Volume 613 Issue 7942, 5 January 2023

Making researchers account for their methods before data collection is a long-overdue step.

Moon landings, mRNA vaccines and climate finance are among the developments set to shape research in the coming year.

Two years after DeepMind’s revolutionary AI swept a competition for predicting protein structures, researchers are building on AlphaFold’s success.

Researchers have zeroed in on nine sites that could describe a new geological time, marked by pollution and other signs of human activity.

A class of drugs that quash hunger have shown striking results in trials and in practice. But can they help all people with obesity — and conquer weight stigma?

The microblogging platform has transformed research communication, but its future is in doubt.

Born 200 years ago, the evolutionary biologist experienced many setbacks during his career — none more severe than when he headed home with his precious collections from Brazil.

Wallace, who independently discovered the theory of evolution, relied on local knowledge to craft his seminal work on species ranges in the Amazon. Now, the region’s Indigenous scientists have taken charge of their research using this and other cross-cultural tools.

A small but growing number of scientific faculty positions are focusing on the science of teaching.

A construction site in Tennessee that was once an ancient watering hole yields fossils that give field technician Laura Emmert clues about the rhinoceros, mastodon and other wildlife that congregated there.

Analysis of an invasive brain cancer reveals that networks of tumour cells are linked to small groups of ‘pacemaker’ cells in which levels of calcium ions pulse periodically, driving a signal through the network that causes tumour growth.

Cells in a state of arrested growth, called senescence, have been characterized in skeletal muscle in mice. Senescent cells promote inflammation and block regeneration, and thus might induce harmful changes in aged muscle.

Estimating the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19 around the world is a complex task — as highlighted by one attempt to measure global excess mortality in 2020 and 2021.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Ferroelectricity has been found in a superconducting compound. Strong coupling between these two properties enables ferroelectric control of the superconductivity, which could prove useful for quantum devices.

An analysis of more than 1,500 field observations has identified a collection of agricultural practices that can improve the use of nitrogen fertilizers — boosting crop yields while reducing environmental pollution.

Msemburi et al. describe how the World Health Organization has estimated the excess mortality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, by month and for 2020 and 2021, and analyse their estimates across the WHO member states, with 14.83 million global excess deaths estimated.

A study of intracluster light (ICL) in ten high-redshift galaxy clusters finds evidence that gradual stripping may not be the dominant mechanism of ICL formation, but may occur alongside the formation and growth of the brightest cluster galaxies, and/or accretion of preprocessed stars.

A study demonstrates full energy–momentum matching, and enhanced interaction, between free electrons and photons through a continuum of flatband resonances, realized in a silicon-on-insulator photonic crystal slab.

The authors show a hysteretic behaviour of superconductivity as a function of electric field in bilayer Td-MoTe₂, representing observations of coupled ferroelectricity and superconductivity.

A van der Waals crystal, niobium oxide dichloride, with vanishing interlayer electronic coupling and considerable monolayer-like excitonic behaviour in the bulk, as well as strong and scalable second-order optical nonlinearity, is discovered, which enables a high-performance quantum light source.

Two newly designed co-adsorbed dye-sensitized solar cells that harvest light quantitatively across the entire visible domain are described, which offer promising applications as power supplies and battery replacements for low-power electronic devices.

Photocatalytic water splitting with a high solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of more than nine per cent is achieved using pure water, concentrated solar light and an indium gallium nitride photocatalyst.

A two-dimensional crystalline polymer of C₆₀, termed graphullerene, is synthesized by chemical vapour transport, and mechanically exfoliated to produce molecularly thin flakes with clean interfaces for potential optoelectronic applications.

A meta-analysis of 1,521 field observations from the past two decades led to the identification of 11 key measures to cost-effectively mitigate nitrogen pollution from global croplands.

The authors investigate chemical anomalies in superdeep diamond inclusions, leading them to suggest that there is an extremely variable redox environment in the deep mantle.

A ‘bottom-up’ approach for calculating the rate of organic carbon burial in the global ocean shows larger variability than has been previously estimated, suggesting that the organic carbon cycle acted as positive feedback of past global warming.

An atlas explores the landscape of recurrent repeat expansions in human cancer genomes.

A new study explores the activity dialogue between hippocampus and cortex as neuronal representations of learning or adaptation are consolidated.

The retrosplenial cortex and superior colliculus of mouse form a neural circuit that specifically encodes shelter location, facilitating rapid escape from predatory threats.

Resident microglia in the central nervous system are identified as the specific macrophage population that regulates myelin growth and integrity.

A decline in disruptive science and technology over time is reported, representing a substantive shift in science and technology, which is attributed in part to the reliance on a narrower set of existing knowledge.

The tomato spotted wilt orthotospovirus nonstructural protein NSs interferes with phytohormone signalling in plants to compromise plant defences by interacting with plant TCP21—this effect of the viral protein is counteracted by the plant NLR immune receptor protein Tsw.

The zebrafish segmentation clock drives sequential segmentation of somites by periodically lowering double-phosphorylated Erk and therefore projecting its oscillation on the double-phosphorylated Erk gradient.

An adipocyte-selective product of the Clstn3 locus (CLSTN3β) facilitates the use of stored triglyceride by limiting lipid droplet (LD) expansion, defining a molecular mechanism that regulates LD form and function to facilitate lipid utilization in thermogenic adipocytes.

A lifetime cartography of in vivo senescent cells shows that they are heterogeneous. Senescent cells create an aged-like inflamed niche that mirrors inflammation associated with ageing and arrests stem cell proliferation and tissue regeneration.

A population of highly interconnected cells in glioblastoma makes these tumours resistant to general damage but vulnerable to targeted disruption of this small fraction of cells and their rhythmic Ca²⁺ oscillations.

RNA–DNA hybrids are immunogenic species that can aberrantly accumulate in the cytoplasm after R-loop processing, linking R-loop accumulation to cell death through the innate immune response.

BRD8 is identified as a specific epigenetic vulnerability for glioblastomas that harbour wild-type p53.