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Programmes aimed at meeting the UN's Sustainable Development Goals need to be informed by data. In two papers in this week's issue, Simon Hay and his colleagues present high-resolution geospatial maps that offer a detailed view of two key components of human capital from 51 African nations: child growth failure and educational inequality. Using survey and census data from thousands of villages across the continent, the authors gathered information on adult educational attainment, and child age, height and weight. They then used Bayesian modelling to combine these data with factors such as local geography and climate in order to extrapolate to regions where information was lacking. The result is a series of maps that show changes in educational attainment and child growth failure between 2000 and 2015 at a resolution of 5 km × 5 km. Although nearly every nation showed certain regions of improvement, the authors conclude that there is not a single country on the continent on track to meet the sustainable development goal of ending all malnutrition by 2030, and that gender inequality in education persists in many regions. Cover image: Jasiek Krzysztofiak/Nature
Geospatial estimates of child growth failure in Africa provide a baseline for measuring progress and a precision public health platform to target interventions to those populations with the greatest need.
Local-level analyses show that, despite marked progress in educational attainment from 2000 to 2015 across Africa, substantial differences persist between locations and sexes that have widened in many countries.
Single-cell transcriptomics, fate assays and a computational theory enable prediction of cell fates during haematopoiesis, discovery of regulators of erythropoiesis and reveal coupling between the erythroid, basophil and mast cell fates.
A high-affinity complex of histone H1 and prothymosin-α reveals an unexpected interaction mechanism, where the large opposite net charge enables the two proteins to remain highly disordered even in the complex.
The 21-cm absorption profile is detected in the sky-averaged radio spectrum, but is much stronger than predicted, suggesting that the primordial gas might have been cooler than predicted.
The large absorption of the 21-centimetre transition of hydrogen around redshift 20 is explained by radiation from the first stars, combined with excess cooling of the cosmic gas caused by baryon–dark matter scattering.
Fast and high-fidelity two-qubit logic gates are demonstrated by using amplitude-shaped laser pulses to ensure that the gate operation is insensitive to the optical phase of the pulses.
Ultrashort mid-infrared laser pulses can drive atoms far from their equilibrium positions in LiNbO3, exciting high phonon harmonics and providing a way to map the interatomic potential.
A scalable process is described for fabricating skin-like electronic circuitry that can be bent and stretched while retaining desirable electronic functionality.
Neodymium-142 isotope data from young Réunion Island volcanic rocks reflect the effects of geological processes that occurred more than four billion years ago, showing that the deep mantle may preserve geochemical signatures of the primordial Earth.
Analyses of a global dataset of plant root traits identify an ancestral conservative strategy based on thick roots and mycorrhizal symbiosis, and an evolutionarily more-recent opportunistic strategy of thin roots that efficiently use photosynthetic carbon for soil exploration.
The DN1p clock neurons of Drosophila melanogaster continuously report temperature changes into the circadian neural network, to control the timing of sleep and activity.
Stem cells of the Drosophila midgut sense mechanical signals in vivo through the stretch-activated ion channel Piezo, which is expressed on previously unidentified enteroendocrine precursor cells.
Oncogene activation results in firing of ectopic origins of replication within transcribed genes, resulting in replication stress and genome instability.
The structure of huntingtin in complex with an interactor is determined to an overall resolution of 4 Å, paving the way for improved understanding of the cellular functions of this protein.
The structure of the glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor (GLP-1R) with its biased agonist exendin-P5 sheds light on both receptor activation and the mechanism of biased agonism.