Volume 615 Issue 7954, 30 March 2023

The UN’s first water conference in decades put the spotlight on a vital and troubled resource. But to widen access and resolve disputes, one thing is needed above all: data.

Material that includes carbon with the same structure as diamond could be used to protect satellites from space radiation.

People scrolling online news are 1% less likely to click on an article for each positive word in its title.

A virus that readily infects bats without harming them could spread a vaccine throughout a population.

Ocean emissions partially explain why 40% more mercury enters the atmosphere every year than previously estimated.

Some say the analysis supports the hypothesis that the virus that causes COVID-19 spilled over from an animal — but falls short of definitive proof.

Researchers are excited about the AI — but many are frustrated that its underlying engineering is cloaked in secrecy.

Hundreds of millions of people lack access to safe water and sanitation. Will the first UN conference on water in nearly 50 years make a difference?

Technical ‘tour de force’ allows researchers to trace the family tree of crucial brain cells.

Luis Caffarelli’s work includes equations underpinning physical phenomena, such as melting ice and flowing liquids.

One year after the launch of ARPA-H, Nature talks to director Renee Wegrzyn about her vision for the agency.

Editors threaten to resign over ‘no-reject’ model that others see as the future of research journals.

Science is beginning to uncover the multiple processes driving persistent pain. But connecting people with treatments that will help them remains a challenge.

When the MIT molecular biologist quantified how much more lab space men were given, she unleashed a US-wide reckoning about how women are held back in academia.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

The benefits of scientific collaboration are too often skewed towards wealthier countries. Bioethicists and others present guidance on how stakeholders such as researchers can change this.

Anthropogenic pressures and climate change are altering water flows worldwide. Better understanding, new economic thinking and an international governance framework are needed to stave off catastrophe.

Three years on, scientist mums implore universities, funding agencies and publishers to heed calls to account for COVID-19 disruptions.

Conservation biologist Andrea Terán-Valdez aims to protect endangered frogs in Ecuador by breeding populations, cataloguing new species and fighting industrial development.

Simulations show that the melting of Antarctic ice reduces the production of deep water that stores heat at the bottom of the Southern Ocean. Comprehensive models could reveal whether the trend will persist.

There is debate about how epigenetic marks, such as methyl groups on DNA, can be passed down from parent to offspring. A mouse model involving targeted DNA methylation will better equip researchers to study this process.

Light-sensitive proteins called rhodopsins in the vertebrate eye initiate the cellular processes of vision. Leading-edge crystallography experiments have revealed the molecular mechanism by which light activates these proteins.

A screen of mouse stem cells that exploits their propensity to gain or lose chromosomes in cell culture has been used to convert male XY to female XX cells. Subsequent differentiation generates functional eggs and live offspring.

The size of the space taken up by a proton’s mass has been measured, and it’s much smaller than previously thought. The result is a key step towards understanding the complex structure of this fundamental building block.

Proteins have been developed that emit flashes of light in response to influxes of calcium ions into cells on millisecond timescales. Two sets of scientists discuss the legacy and future of these proteins.

Analysis of observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array showed evidence of the thermal Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect in the direction of the Spiderweb protocluster at a redshift of 2.156.

The gluonic gravitational form factor of the proton was determined using various models, and these analyses showed that the mass radius of the proton was smaller than the electric charge radius.

In this alternative approach to quantum computation, the all-electrical operation of two qubits, each encoded in three physical solid-state spin qubits, realizes swap-based universal quantum logic in an extensible physical architecture.

Chips with 256 × 256 memristor arrays that were monolithically integrated on complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) circuits in a commercial foundry achieved 2,048 conductance levels in individual memristors.

Perovskite LEDs with exceptional performance at high brightness are demonstrated achieving an operational half-lifetime of 32 hours, an important step towards commercialization opening up new opportunities beyond conventional LED technologies, such as perovskite electrically pumped lasers.

By using in vivo ultrafast TA spectroscopy, extraction of electrons directly from photoexcited PSI and PSII in cyanobacterial cells using exogenous electron mediators is demonstrated.

Simulations show that projected increases in Antarctic meltwater will slow down the abyssal ocean overturning circulation over the coming decades and lead to warming and ageing of the ocean abyss.

Increasing variability of net biome production over recent decades may be due to climate change and points to destabilization of the carbon–climate system.

The very low water contents of minerals in achondrite meteorites from the early Solar System show that substantial amounts of water could only have been delivered to Earth by means of unmelted material.

A systematic census at 1,636 sites around Australia from 2008 to 2021 finds that more than 30% of shallow invertebrate species in cool latitudes exhibit a high extinction risk due to declining populations and oceanic barriers, but tropical coral species remain relatively stable.

Analysis of ancient human DNA from the Swahili coast reveals that predominantly African female ancestors and Asian male ancestors formed families after around ad 1000 and lived in elite communities in coastal stone towns.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Using large-scale screening and structure-guided mutagenesis, fast and sensitive GCaMP sensors are developed and optimized with improved kinetics without compromising sensitivity or brightness.

Mice maintain the memory of previous associations between head direction neurons and allocentric cues and this influences the internal head direction representation.

Mouse induced pluripotent stem cells derived from differentiated fibroblasts could be converted from male (XY) to female (XX), resulting in cells that could form oocytes and give rise to offspring after fertilization.

The structural basis for the molecular mechanism of recognition of different IgM forms by the IgM receptor FcμR is determined using crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy.

Somatic mutations in MEN1 are identified in patients with leukaemia treated with a novel chromatin-targeting therapy, and the mechanism by which these mutations mediate therapeutic resistance is characterized.

Revumenib, a potent and selective oral inhibitor of the menin–KMT2A interaction, is associated with a low frequency of treatment-related adverse events and promising clinical activity in patients with relapsed or refractory acute leukaemia.

Whole-genome doubling induces the loss of segregation of chromatin compartments, and can lead to tumour-promoting epigenetic and transcriptional modifications.

A supercomplex comprising all four respiratory chain components contributes to the induction of mitochondrial membrane curvature and tubulation of cristae.

One picosecond after photoactivation, isomerized retinal pulls away from half of its numerous interactions with its binding pocket, and the excess of the photon energy is released through an anisotropic protein breathing motion in the direction of the extracellular space.

A technique to detect the release of N-terminal fragments of Drosophila adhesion G-protein-coupled receptors (aGPCRs) provides insight into the dissociation of aGPCRs, and shows that receptor autoproteolysis enables non-cell-autonomous activity of aGPCRs in the brain.