Volume 609 Issue 7927, 15 September 2022

Deaths and sufferings are not a failure of technology or knowledge, but a failure of will.

But carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the global reservoir-building spree in the 1960s and 1970s are falling.

A fossilized pile of small bones is probably a meal that an animal heaved up 150 million years ago.

Surrounding an ion of curium with radiation-resistant clusters of other ions allows scientists to study the scarce substance.

Some female white-necked jacobins nab good feeding spots by adopting the flashy plumage of their bigger, brasher male counterparts.

A high-sugar diet unbalances the microbiome, so the body makes fewer of the gut immune cells that help to prevent metabolic disorders.

Delicate laboratory experiment turns up no evidence for one possible explanation of the accelerating expansion of the Universe.

The molecule binds to a cellular protein, setting off a cascade of molecular activity that leads to cell growth.

The latest science news, in brief.

Researchers in China show that a technique used to replace diseased mitochondria does not affect early development.

Scientists hope the immunizations, delivered through the nose or mouth, will prevent even mild cases of illness.

Tecovirimat, a little-known antiviral, shows promise against monkeypox. But human data and supplies of the drug are limited.

Nearly 62% of Chileans voted against the proposed charter, which would have boosted science.

Skeleton missing lower left leg and dated to 31,000 years ago provides the earliest known evidence for surgical limb removal.

The bulk of large plastic bits in the North Pacific garbage patch have been lost or discarded by fishing vessels.

Anna Severin explains how her team used machine learning to try to assess the quality of thousands of reviewers’ reports.

Funders and publishers are increasingly asking researchers to account for the role of sex in experiments — a requirement that’s contentious and hard to get right.

A new ultraconservative supermajority on the United States’ top court is undermining science’s role in informing public policy. Scholars fear the results could be disastrous for public health, justice and democracy itself.

Researchers must help to define science-based targets for water, nutrients, carbon emissions and more to avoid cascading effects and stave off tipping points in Earth’s systems.

Participatory-science projects bring amateurs and experts together to collect and crunch data, and even design research.

Fermentation scientist Chuchu Huang grows mycelium that will become vegan protein.

The interior of the cell is organized with the help of dynamic structures that condense like droplets. A timing strategy ensures that cells maintain healthy function by avoiding uncontrolled growth of these condensates.

Solid-state systems that are designed to simulate the quantum behaviour of electrons in a solid could rival established techniques that require exhaustive computation or precise control of atoms in dilute gases.

Evidence that a child in a hunter-gatherer society survived amputation offers a remarkable insight into the origins of surgery. It challenges the current view that such procedures emerged alongside farming some 10,000 years ago.

The process by which pixels fluoresce in electronic displays uses energy highly inefficiently. The identification of fluorescent molecules with an unusual order of excited states opens up a fresh approach to tackling this issue.

The hormone auxin regulates plant growth through nuclear co-receptors. A rapid response also occurs at the cell surface after auxin is perceived by the receptor TMK1 and a co-receptor protein. Is ABP1 this co-receptor?

Gene expression is regulated by clusters of regulatory DNA sequences called enhancers. Basic design principles that protect enhancer networks against the harmful effects of genetic mutations have now been elucidated.

Using an experimental simulator of the extended Hubbard model with spin–valley isospins arising in chiral-stacked twisted double bilayer graphene, the presence of highly tunable quantum criticalities is demonstrated.

Confining semiconductor dipolar excitons using an artificial two-dimensional square lattice emulates extended Bose–Hubbard Hamiltonians, thus enabling control of boson-like arrays in lattices with programmable geometries and more than 100 sites.

Analysis of the antiferromagnetic ordered phase of kagome lattice FeGe suggests that charge density wave is the result of a combination of electronic-correlations-driven antiferromagnetic order and instability driven by van Hove singularities.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a non-reciprocal near-infrared femtosecond laser-writing technique for reconfigurable three-dimensional nanoscale ferroelectric domain engineering in LiNbO₃ crystals.

A fluorescent molecule is described that does not follow Hund’s rule and instead shows singlet and triplet excited states with inverted energy levels, leading to high-efficiency OLEDs with potential implications for optoelectronic devices.

Attosecond size-resolved cluster spectroscopy is introduced and the effect that the addition of single water molecules has is measured, indicating a direct link between electronic structure and attosecond photoionization dynamics.

Monolayer water exhibits rich and diverse phase behaviour that is highly sensitive to temperature and the van der Waals pressure acting within the nanochannel.

Deep learning and numerical simulations of CryoSat-2 radar altimeter data are used to generate a pan-Arctic sea-ice thickness dataset for the Arctic melt period.

As observed for the 2021 Fagradalsfjall eruption in Iceland, a release of tectonic stress followed by a decline in deformation and seismicity rate may be a characteristic precursory activity for a certain class of eruptions.

Primitive lavas of the Fagradalsfjall eruption present a window into the deep roots of a magmatic system previously inaccessible to near-real-time investigation, showing that eruptible batches of basaltic magma mix on a timescale of weeks.

Using a large-scale fishery dataset in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a pervasive pattern of increased pelagic predator catch inside anticyclonic eddies relative to cyclones and non-eddy areas is shown.

Analyses of newly discovered specimens of the early Cambrian microscopic animal Saccorhytus coronarius support its taxonomic classification in total-group Ecdysozoa.

Around 31,000 years ago, a young individual from Borneo had part of their left lower leg surgically amputated, probably as a child, and lived for another 6–9 years after amputation.

A molecular taxonomy for prostate cancer reveals a subtype associated with copy-number loss found in African and European populations that predicts poor outcomes and two subtypes—one associated with high mutational noise and one with copy-number gain—specific to African populations.

The whisking oscillator—consisting of parvalbumin-expressing inhibitory neurons located in the vibrissa intermediate reticular nucleus—in mice is an all-inhibitory network and recurrent synaptic inhibition has a key role in its rhythmogenesis.

Beige-fat-innervating sensory neurons modulate adipocyte function by acting as a brake on the sympathetic system.

Auxin-binding protein 1 (ABP1) is an auxin receptor that, in complex with transmembrane kinase 1 (TMK1), has a key role in the auxin-induced global phosphorylation of proteins and downstream responses such as vascular regeneration.

Colonization of trypsin-degrading commensal bacteria may contribute to the maintenance of intestinal homeostasis and protection against pathogen infection in humans and mice.

N-acetylglucosamine kinase catalyses the phosphorylation of muramyl dipeptide and is thus essential for its recognition and immunostimulatory activity in human and mouse cells.

A phase portrait study is presented that shows the chemically driven dynamics of short-lived F-actin-rich condensates that support actomyosin cortex formation.

Structural and biophysical analysis of the Arabidopsis thaliana auxin transporter PIN8 reveal that PIN transporters export auxin using an elevator mechanism.

Structures of the Arabidopsis thaliana auxin exporter PIN1 in the apo state, bound to the natural auxin or bound to an inhibitor provide insights into the polar auxin transport mechanisms mediated by PIN family transporters.

Arabidopsis thaliana PIN3 structures reveal the molecular mechanisms of the transport of indole-3-acetic acid and the inhibition of polar auxin transport by N-1-naphthylphthalamic acid.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of IL-25–IL-17RB–IL-17RA and IL-17A–IL-17RC–IL-17RA complexes show a tip-to-tip architecture, which is a key organizing principle of the IL-17 receptor family.

Structures of the ATP-hydrolysing RuvAB complex captured in multiple conformations provide mechanistic insights into coordinated ATPase and motor activity during DNA recombination.