Volume 616 Issue 7958, 27 April 2023

The story of how the structure of DNA was found is one of team science from which one member was unforgivably excluded.

With a radical approach to planning, suburbs in the United States can be made affordable, liveable and climate friendly.

Device could enable doctors to calibrate the treatment of people receiving radiotherapy for certain tumours.

Xiongnu women were honoured with artful coffins and other signs of social leadership.

Some H3N2 strains of influenza infecting dogs in Asia have developed ominous mutations.

Larvae that fed on ancient plumage reveal the deep roots of keratin-eating insects.

Flood mortality rates are far higher in countries with larger income disparities.

The proliferation of miniature satellites — and a possible switch to iodine exhaust — could have unintended consequences.

Carbon-based material for electrodes could lead to batteries that take less time to recharge.

The SpaceX rocket made it partially through its first full test. It could change astrophysics and astronomy, as well as ferry people to the Moon and Mars.

A self-taught Indiana man is among a cadre of community scientists who scour the SARS-CoV-2 genome for problematic mutations.

Facility will produce up to five billion bacteria-infected mosquitoes per year.

Long-awaited decision comes more than a year after Francis Collins resigned as director of the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.

Several search tools claim to help researchers do science.

The proportion of incarcerated people who were Black or Latino increased during the pandemic, mainly because of sentencing differences.

Members of the departing editorial teams say that the fees to publish articles are unsustainable.

The results of influential studies are being used to monitor the world’s banking system amid continuing concerns over bank failures.

An archipelago constructed of sand and mud is bringing new life to a dead lake but can this bold experiment have a lasting impact?

Researchers disagree over how bad it is to be reinfected, and whether COVID-19 can cause lasting changes to the immune system.

Schemes to dive to the bottom of the sea have a surprisingly long history — but a book shows how science has rarely been the motivation.

Pathogens and pandemics have played a huge part in shaping human history right up to COVID-19 — but their exact effects remain highly debatable.

Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved. An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.

Wit can convey important truths about critical thinking and the scientific method, especially when group leaders poke fun at themselves in the process.

Zoleka Filander leads research in South African waters to shield vulnerable marine life and honour her Indigenous community.

Waste plastics contain immiscible polymers, making recycling challenging. A new additive enables the thermal reprocessing of mixed plastics into recyclable, high-performance materials.

A type of circular DNA called extrachromosomal DNA was thought to be found exclusively in cancer. Its discovery in non-cancerous tissue suggests that it might have an early active role in malignant transformation.

The observation that melanocyte stem cells migrate up and down the hair follicle, differentiating into melanocytes and then returning to a stem-cell identity, calls into question long-held assumptions about adult stem cells.

Engineers and algorithms have competed in a virtual test to design a step in the process of manufacturing computer chips. Pairing human expertise with computational efficiency proves most cost-effective, but only when the timing is right.

Influenza viruses that infect the same host can interfere with each other’s replication. This behaviour seems to result in spatial structuring of infected groups of cells in tissue, with implications for viral evolution.

The conversion of dietary sugar to the molecule lactate is a hallmark of many cancers. The discovery of a new binding partner of lactate provides insight into how cells link nutrient metabolism to the decision to divide.

Recent advances in computational approaches and challenges in their application to streamlining drug discovery are discussed.

Spatially resolved images of M87 obtained at a wavelength of 3.5 mm in 2018 show a ring-like accretion structure, the inner (outer) edge of which connects the black hole (jet).

A two-dimensional dipolar XY model with a continuous spin-rotational symmetry is realized using a programmable Rydberg quantum simulator, complementing recent studies using the Rydberg-blockade mechanism to realize Ising-type interactions showing discrete spin rotation symmetry.

The build-up and dephasing of Floquet-–Bloch bands is visualized in both subcycle band-structure videography and quantum theory, revealing the interplay of strong-field intraband and interband excitations in a non-equilibrium Floquet picture.

Two-colour modulation spectroscopy of laser field-driven electrons uncovers the suboptical-cycle strong-field emission dynamics from nanostructures with attosecond precision by measuring photoelectron spectra of electrons as function of the relative phase between the two colours.

A virtual process game to benchmark the performance of humans and computers for the fabrication of semiconductors leads to a strategy combining human expert design with optimization algorithms to improve semiconductor process development.

Suppression of shallow traps responsible for dark count rates in polycrystalline methylammonium lead triiodide using diphenyl sulfide enables the production of metal-halide perovskite photon-counting detectors that allow sensitive detection of γ-ray spectra.

We demonstrate the memory effects and stimuli-regulated transport of molecules through an intelligent, phase-changing MoS₂ membrane in response to external pH, a phenomenon unique to the 1T′ phase of MoS₂.

In situ grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy were used to evaluate the crystallization process and surface morphology of perovskite thin films coated with alkylammonium chlorides, which were used to fabricate high-efficiency perovskite solar cells.

A new compatibilization strategy installs dynamic crosslinkers into several classes of binary, ternary and postconsumer immiscible polymer mixtures in situ, with the resulting compatibilized dynamic thermosets exhibiting intrinsic reprocessability and enhanced tensile strength and creep resistance.

Measurements of the net ecosystem exchanges of CO₂, CH₄ and soil N₂O from Acacia plantation, degraded forest and intact forest enable presentation of the peatland wood plantation rotation greenhouse gas flux balance.

A study shows that clonal haematopoiesis of indeterminate potential is associated with an increased risk of chronic liver disease specifically through the promotion of liver inflammation and injury.

Using data from a single time point, passenger-approximated clonal expansion rate (PACER) estimates the fitness of common driver mutations that lead to clonal haematopoiesis and identifies TCL1A activation as a mediator of clonal expansion.

Analyses of the proteomes of astrocytes and neurons in a cell-specific and subcompartment-specific manner reveal distinct roles for these cell types that are relevant to obsessive–compulsive disorder and perhaps other brain disorders.

Local microenvironmental cues modulate melanocyte stem cells, which control hair pigmentation, to enter different differentiation states, shifting between hair follicle stem cell and transit-amplifying compartments, a process that is different to other self-renewing systems.

A phylogeny-guided genome-resolved metagenomic analysis of DNA viruses in the ocean reveals atypical plankton-infecting relatives of herpesviruses that form a putative new phylum dubbed Mirusviricota.

Discovery of a biochemical mechanism through which lactate binds and inhibits the SUMO protease SENP1, stimulating timed degradation of cell cycle proteins, and resulting in mitotic exit.

An analysis of whole-genome sequencing data from patients with Barrett’s oesophagus or oesophageal ademocarcinoma shows that extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) is strongly associated with cancer progression, and that a wide range of oncogenes are amplified on ecDNAs.

STING signalling is activated in metastatic cancer cells that exit from an immune-evasive dormant state, blocking their progression and cancer relapse.

Increases in transcriptional elongation speed with age affect organismal lifespan and ageing-related changes could be reversed with lifespan-extending interventions.

CTCF is sufficient to block loop extruding cohesin in a DNA tension dependent manner, and induces loop extrusion direction switching and loop shrinkage.

Cryo-electron microscopy and tomography structures of reconstituted and endogenous human mRNA ribonucleoprotein complexes bound to the transcription–export complex reveal how mRNAs are packaged and recognized for nuclear export.

Genome-scale in vitro reconstitution of DNA replication through chromatin establishes a crucial role for the origin recognition complex in organizing nucleosome arrays that are crucial for the initiation of replication.

Using single-molecule imaging, the authors show that Smc5/6 forms DNA loops by extrusion, which establishes DNA loop extrusion as a conserved mechanism among eukaryotic SMC complexes.