Volume 612 Issue 7939, 8 December 2022

Reducing our waste’s impact on the planet requires new technology and materials — and, more importantly, a complete rethink of how we incentivize the production and use of resources.

How many LGBTQ+ researchers are there in the United States? The National Science Foundation should find out.

Programmes to avoid deforestation could have unintentional impacts on a variety of ecosystems.

Flying devices weighing only 10 milligrams could be controlled by an unconventional set of instruments.

Game theory helps to identify genetic variants that give plants the ability to thrive in crowded conditions.

A fifth fundamental force predicted by some alternative theories of gravity has not been seen in the solar interior.

The magma chamber of an enormous volcano lies closer to Earth’s surface than previously estimated.

Low levels of one type of cholesterol predict heart-disease risk in white people only.

Pleasure sensations are blunted in male rodents whose mums ate fatty food during pregnancy.

The latest science news, in brief.

Eisai and Biogen share clinical trial data confirming that lecanemab slows mental decline, amid reports of potentially related deaths.

Nature spoke to three scientists seeking better pay and working conditions in the largest-ever higher-education strike.

Fieldwork is under way to excavate a rare, well-preserved specimen in central China.

An unusual teleportation experiment uses ordinary quantum physics, but was inspired by tunnels in an exotic ‘toy universe’.

Study is one of the few to show the behavioural effects of Toxoplasma gondii in wild animals.

Vaccinating more older people, stocking up on antiviral drugs and expanding hospital facilities would help to ease the transition away from zero COVID.

Fires and droughts in the western states are getting worse — and they’re combining with industrial sources to threaten air quality and people’s health.

Government responsibility for public health shaped the fledgling nation’s concepts of freedom.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

After pandemic disruptions, the #ScientistAtWork contest returns.

Entomologist Jackie Billotte reconstructs the burrows and housekeeping habits of tarantulas, which help to keep insect and rodent populations under control in southeastern Colorado.

Long bursts of γ-rays usually signal the death of massive stars, but an emission detected last year suggests that a long burst with peculiar properties originated from the merger of stars in a compact binary system.

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.

The neurotransmitter dopamine has been shown to serve as a signal for learning in the fly’s navigation centre. The rate at which the fly learns depends on turning, so only useful visual information is used to update the fly’s mental map.

An exercise in benchmarking a quantum computer reveals that the processor can go beyond the ‘integrability’ limit, at which dynamical systems no longer have explicit solutions, and standard mathematical techniques struggle.

Abnormal protein aggregates are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. It emerges that these plaques cause swellings in neuronal projections called axons that prevent proper circuit function.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Abnormalities in gut bacteria can contribute to hard-to-treat illnesses, such as inflammatory bowel diseases. Efforts to harness bacterium-targeting viruses reveal a promising way to tackle these conditions.

A possible kilonova associated with a nearby, long-duration gamma-ray burst suggests that gamma-ray bursts with long and complex light curves can be spawned from the merger of two compact objects, contrary to the established gamma-ray burst paradigm.

A bright, long-duration gamma-ray burst observed by the Swift observatory has hybrid high-energy properties, suggesting that its origin is the merger of a compact binary.

Analysis of the long-duration GRB 211211A led to observations of emission properties differing from all known type I bursts, yet its multiband behaviour suggests a non-massive-star origin, pointing towards a new progenitor type.

The observation of transient-like gigaelectronvolt emission in the high-energy gamma-rays of GRB 211211A, from the merger of two compact binary objects, is reported.

An experimental investigation of the dynamics of the spin ½ Floquet XXZ model finds bound states as predicted, and also robustness to noise and non-integrability when theoretical descriptions start to fail.

A fully integrated semiconductor microlaser that exploits spin–orbit coupling of light emits in a four-dimensional Hilbert space, with flexible control of up to six degrees of freedom.

A femtosecond pulse generator is realized using an electro-optic time-lens system integrated on a lithium niobate photonic chip, capable of tunable repetition rates and wavelengths.

Chiroptically active pinwheel assemblies on substrates are formed by tetrahedral gold nanoparticles from the effective ‘compression’ of a perovskite-like, low-density phase, thereby enabling the manufacture of metastructured coatings with special chiroptical characteristics as identified by photon-induced near-field electron microscopy and chirality measures.

Using a stable and viscosity-tunable perovskite ink, a hybrid perovskite thin-film photovoltaic device can be deposited by the screen-printing method, which exhibits higher efficiency compared with previously investigated techniques.

Three alternative CO₂ emission-mitigation pathways were analysed for the global plastics sector, covering their production to waste management. A circular bioeconomy strategy could achieve negative emissions in the long term, while at the same time allowing landfilling to be phased out and reducing resource consumption.

Between around 5,000 to 2,000 years ago, a drying climate in the vast peatlands of the Congo Basin triggered peat decomposition and carbon release to the atmosphere, implying that this region may be vulnerable to future climate change.

Analysis of two-million-year-old ancient environmental DNA from the Kap København Formation in North Greenland shows there was an open boreal forest with diverse plant and animal species, of which several taxa have not previously been detected at the site, representing an ecosystem that has no present-day analogue.

Genetic analyses of teosinte, the wild ancestor of maize, identify a locus (THP9) that is associated with high seed protein content and increased nitrogen-use efficiency, suggesting that THP9 could have applications in crop breeding.

Exome sequence data from 628,388 individuals was used to identify 24 risk loci in 40,208 carriers of clonal haematopoiesis of indeterminate potential and link them to other conditions including COVID-19, cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Distinct subdivisions of low-threshold mechanoreceptors and postsynaptic dorsal column neurons converge at the dorsal column nuclei to code precise tactile representations.

A study demonstrates that plasticity in the head direction system in Drosophila is modulated by dopamine, which increases learning when reorienting movements are bringing in new spatial information.

A study using super-resolution protein imaging to visualize synaptic proteins from layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the primary visual cortex of adult mice shows that filopodia are a structural substrate for silent synapses.

Amyloid-plaque-associated axonal spheroids are prominent contributors to neural network dysfunction in an Alzheimer’s model and can be reversed by endolysosomal modulation.

Pathologically activated neutrophils, termed myeloid-derived suppressor cells, in the tumour microenvironment spontaneously undergo ferroptosis, which negatively regulates anti-tumour immunity through the release of oxygenated lipids, therefore limiting the activity of human and mouse T cells.

Chemotherapy-induced death of colon cancer cells causes ATP release triggering P2X4 to mediate an mTOR-dependent pro-survival program in neighbouring cancer cells, which renders them sensitive to mTOR inhibition.

The mechanism of action of muscarinic receptor-based DREADDs, important chemogenetic tools in neuroscience and cellular signalling research, are described in molecular detail.