

Evidence from neuroscience and related fields suggests that language and thought processes operate in distinct networks in the human brain and that language is optimized for communication and not for complex thought.

This Perspective considers the implications of advances in human physiology, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics and long-term culture of resected human brain tissue for the study of network-level activity in human neuroscience.

This Perspective views brain development in terms of developmental tempo along the human lineage and reviews the contributions of recent technical advances to our understanding of neurodevelopment.

Focusing on the role of external forcing, an investigation of the causes of observed changes in the tropical Pacific surface warming pattern over recent decades discusses a possible shift in the drivers of this pattern.

The current ‘second space age’ has enabled multiple studies on the effects of spaceflight on human physiology and health, which are contributing to the development of measures that will be needed to maintain astronaut health in future space missions.

This Perspective identifies common misperceptions regarding the harms of online misinformation, finding that exposure to false and inflammatory content is rare and concentrated among a small minority of people who already have extreme views.

Efforts to find renewable alternatives to fossil fuels that might enable a carbon-neutral society by 2050 are described, as well as outlining a possible roadmap towards a refinery of the future and evaluating its requirements.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence tools in scientific research risks creating illusions of understanding, where scientists believe they understand more about the world than they actually do.

To reduce voltage drops—the depreciation of the cost–benefit profile when scaling up solutions to social problems—sufficient policy-based evidence must be generated before policymakers scale up the project.

Four future greenhouse gas emission scenarios for the global plastics system are investigated, with the lead scenario achieving net-zero emissions, and a series of  technical, legal and economic interventions recommended.

A roadmap towards solving the cis-regulatory code using a combination of machine learning and massively parallel assays of exogenous DNA is proposed.

By casting large-language-model-based dialogue-agent behaviour in terms of role play, it is possible to describe dialogue-agent behaviour such as (apparent) deception and (apparent) self-awareness without misleadingly ascribing human characteristics to the models.

This Perspective reviews successful applications of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and presents a case for fMRI as a central hub on which to integrate the dispersed subfields of systems, cognitive, computational and clinical neuroscience.

The mechanisms by which mitochondria are transferred between cells and how intercellular mitochondria transfer regulates physiological processes and disease pathogenesis are discussed.

Technical developments and large collaborative research networks in neurogenomics promise rapid progress in neuroscience, but translation of results from model systems to human brains is limited by sample availability, technical challenges and ethical issues.

Although the catalogue of human protein-coding genes is nearing completion, the number of non-coding RNA genes remains highly uncertain, and for all genes much work remains to be done to understand their functions.

The challenges and opportunities for the design of field-effect transistors are discussed and a vision of future transistors and potential innovation opportunities is provided.

The rationale behind chimaeric antigen receptor T cell therapy is reviewed, and current challenges in oncology, preliminary reports in noncancerous diseases and relevant emerging technologies are discussed.