Volume 614 Issue 7947, 9 February 2023

Researchers and policymakers are only now waking up to the effects of dirty indoor air. As ever, low-income and marginalized communities are most exposed.

Structures resembling small human brains can form neural connections if transplanted into a rat brain.

The drug apremilast reduces alcohol intake in mice bred to imbibe to excess and in humans with alcohol-use disorder.

For the first time, astronomers have identified a planet outside the Solar System using ‘microlensing’ data from a telescope in space.

Floods followed by droughts, or droughts followed by floods, will rise in frequency in a warming world.

The Arctic fox, which weighs less than many house cats, covers long distances in the frigid north.

Remnants of ancient bison and other large mammals might have been kept as hunting trophies.

Nanoparticles bristling with copper atoms convert carbon dioxide into an alcohol that can be used in fuel cells.

The World Health Organization has decided the crisis isn’t over yet — but it’s at a transition point.

Resins used to prepare bodies for the afterlife are found in vessels in an ancient workshop.

The month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.

Prairie voles lacking oxytocin receptors bonded with mates and cared for pups.

The World Health Organization’s disease reports reflect public-health priorities and surveillance capabilities.

Fireworks display from rare dying star is unlike anything astronomers have seen.

A biosecurity panel met, expecting to approve recommendations, but myriad concerns complicated the proceedings.

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is deploying machine-learning algorithms that filter out Earthly interference and spot signals humans might miss.

South Asian weather is becoming increasingly difficult to forecast as monsoons grow more erratic — and global warming is raising the risks posed by violent rain storms.

Researchers are excited but apprehensive about the latest advances in artificial intelligence.

Barbara Rae-Venter’s account of her genetic sleuthing illustrates the power of technologies to bring criminals to justice. But should there be limits to their use?

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Dirty outdoor air might grab the headlines, but learning how pollutants inside buildings form, accumulate and affect our health is equally crucial.

Conversational AI is a game-changer for science. Here’s how to respond.

Approaches to capturing the benefits of research on society are improving — but huge challenges remain.

Automated microscopes that adapt to each sample’s quirks can capture elusive biological phenomena at high resolution.

Satellite transmitters help Cristina Miranda to understand the movements and habitats of endangered hawksbill sea turtles in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

What ingredients and processes underlay mummification in ancient Egypt? The molecular analysis of labelled pots excavated from an embalming workshop provides some answers to this question.

A light-activated ‘plasmonic’ catalyst, made from abundant elements, produces as much hydrogen from ammonia as do the most-used heat-activated catalysts based on a rarer element, suggesting a strategy for sustainable chemical production.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

An object in the distant Solar System has been shown to have a ring that is unusually far from its host — prompting speculation about how the ring material has avoided clumping together to form moons.

An impressive combination of modelling and data analysis has enabled a new estimate of the extent of wetland losses over the past few centuries — and reveals that an area about the size of India has been lost since 1700.

Sophisticated experimental approaches reveal cellular and immune-system mechanisms that enable rare HIV-infected cells to persist for decades in people who are taking antiretroviral drugs.

High-resolution structures of the bacterial Rho protein in complex with an RNA polymerase enzyme and partner proteins provide support for the long-held model of how Rho helps to terminate gene transcription.

The authors report observations of a dense and inhomogeneous ring at a surprisingly large distance from the trans-Neptunian body Quaoar.

At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, observations of two meson species produced by heavy-ion collisions, ϕ and K^*0, show surprising patterns of global spin alignment, being unexpectedly large and consistent with zero, respectively.

A topological insulator, Bi₂Te₃, has been found to have spatially indirect spin-polarized excitonic states, opening the prospect of combining exciton and topological physics.

Nanoscale magnetic fluctuations are spatiotemporally resolved beyond conventional resolution limits using coherent correlation imaging, in which frames in Fourier space are recorded and analysed using an iterative hierarchical clustering algorithm.

By investigation of structural dynamics during the life cycle of Cu nanocatalysts, correlation of multimodal operando techniques was found to serve as a powerful platform to advance understanding of their complex structural evolution.

The simplicity of particle suspension reactors and the precise synthetic control afforded by silicon nanowire growth are used to develop a system that can produce hydrogen fuel by splitting water with sunlight.

Installation of multiple C–O bonds by concurrent oxygenation of contiguous C–H bonds in a selective fashion is highly desirable, and this is achieved by repeated operation of a potent oxidative catalyst via electrophotocatalysis.

We reconstruct the spatial distribution and timing of wetland loss through conversion to seven human land uses between 1700 and 2020, elucidating the magnitude and land-use drivers of global wetland losses to improve assessments of wetland loss impacts.

Philological analysis of labels and instructions, together with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry analysis of residues on vessels recovered from a 26th Dynasty embalming workshop at Saqqara, Egypt provide insights into ancient Egyptian embalming practices.

Analysis of data collected from mice learning a trace conditioning paradigm shows that phasic dopamine activity in the brain can regulate direct learning of behavioural policies, and dopamine sets an adaptive learning rate rather than an error-like teaching signal.

A signalling mechanism ensuring intraspecies and interspecies reproductive barriers in flowering plants is uncovered.

A proteogenomic profiling analysis of single cells from the blood and lymph nodes of individuals living with HIV-1 reveals that CD4⁺ memory T cells harbouring intact provirus show signatures associated with resistance to immune-mediated killing and cell survival.

HIV-infected memory CD4 T cells under antiretroviral therapy are a distinctive population of cells with transcriptomic patterns that favour HIV silencing, cell survival and cell proliferation.

The pathogenic function of XBP1-expressing astrocytes in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis and multiple sclerosis have been studied using FIND-seq, a new method combining microfluidics cytometry, PCR-based detection of nucleic acids and cell sorting for in-depth single-cell transcriptomics analyses of rare cells.

Bacterial products in the gut–liver axis and tissue stromal factors can tune liver immunity by driving myeloid instruction of CD8⁺ T cells with immunomodulatory ability.

A transcriptional enhancer element regulates Prox1 expression and lymphatic endothelial cell identity.

As solid tumours develop, cancer cells shed energetically expensive tissue-specific functions, enabling uncontrolled growth despite a limited ability to produce ATP.

Cap2 methylation increases on transcripts as they age, reducing activation of innate immunity.

Structures presented in this study confirm decades of genetic and biochemical evidence for the mechanism of Rho-dependent termination in bacteria.