Volume 614 Issue 7946, 2 February 2023

Maths made the modern world — and everyone stands to gain from the acknowledgment that the world made maths.

For young immigrant women like me, the pressures of early career research are even greater than for most. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Model predicts the patterns on curved, tubular structures that shrink or grow.

Two brain regions help humans to filter out irrelevant information and concentrate on the right stuff in social situations.

Stimulation of certain neurons triggers activity in the brain’s reward centre.

Other arthropods can regrow lost legs, but the sea spider can regenerate central organs all the way to the anus.

Export of minerals, wood and energy drives a surprisingly high fraction of deforestation.

Magma chamber is discovered beneath Kolumbo volcano, near the Greek island of Santorini.

Genomes of red junglefowl, the wild birds that gave rise to domestic chickens, include genetic material from their farmyard cousins.

Satellite navigation systems for lunar settlements will require local atomic clocks. Researchers are figuring out what time they will keep.

Genomic surveillance is crucial for tracking the next ‘variant of concern’, but many countries are winding back their monitoring.

Sanctions on Priyanga Amarasekare have baffled supporters, who think they are retaliation for speaking out against discrimination.

A variant of H5N1 influenza that can spread between mammals could pose an increased risk to people and wild animals.

Study ties common viruses such as flu to Alzheimer’s and other conditions — but the analysis has limitations, researchers warn.

Earthquake data hint that the inner core stopped rotating faster than the rest of the planet in 2009, but not all researchers agree.

Pfizer, GSK and Moderna are ahead in the race to produce vaccines against respiratory syncytial virus — what will be their impact?

New technologies might provide more potent or broader immunity — but will have to fight for market share.

The unlikely discovery of a life-changing leukaemia drug uncovers harsh realities of profit and loss.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Physicist and co-discoverer of high-temperature superconductivity.

Funds for a major genomics programme in Africa will run dry this year. A chance to address global inequity in health-related genomics by building on the success of this initiative must not be missed.

Mathematicians leading decolonization efforts say that building knowledge-sharing partnerships with communities is key.

Ichthyologist Lucia Rapp Py-Daniel preserves and catalogues the fish of Amazonian waters as their numbers fall because of industrial development.

Engineering the energies of ultracold molecules when they collide has been shown to enhance the probability that they will form complexes — an exciting prospect for precisely controlled chemistry.

The neurotransmitter dopamine has well-established roles in reward-driven behaviours, such as searching for food. The discovery that it also shapes spontaneous behaviour reveals parallels between these two phenomena.

Regions of the human genome that evolved rapidly after the separation between hominins and chimpanzees have now been charted. They contain genomic elements that are unique to humans and are linked to neurodevelopment and disease.

The discovery of bacterial compounds that have antifungal properties opens up opportunities for the development of agents that protect crops from a devastating disease.

When a semiconductor material called black phosphorus is hit with intense laser light, the behaviour of its electrons is found to change. The discovery opens a route to time-dependent engineering of exotic electronic phases in solids.

Daily rhythms affect many aspects of mammalian biology. A discovery in mice that the activity of a key type of immune cell is shaped by such rhythms might have implications for clinical efforts to tackle cancer.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Impaired sensory-nerve function is a common complication of diabetes. Evidence in mice indicates that deficiency of the amino acid serine causes these complications — and suggests that supplements could help to treat them.

A recently discovered high-mass X-ray binary has an evolutionary history showing the neutron star component formed during an ultra-stripped supernova, and has orbital elements that should allow for forming a binary neutron star in the future.

The authors measure the nucleon axial vector form factor, which encodes information on the distribution of the nucleon weak charge, through antineutrino–proton scattering.

Observations of a pronounced and narrow Feshbach resonance in collisions between two triplet ground-state NaLi molecules are described, providing evidence for the existence of long-lived coherent intermediate complexes even in systems without reaction barriers.

A type of universal scattering resonance between ultracold microwave-dressed polar molecules associated with field-linked tetramer bound states in the long-range potential well is observed, providing a general strategy for resonant scattering between ultracold polar molecules.

Experiments demonstrate the powerful capabilities of ultracold molecules to study dynamics in the context of quantum magnetism, and create new possibilities for studying quantum physics with ultracold molecules more broadly.

Tunable itinerant spin dynamics enabled by dipolar interactions are demonstrated with polar molecules, establishing an interacting spin platform that allows for exploration of many-body spin dynamics and spin-motion physics using strong, tunable dipolar interaction.

In black phosphorus, a model semiconductor, analysis of time and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements demonstrates a strong light-induced band renormalization with light polarization dependence, suggesting pseudospin-selective Floquet band engineering.

We report full-colour, vertically stacked µLEDs that achieve exceptionally high array density (5,100 pixels per inch) and small size (4 µm) via a 2D material-based layer transfer technique, allowing the creation of full-colour µLED displays for augmented and virtual reality.

Geometric confinement on arbitrary substrates promotes, without epitaxial seeding, the layer-by-layer growth of two-dimensional single-crystal monolayers and bilayers of transition metal dichalcogenides.

A new type of carbon, long-range ordered porous carbon, is synthesized from carbon fullerenes at the gram scale and under ambient pressure.

Analysis of fossils of the oldest known caecilian provide insights into the origin and morphological and functional evolution of caecilians.

Photometric recordings and optogenetic manipulation show that dopamine fluctuations in the dorsolateral striatum in mice modulate the use, sequencing and vigour of behavioural modules during spontaneous behaviour.

Serine deficiency can increase small fibre neuropathy in wild-type mice and serine replacement in diabetic mice alleviates diabetic neuropathy, directly linking amino acid metabolism to peripheral nerve disorders.

Data from more than 9,700 human stool and oral metagenomes has been used to decipher the strain transmission patterns of the human microbiome from mother to infant, within households and within populations.

Rhythmic trafficking of dendritic cells to the tumour draining lymph node governs a circadian response of tumour-antigen-specific CD8⁺ T cells that is dependent on the circadian expression of the co-stimulatory molecule CD80.

Synthetic cell adhesion molecules yield customized cell–cell interactions with adhesion properties that are similar to native interactions, and offer abilities for cell and tissue engineering and for systematically studying multicellular organization.

An analysis of MitCOM—a comprehensive resource for the identification, organization and interaction of mitochondrial machineries and pathways in yeast—identifies a constitutive pathway for the removal of preproteins.

Structural studies of the ribosome-associated endoplasmic reticulum translocon complex based on cryo-electron tomography and molecular modelling reveal multiple intermediate states and interactions between the components of the complex and its cofactors.

A CalpL–CalpT–CalpS cascade mediated by cyclic oligoadenylates is identified as a mechanism to detect viral RNA and activate subsequent antivirus responses in microorganisms.

The structures of both human and yeast mitochondrial ribosomal small subunits undergoing assembly are uncovered.