Volume 617 Issue 7960, 11 May 2023

Abolishing the council that controls the universities would allow higher education to finally blossom.

Two extremely cool examples of ‘failed stars’ called brown dwarfs are found orbiting each other.

Younger and older people gained greater protection if they had their jabs in the middle of the day.

A plant used as medicine by South African peoples could be a source of some of the ingredients in the marijuana plant.

Climate change is shrinking ice, fuelling fog formation over the Arctic Ocean.

Griffon vultures in northern Spain fill up at landfills, but their southern brethren prefer the carcasses of wild animals.

A device that transforms infrared light into a visible image could be used for anti-surveillance purposes.

Children living in Germany who had fled their home countries faced less rejection if their classes were ethnically mixed.

Three years after the start of the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 shows no signs of settling into a seasonal pattern of spread, like influenza has.

Easy gains from upgrading power-plant smokestacks will be strengthened only by deeper policy changes.

Clashes have left hospitals and universities without water and power — and vulnerable to takeover by armed groups.

Results suggest that the amyloid-targeting drug candidate slows cognitive decline in some people, but questions remain over its potential side effects.

New analysis of genomic data from market swabs highlights their limitations.

Green light from US regulatory agency for GSK’s jab caps off a decades-long quest.

Language models similar to those behind ChatGPT have been used to improve antibody therapies against COVID-19, Ebola and other viruses.

Neuroethicists are split on whether a study that uses brain scans and AI to decode imagined speech poses a threat to mental privacy.

Despite broader acceptance of neurodiversity, autistic advocates and scientists are still fighting for a chance to set clinical and scientific priorities.

Concerned by the speed of research, policymakers are looking for alternative ways to establish rules on genome editing and other technologies.

The prospect of settling the Moon, Mars and elsewhere requires urgent conversations about issues such as labour and reproductive rights far from Earth.

Adaptive algorithms have been linked to terrorist attacks and beneficial social movements. Governing them requires new science on collective human–algorithm behaviour.

Time management isn’t taught at graduate school, but a better understanding of how you pass the hours can help you achieve your goals.

Yichen Cai creates thin, flexible devices that could have myriad uses, from wearable blood-pressure monitors to touch sensors for robots.

The human brain’s motor cortex is often regarded as a linear map with discrete sections, each controlling different parts of the body. The discovery that portions of the motor cortex have other functions points to a different type of map.

Superconducting quantum bits, a promising platform for future quantum computers, have been entangled over a separation of 30 metres, with a performance that enabled the demonstration of a milestone in quantum physics.

A pangenome is a collection of DNA sequences that reveals genetic variation between individuals. Four scientists discuss the generation of a human pangenome, and what insights can be gained from it.

Analysis of microfossils in marine sediments spanning the past 1.2 million years suggests that increased intrusion of highly saline waters from the Indian Ocean into the South Atlantic propelled Earth’s deglaciations during this period.

A public data set on the size and racial composition of US prison populations has been generated. Its analysis indicates how biases in sentencing lengths shape prisons’ racial make-up in the United States.

Investigation of the physical conditions of the circumgalactic medium led to detection of two compact [C ii]-emitting galaxies with narrow linewidths at a redshift of 5.7, associated with a complex, high-ionization C iv absorption system.

A loophole-free violation of Bell’s inequality with superconducting circuits shows that non-locality is a viable new resource in quantum information technology realized with superconducting circuits, promising many potential applications.

Under strong excitation, inhomogeneously broadened solid-state emitters coupled with high cooperativity to a cavity demonstrate collectively induced transparency and dissipative many-body dynamics, resulting from cavity–ion coupling.

A simple experimental method identifies the statistical phase of highly diluted abelian anyons weakly partitioned in fractional quantum Hall states and reveals their braiding statistics.

Experimental observation and calculations show that broken reflection symmetry in graphene heterostructures allows tunable electron–flexural phonon coupling, providing a way to control quantum matter at the atomic scale.

A new transfer method for microLEDs fabrication based on fluidic self-assembly technology combining magnetic and dielectrophoresis forces is described, achieving a very high simultaneous RGB LED transfer yield and over large areas.

The authors report a high-throughput combinatorial printing method capable of fabricating materials with compositional gradients at microscale spatial resolution, demonstrating a variety of high-throughput printing strategies and applications in combinatorial doping, functional grading and chemical reaction.

The authors develop a strategy that allows the diffusion limit of ions in water to be approached for large-area, free-standing, synthetic membranes using covalently bonded polymer frameworks with rigidity-confined ion channels.

Salinity reconstructions show that Indian Ocean surface salinity increased during glacial periods and that the release of this water via the Agulhas Leakage during deglaciation can trigger abrupt changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

An initial draft of the human pangenome is presented and made publicly available by the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium; the draft contains 94 de novo haplotype assemblies from 47 ancestrally diverse individuals.

A study comparing the pattern of single-nucleotide variation between unique and duplicated regions of the human genome shows that mutation rate and interlocus gene conversion are elevated in duplicated regions.

Comparisons within the human pangenome establish that homologous regions on short arms of heterologous human acrocentric chromosomes actively recombine, leading to the high rate of Robertsonian translocation breakpoints in these regions.

A study shows that, although the number of incarcerated people in the USA decreased during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the fraction of incarcerated Black and Latino individuals increased.

Functional MRI studies across ages show that the classic homunculus of the motor cortex in humans is in fact discontinuous, alternating with action control-linked regions termed the somato-cognitive action network.

A new encoding method, CEBRA, jointly uses behavioural and neural data in a (supervised) hypothesis- or (self-supervised) discovery-driven manner to produce both consistent and high-performance latent spaces.

Inhibitory neuron activity is necessary and sufficient for astrocyte morphogenesis.

Interactions between programmed death ligand 2 (PD-L2) and its binding partner RGMb are downregulated by the gut microbiota, a mechanism that may be exploited to enhance the efficacy of PD-1-based cancer immunotherapies.

Cellular uptake of copper(ii) by CD44 has a key role in regulating cellular plasticity via copper(ii)-dependent downstream signalling events.

Combining genome-wide CRISPR screens with massively parallel analyses of human and random DNA sequences reveal a unified mechanism for the surveillance and evolution of translation products from annotated noncoding DNA.

The α-diazoester azaserine can be produced by Streptomyces albus engineered with a biosynthetic gene cluster and act as the carbene precursor for coupling with intracellularly produced styrene to generate unnatural amino acids containing a cyclopropyl group.

A cryo-electron microscopy reconstruction of the virus ΦcrAss001 provides insights into the functions of the viral gene products in capsid assembly and infection.

Active-state structures of the κ-opioid receptor in complexes with the G-protein heterotrimers G_i1, G_oA, G_z and G_g provide insights into the actions of hallucinogenic opioids and G-protein-coupling specificity at the κ-opioid receptor.