Reviews & Analysis

MicroLED displays have advantages over commercially available technologies, but are difficult to put together efficiently. Agitating microLED chiplets and a substrate together in fluid causes them to self‑assemble quickly and with high yield.

Origami — the art of making various shapes from a single piece of paper — has been realized at the nanoscale using DNA. Sheets of ‘DNA wireframe paper’ have been developed that, through folding along crease lines, can be transformed into a range of target shapes in response to external stimuli.

Restricting dietary calories leads to weight loss, but with time these effects diminish because the body’s metabolism slows down. A hormone called GDF15 is now shown to maintain weight loss during dieting by promoting energy expenditure through the activation of pathways that affect calcium levels in skeletal muscle.

As the climate warms, the amount of atmospheric water vapour increases and the type of precipitation shifts towards more rain and less snow. These two mechanisms amplify the intensity of rainfall extremes in high-elevation regions by 15% per degree Celsius of warming, approximately double the previously reported rate.

The eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, which today is a major oxygen-deficient zone, or ‘dead zone’, was well oxygenated during the Miocene warm period about 16 million years ago. This finding supports model simulations suggesting that modern oxygen loss from the ocean might eventually reverse.

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system and a common cause of chronic neurological disability in young adults. A systematic search identifies genetic variants associated with differences in severity and confirms resilience of the central nervous system to be an important determinant of outcome.

Surfaces that contain cholesterol, such as the skin of some invertebrates, can repel other molecules, preventing the adsorption of proteins and bacteria. Experiments, simulations and thermodynamic analyses show that this repulsive quality depends on cholesterol molecules rotating freely and switching their orientation.

The function of immune cells called B cells in cancer has been controversial. Single-cell profiling has identified a previously undescribed subset of B cells that express a protein called TIM-1 and that multiply in response to melanoma tumour growth. Deletion of the gene that encodes TIM-1 in these cells unleashed an antitumour immune response.

Genes in agricultural crops are usually fine-tuned through long periods of evolution and crop domestication. In a modern strategy to genetically improve crops, genome editing was used to rapidly develop a variant of a rice gene that shows promise for increasing the plant’s resistance to several diseases.

In the first phase of its project to produce a genome reference that represents the genetic diversity of the people of China, the Chinese Pangenome Consortium analyse genomic sequences from 58 individuals representing 36 minority ethnic groups in China. The data capture genomic variability that is not currently reflected in human reference genomes.

The synthesis of high-entropy alloy nanoparticles (HEA-NPs) — small particles each containing multiple principal metal elements — typically requires extreme conditions to ensure adequate mixing of constituents. Innovative experiments show that the liquid metal can act as a mixing reservoir to facilitate the synthesis of a diverse range of such nanoparticles in mild conditions.

A minimal but general method has been developed for catalysing many different cross-coupling reactions — those in which two chemical fragments are joined. It requires only the two substrate substances, a nickel salt as a catalyst precursor, a catalyst for light-driven redox reactions and, in some cases, a nitrogen-containing base.

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.