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  • Radiation-damaged paternal DNA has been found to cause embryos of the second generation of nematode worms, but not the first, to die. The proposed mechanisms help to explain the observed lack of such an effect in humans.

    • Ronald Cutler
    • Jan Vijg
    News & Views
  • Future LEDs could be based on lead halide perovskites. A breakthrough in preparing device-compatible solids composed of nanoscale perovskite crystals overcomes a long-standing hurdle in making blue perovskite LEDs.

    • Hendrik Utzat
    • Maria Ibáñez
    News & Views
  • Cells in a state of arrested growth, called senescence, have been characterized in skeletal muscle in mice. Senescent cells promote inflammation and block regeneration, and thus might induce harmful changes in aged muscle.

    • David J. Glass
    News & Views
  • An X-ray imaging mission has unveiled the magnetic field in the environment of a dead star. The order and symmetry of the field will reshape our understanding of how it accelerates particles to ultra-high energies.

    • Samar Safi-Harb
    News & Views
  • Assessment of a tumour’s mutational profile offers a way of predicting a person’s response to anticancer therapies called immune-checkpoint inhibitors. It seems that such approaches might fall short for people who are not of European ancestry.

    • Chao Cheng
    • Christopher I. Amos
    News & Views
  • Estimating the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19 around the world is a complex task — as highlighted by one attempt to measure global excess mortality in 2020 and 2021.

    • Enrique Acosta
    News & Views
  • Atmospheric methane concentrations rose unexpectedly during the lockdowns of 2020. It now seems that this was due to warm, wet weather in the Northern Hemisphere and, ironically, a slowdown in air-pollutant emissions.

    • George H. Allen
    News & Views
  • The therapeutic options available to treat ovarian cancer need improvement. Data that reveal the cellular, molecular and mutational landscape as such tumours grow and spread might aid efforts to develop new targeted therapies.

    • Denarda Dangaj Laniti
    • George Coukos
    News & Views
  • Microorganisms in the gut produce molecules that activate sensory neurons, stimulating exercise-associated reward circuits in the brain. This newly discovered pathway in mice affects motivation for prolonged exercise.

    • Gulistan Agirman
    • Elaine Y. Hsiao
    News & Views
  • How do environmental cues steer the branching of plant roots? Insights into how water availability shapes root growth reveal an unexpected mechanism behind the hormone-mediated regulation of this process.

    • Christa Testerink
    • Jasper Lamers
    News & Views
  • Analysis of radio emission from matter near the Milky Way’s central black hole sheds light on this previously unobservable region, revealing that the local magnetic field is carried around in complete loops by the matter orbiting the centre.

    • Anna Ciurlo
    • Mark R. Morris
    News & Views
  • What are the ecological consequences of logging in a tropical forest? A detailed assessment of vegetation growth, bird and mammal numbers, and energy flows in logged and unlogged forests offers some surprising findings.

    • Pieter A. Zuidema
    • Joeri A. Zwerts
    News & Views
  • A versatile nanowire system has enabled the hunt for particles that could be useful for quantum computers. The platform can be probed with two techniques simultaneously — minimizing the possibility of false-positive signals.

    • Manohar Kumar
    • Chuan Li
    News & Views
  • Analysis of an invasive brain cancer reveals that networks of tumour cells are linked to small groups of ‘pacemaker’ cells in which levels of calcium ions pulse periodically, driving a signal through the network that causes tumour growth.

    • Benjamin Deneen
    News & Views
  • Modelling reveals that the carbon emissions associated with plastics could be negative by 2100 under a strict set of technological and socio-economic conditions — including increased recycling and plant-derived production.

    • Sangwon Suh
    • André  Bardow
    News & Views
  • Organisms use various strategies for sex determination. The non-genetic mechanism in the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum, involving a male-specific factor, has now been revealed.

    • Elisabet Tintó-Font
    • Alfred Cortés
    News & Views