Reviews & Analysis

Biodiversity experiments show that a high diversity of plants increases the accumulation of soil carbon and nitrogen, but whether such conclusions hold in natural ecosystems is debated. An analysis of Canada’s National Forest Inventory provides strong evidence that the build-up of soil carbon and nitrogen on a decadal timescale increased with improved tree diversity in natural forest ecosystems.

Creating protein interactions through computational design is a key challenge in the fields of both basic and translational biology. An approach that uses the machine-learned fingerprints of protein-surface features was used to produce synthetic proteins that engage immunotherapeutic or viral targets with binding affinities comparable to those of naturally occurring proteins.

Gram-negative bacteria that are resistant to multiple drugs cannot survive without the cell-surface machinery that builds a β-barrel pore structure from outer membrane proteins. Snapshots of different stages in the assembly process provide insights into this crucial mechanism, and could lead to the development of new antibiotics.

An innovative approach has been developed to break down plastic polymers into their monomer building blocks. It uses a continuous melting, wicking, vaporization and reaction process in a porous carbon-bilayer structure, and can convert two model plastic polymers to their monomers at high yields without a catalyst.

Quantum materials can host exotic phases of matter in which electrons form unusual collective states. Scientists have struggled to observe the quantization that these electronic states are expected to show, but this phenomenon has now been detected in heavy states at the surface of a superconducting quantum material.

Intracellular machines called ribosomes use messenger-RNA sequences to synthesize proteins. Investigations using single-molecule imaging and cryo-electron microscopy techniques reveal structural and kinetic differences in how human ribosomes function compared with those of bacteria. These differences explain why ribosomes in cell-nucleus-bearing species are slower and more accurate than their bacterial counterparts.

Landforms across the mid-Norwegian sea floor reveal that a former ice sheet retreated at up to 600 metres per day at the end of the last ice age. Pulses of similarly rapid retreat could soon be observed across flat-bedded areas of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Land-use changes alter the exchange of greenhouse gases, but the magnitudes of these effects remain uncertain. Estimates of net greenhouse-gas emissions associated with different uses of tropical peatland in Indonesia — including intact forest and Acacia tree plantations — could inform science-based practices for managing peatlands as nature-based mitigators of climate change.

A catalyst with a hydrophobic cavity that contains an active iron centre has been developed to convert methane into methanol. It has a ‘catch-and-release’ mechanism whereby a hydrophobic methane molecule enters the cavity for oxidation and the resulting hydrophilic methanol molecule is released into the surrounding aqueous solution.

Genetic scores for predicting levels of several types of biomolecule have been developed and validated in people of diverse ancestries, and used to uncover insights into disease biology. An open resource to disseminate these scores, OmicsPred, will enable researchers to predict various molecular traits from genetic profiles in their own data sets.

Analyses of ancient DNA from 80 individuals buried in medieval Swahili stone towns along the East African coast revealed that these individuals had both African and Asian ancestry. The findings suggest that in most cases, African women began having children with Asian men at least 1,000 years ago, at several locations along the coast.

The number of distinguishable conductance levels in memristor devices — electronic components that store information without power — has been limited by noise. An understanding of the source of the noise, and development of an effective denoising process, have now enabled 2,048 conductance levels to be achieved in memristors in large arrays fabricated in a chip factory.

Galaxy clusters are among the largest objects in the Universe to be held together by their own gravity. Most of the ordinary matter in nearby galaxy clusters is associated with a diffuse, hot-gas component. The detection of this ‘intracluster medium’ in a distant protocluster of galaxies sheds light on the cluster’s formation history.

An unprecedented data set of the body measurements of 71 million children and adolescents reveals that, in most countries, growing up in cities no longer results in the height advantage seen in most of the world in the 1990s. However, in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the growth and development advantages of urban living have been amplified.

A generalizable technique has been developed to create diverse functional inorganic membranes on the surface of various aqueous solutions. The technique ensures that the air–liquid interface receives a continuous supply of floating particles, which then assemble dynamically to form continuous membranes.

Quantum information in superconducting processors is stored as low-energy microwave photons, but transmitting this information over long distances to build a quantum network requires conversion of low-energy photons to high-energy optical photons. Laser-cooled rubidium atoms now enable conversion between photons with vastly different energies.

Since 2008, population densities of shallow-reef fishes, invertebrates and seaweeds around Australia have generally decreased near the northern limits of species’ ranges, and increased near their southern limits. Endemic invertebrates and seaweeds that prefer cold waters showed the steepest declines, and are prevented by deep-ocean barriers from moving south as temperatures rise.

Sleep in the bearded dragon Pogona vitticeps comprises two alternating stages. During one of the stages, the activities of a structure called the claustrum in the left and right hemispheres of the brain are precisely coordinated but show competitive dynamics that depend on circuits in the midbrain typically associated with vision and attention.

The zebra finch’s courtship song consists of a fixed sequence of vocal elements called syllables. A small structure in the thalamus, deep in the brain, forms connections with a set of nerve cells that become active at the beginning of syllables, thereby initiating components of the finch’s vocal repertoire.

Circadian clocks, the biochemical oscillators that are controlled by the day–night cycle, have a central role in many biological processes. The mechanism underlying the earliest form of such oscillators involves the proteins KaiB and KaiC that orchestrate the addition and removal of a phosphate group to and from KaiC.