Volume 611 Issue 7936, 17 November 2022

Hydrogen is touted as a wonder fuel for everything from transport to home heating — but greener and more efficient options are often available.

Enlist community members to find and support cases — trust is crucial to containment.

Photons trapped inside a special ring must travel two laps before reaching their starting state.

US consumers could generate more than one billion pieces of e-waste a year by 2033.

Immune players called B cells are partly to blame for the decline in vaccine efficacy for people over 65.

Large barriers to the animals’ movement could threaten their long-term future.

Concertgoers were not conscious of a low-frequency sound, but grooved more energetically when it played.

A new design enables molecule to either rotate or emit light.

Scientists trace the source of the dazzling X-rays emanating from Cygnus X-1, the first recognized black hole.

The latest science news, in brief.

‘Most complicated therapy ever’ tailors bespoke, genome-edited immune cells to attack tumours.

Indonesia will be using the jab from next year, but some scientists say there are insufficient data to rule out that it could make infections worse in some people.

Host-country scientists call for more finance for research at the start of United Nations climate summit.

Extremists could flock back to the platform under the guise of ‘free speech’ — and researchers are gearing up to study their impact.

Detailed gene-activity map could pave way for more precise treatments for many more people with spinal-cord injuries.

On the heels of successful COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, the technology could hold promise in protecting against another deadly pathogen.

Many researchers see a huge role for the gas in decarbonizing economies.

As the FIFA tournament kicks off, researchers are showing their skills to help soccer coaches develop players and tactics.

A forensic anthropologist unmasks insidious interpretations of fossil finds.

Visa woes and a lack of career prospects affect many international students, Nature’s survey finds.

Antonella Leone catches jellyfish off the coast of Italy to study them as potential sources of medicine and food.

A 30-year record of ocean-current velocities has been used to infer wind speeds during tropical cyclones. The data show that these storms have intensified over time, supporting claims that their strength will increase as the planet warms.

Improved treatments for spinal-cord injury require both technological development and insights into the biology of recovery. High-resolution molecular maps of the nervous system are beginning to provide the latter.

Existing telecommunications infrastructure could operate as a miniaturized global positioning system, offering submetre resolution in urban areas and indoors, where location information from satellites is often inaccurate.

Predicting the risk of extinction from climate change requires an understanding of the interactions between species. An analysis of how changes in rainfall affect competition between plant species offers a way of tackling this challenge.

In an effort to treat systemic lupus erythematosus, T cells of the immune system were engineered to become cells known as CAR T cells. Their injection into people with the disease resulted in clinical and immunological improvement.

The generation of spatial maps that detail molecular and genetic information for the diverse cells and tissue environment of breast tumours offers insight into the factors that drive cancer progression.

Change of chirality from left- to right-handed transport in the layered kagome metal CsV₃Sb₅ can be controlled by small magnetic field changes, a required feature for chiral electronic applications.

Current-control of chiral orbital current-enabled colossal magnetoresistance offers a new paradigm for quantum technologies.

A terrestrial networked positioning system based on a hybrid optical–wireless telecommunication infrastructure and that is independent of global navigation satellite systems is demonstrated for urban environments with decimetre-level accuracy. 

An unusual new material, NiTTFtt, is reported that is structurally amorphous, precluding a classical band structure, but detailed characterization reveals high conductivity and a metallic character.

A new approach to charging energy-dense electric vehicle batteries, using temperature modulation with a dual-salt electrolyte, promises a range in excess of 500,000 miles using only rapid (under 12 minute) charges.

Advancements in satellite imagery and machine learning can be used to infer the causal impact of electricity access on livelihoods, providing a low-cost, generalizable approach to evaluating public policy in data-spare environments.

Both drifter current observations and satellite-based tropical cyclone (TC)-induced sea surface cooling demonstrate that weak TCs have intensified in recent decades.

Isotopic analysis reveals that the samarium/neodymium ratio of the Earth–Moon system is higher than that of chondrites, and that the neodymium composition of Earth is similar to that of enstatite chondrites.

Reduced precipitation changes competitive outcomes among plant species, and species pairs that were functionally more similar were less likely to experience these changes.

Time-series data including 1,794 plant species from 7,738 vegetation plots in Germany between 1927 and 2020 reveal patterns of change in biodiversity, and suggest that more species declined than increased in abundance during this period.

Which combination of current genome sequencing and assembly approaches results in high-quality, complete diploid genome assemblies is determined.

RNA sequencing reveals widespread transcriptomic changes across the cerebral cortex in autism spectrum disorder, including primary sensory regions, in addition to association regions, as well as an attenuation of regional identity.

Transcriptomic analysis following epidural electrical stimulation of the lumbar spinal cord during neurorehabilitation in mice identifies a population of neurons that orchestrates the restoration of walking following paralysis.

The combination of synthetic biology and materials engineering enabled the development of biosensors that produce electrical readouts and real-time detection capabilities.

Analysis of the activity of CA1 cells in mice performing a learning task shows that the entorhinal cortex signals behavioural timescale synaptic plasticity to generate learning-related changes in the hippocampus.

Single-cell RNA sequencing and single-molecule RNA transcript imaging have been used to characterize spatially and temporally resolved mouse liver and parasite expression programmes during infection with the rodent malaria parasite Plasmodium berghei ANKA.

A handheld printed circuit board-based programmable platform using ferrobots can perform the complex, laboratory-equivalent procedures involved in multiplexed and pooled nucleic acid amplification testing, allowing for the decentralization of viral diagnostics.

Dietary inulin fibre alters the composition and metabolism of gut microbiota, resulting in elevated levels of bile acids that subsequently trigger mucosal type 2 inflammation characterized by eosinophilia, with clinical implications for allergy and anti-helminth defence.

Perivascular and leptomeningeal macrophages, collectively termed here parenchymal border macrophages, are shown to regulate flow dynamics of cerebrospinal fluid, implicating this cell population as new therapeutic targets in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

A workflow centred around base-specific in situ sequencing generates detailed maps of, and can phenotypically characterize, the unique set of subclones of cancers.

A poor prognosis gene programme in patients with colorectal cancer is expressed by a unique tumour cell population that we name high-relapse cells (HRCs), and ablation of cells expressing the HRC marker EMP1 or neoadjuvant immunotherapy prevented metastatic recurrence in mice.

H2B.8 is identified as a histone variant that mediates a newly described mechanism of transcription-compatible chromatin condensation in flowering plant sperm cells.