Reviews & Analysis

Hybrid molecules containing organic and inorganic components were assembled through bottom-up synthesis into a continuous network of interpenetrating molecular-scale organic and inorganic ionic domains. The resulting material, called elastic ceramic plastic, shows ceramic-like hardness and strength, rubber-like deformability and resilience, and plastic-like mouldability.

A previously unknown neural circuit in the brains of female mice is activated during infanticidal behaviour, and reciprocally inhibits another circuit that promotes maternal-care behaviour. These circuits show opposing changes in excitability when female mice become mothers, explaining the switch in young-directed behaviours that occurs with motherhood.

An experiment testing two opposing theories about how biodiversity is governed in communities was done at seawall structures at the boundary between high and low tides. Rather than the conventional model, the results support one that suggests that immigration has a larger role in maintaining diversity than do niches.

Brain activity is structured in space and time. The resulting activity patterns are conventionally thought to depend on an intricate web of anatomical connections that link specialized populations of cells. This work challenges this paradigm by showing that macroscale neuronal dynamics of the human brain are fundamentally shaped by its physical geometry.

Cash-transfer programmes have emerged as central components of poverty-reduction strategies in many countries, and became even more common during the COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis of 37 low- and middle-income countries finds that these programmes led to marked reductions in population-level mortality in adult women and young children.

Axonemes are molecular machines that enable the movement of cilia, the hair-like structures found on the surface of some cells. Atomic models of axonemes from the flagella of green algae and from the cilia of human respiratory-tract cells reveal how the axoneme enables the cilia to move, and explain the effects of genetic mutations that cause human ciliary disease.

A deep-learning model called Geneformer has been developed and pretrained using about 30 million single-cell gene-expression profiles to enable it to make predictions about gene-network biology in instances in which gene-expression data are limited. Geneformer can be tuned for many downstream applications to accelerate discovery of key gene-network regulators and candidate therapeutic targets.

An original class of strong, ductile titanium alloy containing the inexpensive and abundant oxygen and iron as principal alloying elements has been created using 3D printing. The research findings offer promise for turning low‑quality titanium sponge — a waste product of the energy-intensive production of titanium — into high‑performance titanium alloys, and for innovative alloy engineering.

The degree of ionization inside giant planets and stars determines their material properties. In burning stars, ionization is controlled by temperature, whereas pressure-driven ionization is dominant in cooler objects. Experiments creating the extreme conditions needed for pressure-driven ionization in the laboratory shed light on this complex process.

Nematode worms that parasitize plants ravage food crops and threaten global food security. Conventional nematode control relies on agrochemicals that are broadly toxic, so less-risky strategies are needed. Benign precursor chemicals that are metabolically converted to lethal products selectively in worm tissue could be the solution.

Although crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells were developed nearly 70 years ago, their use is still limited. Tailoring the structural symmetry on the edges of textured c-Si wafers changes their fracture mechanism such that they can be used to fabricate flexible solar cells with a bending radius of about 8 millimetres.

Bacterial infections with Pseudomonas aeruginosa can shift between chronic and acute. An investigation of P. aeruginosa gene expression during human infection identified a small RNA that is expressed in low-oxygen conditions and controls this transition.

Analyses of chromosome organization across diverse animals and non-animals provide evidence that a group of marine creatures called ctenophores, or comb jellies, are the sister clade of all other animals, bringing to bear new methods to answer a long-standing evolutionary question.

Polygenic scores can estimate the likelihood of an individual having a certain trait by using the contributions of thousands of genetic variants in their genome. An analysis shows that the accuracy of these scores varies between individuals across a continuum of genetic ancestry, even in populations conventionally considered homogeneous.

Most light-field sensors — devices that detect the angles of incoming light rays to reconstruct 3D scenes — can detect light only in the ultraviolet and visible wavelength ranges. A newly developed light-field sensor comprising perovskite nanocrystals encodes the angles of incoming visible-light beams and X-rays as different colours.

An innovative method was used to obtain a woman’s rich DNA record from a 20,000-year-old pendant found in Siberia, providing the first direct genetic evidence for the identity of an individual who handled an object in the deep past.

Crassviruses are the most abundant, and among the most genetically diverse, viruses found in the human gut. New structural information about these viruses has shed light on the functions of previously uncharacterized proteins in virus-particle assembly and infection.

CEBRA is a machine-learning method that can be used to compress time series in a way that reveals otherwise hidden structures in the variability of the data. It excels at processing behavioural and neural data recorded simultaneously, and it can decode activity from the visual cortex of the mouse brain to reconstruct a viewed video.

It emerges that copper ions found in cell organelles called mitochondria regulate the cellular changes that underlie transitions in cell state. A small molecule that inhibits copper-mediated catalysis can suppress the activation of immune cells called macrophages, conferring therapeutic benefits in models of acute inflammation.

Multisensory information improves subsequent memory performance. In Drosophila flies, learning re-routes activity through neuronal networks in the brain such that individual components of a multisensory experience can trigger retrieval of the memory of the whole event. As a result, memory performance for both the combined and individual components of the experience is improved.