Volume 615 Issue 7951, 9 March 2023

Japan plans to share US$2 billion annually between a handful of top universities. Experience from elsewhere suggests the negatives of this approach might outweigh the positives.

From COVID-19 to the war in Ukraine, virtual models could inform global food policy before emergencies unfold.

Conventional sunscreens can bleach coral reefs, but new formulation is coral-safe.

Paired hurricanes within 15 days of each other are likely to become more frequent as Earth warms.

The cells regenerate masses of bone and cartilage every year.

Male researchers are more likely to migrate for jobs — but this disparity is closing.

Human hunt at least 19% of bat species worldwide — especially flying foxes, which can have wingspans of 1.5 metres.

An insect that subsists on low-energy food has found an efficient way to rid itself of large volumes of waste.

Modelling suggests that the Sun’s ‘birth cluster’ could have contained as many as 20,000 stars.

With only 64 X-ray and 73 kidney-dialysis machines, 7 CT scanners and one MRI machine, doctors in northwest Syria are racing against the clock to treat 8,500 injuries.

Studies reveal final moments before NASA probe crashed into an asteroid.

From tracking the disease’s spread in wild birds to updating human vaccines, there are measures that could help keep avian influenza in check.

A pair of studies offer the most detailed look yet at groups of hunter-gatherers living before, during and after the last ice age.

Anti-Asian scrutiny has only intensified since the controversial programme ended one year ago, researchers say.

Nature analysis suggests that Russia is increasing partnerships with China and India.

As generative AI models grow larger and more powerful, some scientists advocate for leaner, more energy-efficient systems.

The current pandemic has focused attention to the importance of healthy indoor air and could spur lasting improvements to the air we breathe.

Nails, wheels, springs, magnets, lenses, string and pumps: a structural engineer reveals the small things that our biggest tech advances are built on.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Shifting weather, changing settlement patterns and a lack of preparedness mean that dryland areas are most at risk from flooding. Researchers need to focus on data collection, early-warning systems, flood protection and more.

The University of York’s efforts to decolonize how chemistry is taught holds lessons for other chemistry educators.

Innovative software and modes of presentation are helping to broaden access to the literature.

Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti sloshed fluids around in the International Space Station to gather information for designing fuel tanks.

During periods of anxiety, the brain affects the heart, but does a racing heart also talk to the brain to cause anxiety-related behaviour? Use of a light-stimulated pacemaker in mice shows that it does, and pinpoints a brain region involved.

The enzyme Dicer cleaves a type of RNA called a pre-microRNA to make the mature functional RNA. Structural evidence now sheds light on the catalytic mechanism involved and the role of a newly found RNA sequence termed GYM.

Unexpected smoke-particle chemistry is shown to be the link between intense wildfires and stratospheric ozone loss. As the climate changes, more-frequent and more-intense fires might delay the recovery of the stratospheric ozone layer.

A hydrogen-rich compound has taken the lead in the race for a material that can conduct electricity with zero resistance at room temperature and ambient pressure — the conditions required for many technological applications.

Structures of the machinery for importing proteins into chloroplast organelles of algae, determined using cryo-electron microscopy, have opened a new chapter in efforts to understand how chloroplasts are built.

The mechanisms that enable the deadly spread of cancer are not fully understood. It emerges that tumours can signal to the lung to manipulate lipids and so prime the organ to support tumour cells that subsequently spread there.

Direct detection of gas phase water from the disk of V883 Ori indicates that disks directly inherit water from the star-forming cloud that becomes incorporated into large icy bodies without notable chemical alteration.

Quantum simulation of superfluid to Mott insulator transition in twisted-bilayer square lattices based on atomic Bose–Einstein condensates loaded into spin-dependent optical lattices provides a new direction for exploring moiré physics in ultracold atoms.

A distorted infinite-layer lattice of single-crystal CaCoO₂ originates from competition between an ordered Jahn–Teller effect and geometric frustration.

A nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride was synthesized under high-pressure high-temperature conditions and, following full recoverability, examination along compression pathways showed evidence of superconductivity at room temperature and near-ambient pressures.

Information from natural protein libraries was extracted and used to design heteropolymer ensembles as mixtures of disordered, partially folded and folded proteins, providing valuable guiding principles to synthetically realize protein properties.

Comparison of model simulations with atmospheric observations from the Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes following the 2020 Australian wildfires shows that the wildfire aerosol composition promotes stratospheric chlorine and ozone depletion chemistry.

Geochemical insights from a dataset of carbonate stable strontium isotopes suggest that porewater production of authigenic carbonates may have been an overlooked carbonate sink for much of Earth’s history.

A pan-tropical analysis using satellite, station-based and reanalysis datasets shows that deforestation causes reduced precipitation, and demonstrates that the effect increases with spatial scale.

Numerical model experiments show that deep valleys cutting across the East African Rift System dry out East Africa by channelling water vapour towards Central Africa, leading to elevated rainfall in the Congo Basin rainforest.

Satellite observations reveal global increases in the extent and frequency of phytoplankton blooms between 2003 and 2020 and provide insights into the relationship between blooms, ocean circulation and sea surface temperature.

Using sequencing and comparing high-coverage genomes, the germline mutation rates across vertebrates are quantified.

Direct elevation of heart rate using noninvasive optogenetics in mice influences anxiety-like behaviours in specific environmental contexts, and the posterior insular cortex is implicated in this integration of signals from the heart with environmental risk information.

A study demonstrates that specific interactions between the two committed enzymes for the synthesis of lipopolysaccharide and peptidoglycan enable coordinated assembly of the outer membrane and cell wall in the Gram-negative pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

An autoimmune-prone state of steady-state cytokinopathy, hyperactivated CD4 T cells and ongoing B cell activation contributes to a breach in immune tolerance in individuals with Down’s syndrome.

Disruption of TET2 increases the antitumour efficacy of CAR T cells, but establishes an epigenetic state that is prone to hyperproliferation and accumulation of secondary mutations.

Massively parallel assays reveal a highly conserved sequence motif termed the GYM motif, which potentiates RNA interference by directing Dicer-mediated small RNA processing.

The active-state structure of human DICER bound to pre-miRNA reveals the structural basis for the specificity of DICER in how it selects substrates in a sequence dependent manner, and sheds light on DICER-related diseases.

Acute loss of H3K4me3 does not have detectable effects on transcriptional initiation, but leads to a widespread decrease in transcriptional output, an increase in RNA polymerase II pausing and slower elongation

A cryo-electron microscopy analysis of the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii TOC–TIC supercomplex reveals that Tic214 traverses the chloroplast inner membrane, the intermembrane space and the outer membrane, connecting the TOC complex with the TIC proteins.