Reviews & Analysis

A population of neurons that engages mechanisms of the innate immune system during memory formation has been uncovered in mice. Surprisingly, inflammatory signalling might pave the way for long-term memory.

What effects will climate change have on insect communities? Analyses of data collected over decades robustly document consequences specific to bee populations, and this evidence might aid future conservation efforts.

Organelles called lysosomes fuse with cargo-carrying vesicles and degrade the cargo molecules. How lysosomes maintain their size despite constant vesicle fusion was unclear, but now factors that aid organelle fission have been found.

Plans for Sydney’s iconic landmark become concrete, plus a ‘Michelin Guide’ to superconductive tunnelling, in the weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

Complex magnetic structures called skyrmions have been generated on a nanometre scale and controlled electrically — a promising step for fast, energy-efficient computer hardware systems that can store large amounts of data.

The central nervous system’s astrocyte cells respond to injury and disease. The finding that they form molecular memories of certain responses, and that these modify inflammatory signalling, sheds light on autommunity.

A method for imaging the production of blood cells in the bones of mice has revealed the organization of cell lineages, both in a steady state and in response to stressors, such as bleeding and infection.

Understanding the factors that drive formation of particular types of cancer can aid efforts to develop better diagnostics or treatments. The identification of a bacterial subspecies with a connection to colon cancer has clinical relevance.

An array of robots has been set up so that pushes between them produce movements that do not conform to the usual laws of motion. Fascinating behaviour emerges from these interactions: wave phenomena known as solitons.

The quality of a bird’s song during courtship can influence whether a male is selected as a mate. An innovative approach using machine learning offers a way to analyse the characteristics of birdsong.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

For a century, scientists pondered whether bird flight evolved by animals gliding down from trees or by creatures running and flapping from the ground up. A landmark 1974 paper reset the debate to focus on the evolution of the flight stroke instead.

Words and images experienced by an infant wearing sensors during their daily life have led to efficient machine learning, pointing to the power of multimodal training signals and to the potentially exploitable statistics of real-life experience.

Burning events that occur at night have been revealed as a driver of large wildfires. Prolonged drought conditions are to blame, making it easier for fires to spread at night when they would ordinarily slow or extinguish completely.

A trial that took mobile health services to rural Sierra Leone finds that this initiative increased COVID-19 vaccine uptake. But more must be done to expand the coverage of health services in low-income countries.

Combining a high-throughput technique with 3D printing offers a way of fabricating micrometre-sized particles for use in electronics and biotechnology. The versatile method can produce one million intricate shapes in a single day.

The 1964 discovery of Epstein–Barr virus shed light on factors that contribute to human cancer. Subsequent studies set the stage for finding ways to diagnose and treat cancer, and revealed how immune defences control viral infection.

Why do several species of whale experience menopause, and why does the phenomenon occur at all? Analysing whale data might help to answer these questions and shed light on why menopause evolved in humans.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Direct interactions between cells in tissue are incompletely understood because the advanced technologies required to examine them are still in their infancy. A new method can decipher cell–cell interactions on a large scale.