Volume 617 Issue 7959, 4 May 2023

Funding for research on women’s health is still a fraction of that available for men’s health.

As commercial firms transform the global space economy, each country’s space governance will shape its opportunities for decades to come.

Unprecedented pattern of brain activity is recorded in freely swimming fish.

An aerial system can image objects submerged in either still or moving water.

Insights from mudskippers suggest that blinking is an adaptation to emerging from the sea.

The BCG injection failed to prevent COVID-19 in a large trial, contrary to preliminary evidence.

Extremely white pigment stems from a peculiar arrangement of reflective molecules.

The famed thought experiment, which posits that a cat can be alive and dead at the same time, is confirmed with classical evidence.

Settlers brought in hemlock and other types of timber much earlier than previously realized.

Following the US National Ignition Facility’s breakthrough last year, Nature looks at what’s next.

Observations of galaxy M87 show how the black hole at its centre relates to a long-seen stream of superheated matter.

Ex-Harvard researcher was among the first academics tried under the now-defunct US China Initiative.

Researchers question the government’s investment, given uncertainties about the technology.

Mission control was unable to re-establish contact with the M1 spacecraft, and early signs suggest it crash-landed on the lunar surface.

Images from the UAE’s Hope mission suggest that the moonlet’s composition is similar to that of the red planet’s surface.

The majority of sequences come from people who lived in Western Eurasia, but samples from other regions are on the rise.

The current landscape of mobile mental-health apps is the result of a 70-year search to automate therapy. Now, advanced AIs pose fresh ethical questions.

Researchers are starting to learn how the early stages of menopause affect brain health — and what that could mean for treatment.

Conditions that affect women more than men garner less funding. But boosting investment could reap big rewards.

More political and public awareness of the plight of the world’s crops when it comes to fungal disease is crucial to stave off a major threat to global food security.

Female and Black researchers describe the impacts of sexism and racism at conferences

Computational environments and the tools to manage them can help researchers to deliver code that is reproducible, documented and shareable.

Miin Wu, whose company, Macronix International, has played a seminal part in Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, explains why dust and vibration pose enormous challenges for running his factory.

Lablab is a key crop in the tropics. A high-quality genome sequence for the plant, produced in Kenya, provides insights that could boost breeding programmes and pave the way for more African crops to be sequenced in African laboratories.

An outburst of radiation offers direct evidence that a star has consumed a giant planet. But not every planet ends up as a stellar host’s snack — the star’s properties, and its interactions with the planet, have to be just right.

A serendipitous observation has revealed that cells make several versions of a key protein needed for cell division. The ratio of these protein isoforms influences how long division can be delayed when errors arise.

Nanocrystals made from a semiconducting material have been shown to emit intense light when excited with an electric current. The technology could be used to build a type of laser that is more versatile than those in general use.

Tumours with certain cancer-driving mutations are difficult to treat. A discovery that one enzyme both controls proliferation and suppresses anticancer immune defences presages the exploration of new cancer-therapy strategies.

This Review examines the palaeobiology of Australopithecus in terms of morphology, phylogeny, diet, tool use, locomotor behaviour and other characteristics, and considers the role of this genus of hominins in human evolution.

Observations of ZTF SLRN-2020, a short-lived optical outburst in the Galactic disk accompanied by bright, long-lived infrared emission, show that the resulting light curve and spectra are consistent with the signatures of a planet being engulfed by its host star.

Using a quantum annealing processor to study three-dimensional spin glasses demonstrates an accurate large-scale quantum simulation of critical dynamics and a scaling advantage over analogous classical methods for energy optimization.

A single-element ferroelectric state is observed in a black phosphorus-like bismuth layer, in which the ordered charge transfer and the regular atom distortion between sublattices happen simultaneously and ferroelectric switching is further visualized experimentally.

All-optical, mode-selective manipulation of the crystal lattice can be used to enhance and stabilize ferromagnetism in YTiO₃ well above its equilibrium ordering temperature and for many nanoseconds, enabling dynamic engineering of practically useful non-equilibrium functionalities in fluctuating electronic systems.

Colloidal quantum dot devices demonstrating electrically pumped amplified spontaneous emission are described, showing strong, broadband optical gain and bright edge emission, opening the path to solution-processable laser diodes.

Tracking the formation of cubic ice (ice Ic) using transmission electron microscopy and low-dose imaging shows preferential nucleation of ice Ic at low-temperature interfaces and two types of stacking disorder.

We report a simple method to fabricate chiroptical flexible layers via supramolecular helical ordering of conjugated polymer chains, providing direct, scalable realization of on-chip detection of the spin degree of freedom of photons.

Ice-core data show that extreme iceberg discharge events in the North Atlantic had no detectable impact on Greenland temperatures but are synchronous with abrupt acceleration of Antarctic warming.

Analysis of more than 7,600 corrugation ridges on the Norwegian continental shelf shows that rapid grounding-line retreat of several hundred metres per day occurred across low-gradient ice-sheet beds during the last deglaciation.

A pan-Amazon study of forests shows large variations in drought tolerance traits and finds that forests in regions of pronounced climate change are losing biomass and may be operating beyond their hydraulic limits.

A strategy that depends on attenuated brassinosteroid signalling is described for the design of semi-dwarf wheat varieties with improved grain yield compared with that of green revolution varieties.

Experiments in rats show that spatial representations in the hippocampus are closely coordinated with the forelimb stepping cycle, particularly when spatial decisions are approaching, and provide insight into how this synchronization supports information processing.

Arabidopsis thaliana UMAMIT uniporters facilitate glucosinolate efflux from biosynthetic cells along the electrochemical gradient into the apoplast, in which the high-affinity H⁺-coupled glucosinolate importers GLUCOSINOLATE TRANSPORTERS (GTRs) load them into the phloem for translocation to the seeds.

A mouse model of invasive breast cancer in which Pten and Trp53 are simultaneously inactivated links PTEN loss with STAT3 activation and indicates that immune escape in PTEN-null tumours is mediated by PI3Kβ.

Analysis of messenger RNA splicing in a large cohort of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma tumours identifies differential splicing correlating with disease progression, associated with the the splicing regulator RBFOX2.

Human cells modulate the duration of their mitotic arrest through the presence of conserved alternative CDC20 translational isoforms.

Previously shown as a 60-nm hole in the nuclear pore complex, the transport machinery by FG-nucleoporins is mapped.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures reveal how XPC recognizes DNA lesions and recruits XPA and the TFIIH core complex for lesion verification in nucleotide excision repair.

A surface-centric approach captures the physical and chemical determinants of molecular recognition, enabling the de novo design of protein interactions and of artificial proteins with function.

The structural basis of the late-stage intermediate assembly of outer membrane β-barrel proteins mediated by the bacterial β-barrel assembly machinery is determined.

Structural analysis of a protein complex in the circadian clock of Drosophila reveals how a light-sensing cryptochrome recognizes and engages its target.

The reaction coordinate of aminoacyl-tRNA movement is altered on the human ribosome and the process is an order of magnitude slower compared with bacteria due to eukaryote-specific structural elements in the human ribosome and in the elongation factor eEF1A.