Volume 616 Issue 7956, 13 April 2023

Ethics review processes routinely impede Indigenous academics’ research with Indigenous communities.

An endangered butterfly, found only in Papua New Guinea, has had a small population for a million years.

An enzyme rapidly makes hydrocarbons found in petrol if it has the right fatty acid as a reagent.

Genome editing raises levels of a protein that is scarce in people with spinal muscular atrophy.

Sensor-laden research vessels help to measure how much ice is being lost under lake surfaces.

Extreme blazes mean that woods in California take longer to return to their pre-fire rate of carbon uptake.

An ornament buried with an elite woman from the fifth or sixth century ad was probably made in an East African workshop.

Some genes that influence the length of a pregnancy also hold sway over fetal growth rates.

First peer-reviewed analysis of the Chinese swabs confirms animal DNA was present in samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

An ongoing clinical trial aims to test whether digital models built using brain-scan data can help to identify where seizures originate.

Advocates ask the US biomedical agency to rethink the design of its RECOVER initiative, citing possible harm and funding waste.

Microphones capture ultrasonic crackles from plants that are water-deprived or injured.

A mirror that rapidly turns on and off alters the waveform of a reflected laser pulse in a way characteristic of Thomas Young’s classic double-slit experiment.

The stakes are high as the agency contemplates the technological and financial hurdles ahead for its sample-return mission.

Arati Prabhakar speaks to Nature about innovation, science’s role in political decision-making and taking the reins after scandal.

Researchers are studying how more-sophisticated policies, smarter recycling and new materials could stem the tide of waste.

An international team braved the far north in January to unlock secrets of how marine organisms tell day from night during the polar winter.

The question of what the Big Bang really represented still bamboozles cosmologists — and Hawking provided more than one answer.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Demand for lithium for batteries and other green technologies is exploding. The industry must develop sustainable methods to remove and process the element from ores and brines to avoid environmental damage.

Researchers describe how listening to music at work can boost (or hamper) productivity, and share the tunes that keep them focused.

Microbiologist Gaël Erauso studies microorganisms from the deep ocean to learn how they evolved from prebiotic organic molecules billions of years ago.

A model shows that key physical properties of our planet, from the density of its iron core to its water, could have been set by interactions between a magma ocean and an early hydrogen atmosphere that was lost to space.

A four-legged robot has learnt to run on sand at a faster pace than humans jog on solid ground. With low energy use and few failures, this rapid robot shows the value of combining data-driven learning with accurate, yet simple, models.

An injection system from bacteria has been re-engineered in an effort to develop a programmable system for protein delivery into cells. Its customizability opens the door to a multitude of biomedical applications.

A molecular process called singlet fission might boost solar-cell efficiency, but the mechanism must first be determined. A technique that probes molecules undergoing this process finally reveals the excited states involved.

Unusual metabolic pathways used by cancer cells offer possible targets for the development of clinical treatments. One such pathway, involving molecules called polyamines, has been found for pancreatic cancer.

This review discusses generalist medical artificial intelligence, identifying potential applications and setting out specific technical capabilities and training datasets necessary to enable them, as well as highlighting challenges to its implementation.

James Webb Space Telescope early release observations used to search for intrinsically red galaxies from the first 750 million years of cosmic history find six candidate massive galaxies, possibly including one of roughly 10¹¹ solar masses.

A Dirac plasma in high-mobility graphene shows anomalous magnetotransport and giant magnetoresistance that reaches more than 100 per cent in a low magnetic field at room temperature.

Time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy is used to observe the primary step of singlet fission with orbital resolution indicating a charge-transfer mediated mechanism with a hybridization of states in the lowest bright singlet exciton.

Transient absorption with N prescribed excitation intensities allows isolation of N increasingly nonlinear responses, enabling separation of single- and multiple-exciton dynamics.

A porous organic crystal readily and reversibly adsorbs water, with dehydration occurring well below the freezing point of water, which could be seen by a change in colour.

By switching the nucleation preferences in aqueous systems of inorganic precursors to bias formation and growth at the air–liquid interface, the mechanistic formation of inorganic membranes from the floating-particle system is demonstrated.

Spatial optimizations of high-resolution data from China on crop-specific yields, harvested areas, environmental footprints and farmer incomes shows that crop switching can enhance environmental sustainability and farmer incomes, and contribute substantially towards China’s agricultural sustainable development targets.

Thermodynamic modelling shows that Earth’s water, core density and overall oxidation state can be explained by the formation of Earth from planetary embryos with hydrogen-rich primary atmospheres and underlying magma oceans.

Electrophysiological recordings in sleeping bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps) reveal a type of interhemispheric competition that is detected in the claustrum but generated in the midbrain, and only during rapid-eye-movement sleep.

This study demonstrates that bacteria use a ubiquitin transferase-like enzyme to prime cGAS/DncV-like nucleotidyltransferase activation and use a deubiquitinase-like enzyme to decrease activity. 

Cap2 of the cyclic dinucleotide-based anti-phage immune system functions through a ubiquitin-like conjugation mechanism to regulate cGAS activity.

Phase separation of the human adenovirus 52-kDa protein has an essential role in the formation of biomolecular condensates, regulating the coordinated assembly of viral progeny particles.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cells show a specific dependency on ornithine aminotransferase-mediated ornithine synthesis from glutamine, providing an opportunity to develop targeted therapies with minimal toxicity for this cancer.

NKp46 recognizes externalized calreticulin, which translocates from the ER to the cell membrane during ER stress, indicating a danger-associated molecular pattern that eliminates ER-stressed cells.

The tail fibre of an extracellular contractile injection system (eCIS) from Photorhabdus asymbiotica recognizes targets expressed on eukaryotic host cells, and can be reprogrammed to target specific organisms and cell types for delivery of novel protein payloads.

A high throughput recruitment assay testing the transcriptional activity of more than 100,000 protein fragments tiling across most human chromatin regulators and transcription factors maps the locations and strengths of activation, repression and bifunctional domains, and identifies the sequences necessary for these functions.

Cryo-electron microscopy analyses reveal adaptations that facilitate the octopus chemotactile receptor’s evolutionary transition from an ancestral role in neurotransmission to detecting greasy environmental agonists for ‘taste by touch’ sensory behaviour.

Octopus and squid use cephalopod-specific chemotactile receptors to sense their respective marine environments, but structural adaptations in these receptors support the sensation of specific molecules suited to distinct physiological roles.

Cryo-EM structures of D. radiodurans TnpB–reRNA complex in DNA-bound and -free forms reveal the basic architecture of TnpB nuclease and the molecular mechanism for DNA target recognition and cleavage supported by biochemical experiments.

Cryo-electron microscopy analysis of the Deinococcus radiodurans ISDra2 TnpB in complex with its cognate ωRNA and target DNA provides insights into the mechanism of TnpB function and the evolution of CRISPR–Cas12 effectors.