Volume 613 Issue 7944, 19 January 2023

If researchers are to meet society’s expectations, their training and mentoring must escape the nineteenth century.

Institutions owe it to young researchers to prepare them for careers outside academia. Preprint review is a perfect opportunity.

A metal–polymer composite conducts electricity and conforms to the skin, making it suitable for medical devices applied directly to the body.

A trial aimed at evaluating safety offers hints that stem cells preserve grey matter in people with the neurodegenerative disease.

An atomic force microscope helps to measure the stretchiness of a short molecule tied in a simple knot.

Crustaceans lean on bacteria to detoxify the sulfur belched by shallow-water hydrothermal vents.

Dwarf planet Eris’ rotation is constrained by its large moon Dysnomia, named after the Greek goddess of lawlessness.

Analysis of more than one million people suggests that roughly 16% of the condition can be attributed to genetic factors.

Changes similar to those seen in Alzheimer’s disease are less pronounced in mice with minimal levels of gut bacteria.

The biggest defender of ‘unmodified’ mRNA for vaccines against infectious disease has a change of heart.

The new president has already taken steps to protect the Amazon, but researchers call for more action.

As University of California researchers return to work, union organizers say this is just the beginning of a nationwide push for better working conditions.

Researchers cannot always differentiate between AI-generated and original abstracts.

But a lack of data is obscuring the true impact of the outbreak.

JWST has spotted three tiny, distant galaxies that could solve a long-standing cosmic mystery.

180 rockets lifted off successfully, with SpaceX driving the pace.

The immune system responds more strongly to the strain of a virus that it first met, weakening response to other strains. Can this ‘imprinting’ be overcome?

Abstraction is a powerful mathematical technique that has influenced everything from quantum theories of gravity to nuclear deterrence theory. But has it gone too far?

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Wordle, Minecraft and Scrabble are played online by millions. Gamifying experiments can make behavioural research more inclusive, rigorous and reproducible — if it’s done right.

Group leaders must find ways to efficiently cut costs without sacrificing research quality.

Microbial ecologist Gerdhard Jessen studies how climate change might affect microorganisms in deserts, hot springs and hydrothermal vents.

Mouse and human embryos undergo similar developmental steps, but the exact timings differ. An analysis reveals that differences in metabolic activity set the timing of one such step on the road to formation of the vertebrae.

T cells of the immune system develop through a lineage-commitment step followed by two checkpoints. The finding that the first checkpoint is needed to complete commitment offers a fresh perspective on T-cell development.

How does a fruit fly’s brain determine which way the animal should escape in the face of a looming predator? A mechanism involving numeric gradients of synaptic connections between neurons provides an answer.

Organic electrochemical transistors could be better than conventional inorganic devices for certain uses, but have been held back by performance issues. The solution could be to build up these organic transistors like a sandwich.

An analysis of the publication records of academic editors shows that one-quarter of them publish 10% of their own papers in the journals they edit and reveals that fewer than 10% of editors-in-chief are women.

The intrinsic structure of a material called a chiral superconductor enhances the separation of charge carriers, transforming an electric current in a way that could change the future of memory storage at low temperatures.

A review of current river ecosystem metabolism research quantifies the organic and inorganic carbon flux from land to global rivers and demonstrates that the carbon balance can be influenced by a changing world.

A direct star-counting method of about 93,000 M-dwarf stars in the solar neighbourhood indicates a variable stellar initial mass function that depends on both metallicity and stellar age.

The direct observation of hole pairing in a doped Hubbard model is demonstrated using ultracold atoms in a quantum gas microscope setting by engineering mixed-dimensional fermionic ladders.

An emergent randomness arising from partial measurement of an interacting many-body system is uncovered, and a widely applicable fidelity estimation scheme is presented that works at shorter evolution times and with reduced experimental complexity.

Chiral metasurfaces have been produced, with experimental observation of intrinsic chiral bound states in the continuum, which may lead to applications in chiral light sources and detectors, chiral sensing, valleytronics and asymmetric photocatalysis.

The simultaneous observation of spin–orbit interaction enhancement and chirality represented by a pair of oppositely polarized spins is reported for an organic chiral superconductor in the vicinity of the superconducting transition temperature.

A new exchange-bias effect between two different antiferromagnetic layers enables the fabrication of all-antiferromagnetic structures that have a large room-temperature tunnelling magnetoresistance and potential applications for ultrafast memory technologies.

The authors report observation of tunnelling magnetoresistance in an all-antiferromagnetic tunnel junction consisting of Mn₃Sn/MgO/Mn₃Sn, laying the foundation for the development of ultrafast and efficient spintronic devices using antiferromagnets.

Vertical organic electrochemical transistors demonstrating unprecedented performances in both p- and n-type operation modes have been synthesized from new electro-active and ion-permeable semiconducting polymers by the interface engineering of electro-active blend layers.

A reconstruction of temperatures in central and north Greenland from ad 1000 to 2011 shows that that the final decade of this period was on average 1.5 ± 0.4 °C warmer compared to pre-industrial temperatures, accompanied by increased meltwater run-off.

Genome-wide association studies of individuals from an isolated population (data from the Finnish biobank study FinnGen) and consequent meta-analyses facilitate the identification of previously unknown coding variant associations for both rare and common diseases.

An analysis of biobank data from the FinnGen project examines dosage effects of genetic variants on disease, andidentifies a benefit when considering more complex inheritance in the genetics of common as well as Mendelian diseases.

Findings from large-scale studies in Sweden and the USA indicate that providing financial incentives for vaccination and informing about state incentive programmes do not have any negative unintended consequences.

Analysis of behaviour, physiology, anatomy and connectomics in Drosophila shows how direction-specific visual information is transformed onto downstream premotor networks and converted into appropriate motor responses.

Mapping of the mouse cerebellar cortex using 3D reconstruction from electron microscopy, as well as numerical simulation of neuronal activity, shows non-random redundancy of connectivity that may favour resilient learning over encoding capacity.

An in vitro system that recapitulates temporal characteristics of embryonic development demonstrates that the different rates of mouse and human embryonic development stem from differences in metabolic rates and—further downstream—the global rate of protein synthesis.

Nirmatrelvir, an oral antiviral targeting the 3CL protease of SARS-CoV-2, has been demonstrated to be clinically useful against COVID-19, but viral resistance to the drug was found to arise readily via multiple pathways in vitro.

Aberrant thymocyte developmental programming results when interactions between thymic stroma and pre-T cell receptors occur in the absence of major histocompatibility complex bound to antigen peptide.

Single-molecule calibrated live microscopy and computational modelling have revealed that human nuclear pore complex assembly takes different pathways during the exit from mitosis and during nuclear growth in interphase.

Structural analysis of Cas12a2, a CRISPR-associated nuclease that nonspecifically cleaves ssRNA, ssDNA and dsDNA, reveals a complete activation pathway involved in the abortive infection system protecting cells against invasion.

RNA targeting by the Sulfuricurvum type V single-effector nuclease SuCas12a2 drives abortive infection through non-specific cleavage of double-stranded DNA—after recognition of an RNA target through an activating protospacer-flanking sequence, SuCas12a2 efficiently degrades ssRNA, ssDNA and dsDNA.

We report cryogenic electron microscopy structures of disc-shaped active NLRP3 oligomers in complex with NEK7 and ASC, and propose that the role of NEK7 is to transform NLRP3 into the active NLRP3 inflammasome disc.