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A natural seed has inspired the design of a robot that can bury itself in soil when exposed to rainfall. The mechanism relies on the shape-changing properties of wood — a simple and elegant example of sustainable innovation.
An antibody treatment reduces measurements of brain abnormalities called amyloid plaques in people with Alzheimer’s disease, and lessens clinical decline. This result will help in developing therapies to treat and prevent the disease.
An analysis of rare genetic variants reveals that they influence human traits through similar biological pathways to common ones. The work deepens our understanding of how this type of variant affects complex traits.
An impressive combination of modelling and data analysis has enabled a new estimate of the extent of wetland losses over the past few centuries — and reveals that an area about the size of India has been lost since 1700.
A computational tool called CellOracle can predict how networks of genes interact to program cell identity during embryonic development. The tool should help to hone efforts to understand how development is regulated.
An object in the distant Solar System has been shown to have a ring that is unusually far from its host — prompting speculation about how the ring material has avoided clumping together to form moons.
An assessment of juniper tree-ring samples from central Turkey, together with other types of dating analysis, demonstrate that a devastating drought in 1198–1196 bc contributed to the end of the Hittite empire.
Signals from gut microorganisms to the brain might be involved in neurodegeneration. It emerges that the gene APOE — variants of which each confer a different risk of Alzheimer’s disease — has a role in modulating this gut–brain communication.
A 319-million-year-old fossil provides the oldest known evidence of preserved vertebrate brain tissue. This specimen offers insights into the brain evolution of ray-finned fishes, the most diverse group of living vertebrates.
A light-activated ‘plasmonic’ catalyst, made from abundant elements, produces as much hydrogen from ammonia as do the most-used heat-activated catalysts based on a rarer element, suggesting a strategy for sustainable chemical production.
When a semiconductor material called black phosphorus is hit with intense laser light, the behaviour of its electrons is found to change. The discovery opens a route to time-dependent engineering of exotic electronic phases in solids.
Antibodies that activate stimulatory or inhibitory receptors are of great therapeutic interest for the treatment of cancer or autoimmune diseases. It emerges that such antibodies work better if they don’t bind to receptors too tightly.
What ingredients and processes underlay mummification in ancient Egypt? The molecular analysis of labelled pots excavated from an embalming workshop provides some answers to this question.
Engineering the energies of ultracold molecules when they collide has been shown to enhance the probability that they will form complexes — an exciting prospect for precisely controlled chemistry.
The discovery of bacterial compounds that have antifungal properties opens up opportunities for the development of agents that protect crops from a devastating disease.
Experiments on ultracold atoms reveal that disorder doesn’t stop a quantum system of interacting particles from reaching thermal equilibrium. Instead, small thermalized regions ripple like an avalanche through the whole system.
High-resolution structures of the bacterial Rho protein in complex with an RNA polymerase enzyme and partner proteins provide support for the long-held model of how Rho helps to terminate gene transcription.
