Volume 612 Issue 7941, 22 December 2022

Stepping down well is an important leadership skill — and one that is rarely named or valued.

Rodents’ pain in response to a gentle touch was reduced when scientists suppressed the activity of specific neurons.

Common North American viper protects itself with the help of an ancient gene.

Experiments on mice suggest that gut bacteria contribute to the post-diet rebound of fat tissue.

Chemical analysis of rare gems suggests that seawater played a part in their creation.

Perseverance crossed paths with a dust-filled whirlwind — and has the audio to prove it.

Scientists manipulate cellulose, which is found in wood fibre, to produce an ion-transporting ‘supramolecule’.

Pyramids, causeways and other edifices formed a densely settled Maya realm in what is now Guatemala.

The latest science news, in brief.

Researchers at the US National Ignition Facility created a reaction that made more energy than they put in.

Public-health leader advises early-career researchers ‘not to be deterred’ by public vitriol.

The far-seeing observatory has served up revelations from the most distant reaches of the Universe to a moon orbiting Saturn.

Nature’s pick of the sharpest science shots this month is dedicated to the James Webb Space Telescope, which began peering into the Universe earlier this year.

Reviewers would no longer score researchers’ expertise and institutions during grant evaluations for the US biomedical agency.

The tragic deaths of 13 children in England and an unusual rise in autumn cases have put researchers on alert.

An almighty eruption, the cosmos remastered, swirling cells and more.

A trail-blazing astronomer, a climate revolutionary and a transplant pioneer are some of the people behind this year’s big stories.

Market turmoil and geopolitical realignment after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put livelihoods and the green-energy transition at risk. Here’s how researchers can help overcome the threats.

Cost-of-living crises, labour shortages and the impact of global politics on research collaborations were among the challenges faced by working scientists in a tumultuous year.

Conservationist Eileen Maher uses large spheres made of shells, sand and cement to prevent erosion and attract oysters as part of her work to manage tidelands around a Southern Californian port.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Highlights from News & Views published this year.

Recent key developments in the exploration of kagome materials are reviewed, including fundamental concepts of a kagome lattice, realizations of Chern and Weyl topological magnetism, flat-band many-body correlations, and unconventional charge-density waves and superconductivity.

Polarization can exceed 60% at the leading edge of the inner part of the Vela pulsar wind nebula; in contrast with the case of the supernova remnant, the electrons in the pulsar wind nebula are accelerated with little or no turbulence in a highly uniform magnetic field.

A spatially distributed, atomic clock network entangled via quantum nondemolition measurements offers better precision and lower noise compared to an equivalent mode-separable network, and the improvements scale with network size.

Optomechanical lattices in one and two dimensions with exceptionally low disorder are realized, showing how the optomechanical interaction can be exploited for direct measurements of the Hamiltonian, beyond the tight-binding approximation.

An efficient and scalable direct seawater electrolysis method for hydrogen production that addresses the side-reaction and corrosion problems associated with using seawater instead of pure water is demonstrated.

Ultrasmall monodisperse perovskite quantum dots are synthesized in situ on a substrate via ligand structure regulation, yielding the highest external quantum efficiency blue perovskite LEDs reported so far.

An additive manufacturing technique that infuses 3D printed hydrogels with metallic precursors leads to metallic micromaterials, providing new opportunities for the fabrication of energy materials, micro-electromechanical systems and biomedical devices.

Measurements of  isomerization rates  of CO isotopologues on an NaCl surface show a nonmonotonic mass dependence that arises from  resonantly enhanced cross-barrier coupling, or ‘tunnelling gateways’, which  are intrinsic to condensed-phase tunnelling.

Analysis of new observations from the EUREC⁴A field campaign shows that lower-tropospheric mixing does not desiccate the base of trade cumulus clouds, refuting the mixing-desiccation hypothesis and explaining the weak trade cumulus feedback.

Analysis of Landsat imagery from the past two decades allows quantification of the changes in salt marsh ecosystems, as well as associated carbon emissions resulting from net global losses.

Logged forests in Borneo have higher energy flow from vegetation to and broad range of bird and mammal species relative to old-growth forests and oil palm plantations, showing that they can be diverse and ecologically vibrant ecosystems.

Provora is an ancient supergroup of microbial predators that are genetically, morphologically and behaviourally distinct from other eukaryotes, and comprise two divergent clades of predators—Nebulidia and Nibbleridia—that differ fundamentally in ultrastructure, behaviour and gene content.

A multi-ancestry meta-regression study analyses diverse genome-wide association studies and genome loci associated with tobacco and alcohol use.

Ribosome^ST—a ribosome with a specialized nascent polypeptide exit tunnel—cotranslationally regulates the folding of a subset of male germ-cell-specific proteins that are essential for the formation of sperm.

In-depth transcriptomic analyses of 56,636 single cells from monkey embryos revealed transcriptional features of major perigastrulation cell types, and comparative analyses with mouse embryos and human embryoids uncovered conserved and divergent features of perigastrulation development across species.

It is demonstrated that the brain circuitry involved in regulating the motivation for physical activity is not strictly central nervous system autonomous but is shaped by peripheral influences that originate in the intestinal microbial community.

NeoCoV and its close relative, PDF-2180, can efficiently bind to and use specific bat ACE2 orthologues and, less favourably, human ACE2 as entry receptors through their receptor-binding domains on the spike protein.

A study reports the distribution, replication and persistence of SARS-CoV-2 throughout the human body including in the brain at autopsy from acute infection to more than seven months following symptom onset.

Cell-specific respiration rates differ by more than 1,000× among prokaryoplankton genera, and the majority of respiration was found to be performed by minority members of prokaryoplankton, whereas cells of the most prevalent lineages had extremely low respiration rates.

A study shows that cross-reactivity of microbial antigens and self-antigens presented by HLA-B*27 may be important in the pathogenesis of diseases associated with HLA-B*27 and identifies the shared binding motif responsible.

Multi-modal analysis of genomically unstable ovarian tumours characterizes the contribution of anatomical sites and mutational processes to evolutionary phenotypic divergence and immune resistance mechanisms.

Integrated single-cell atlases of human fetal cerebella and MBs show potential cell populations predisposed to transformation and regulatory circuitries underlying tumour cell states and oncogenesis, highlighting hitherto unrecognized transitional progenitor intermediates predictive of disease prognosis.

Mutations in the sodium/iodide symporter (NIS) cause congenital hypothyroidism, and our results yield insights into how NIS selects, couples and translocates anions, thereby establishing a framework for understanding NIS function.