Volume 620 Issue 7976, 31 August 2023

Sustainability cannot be achieved without climate action, and vice versa. What’s needed is a fight on both fronts.

Events in Hawaii show how much we have to learn about wildfire spread — but simple research steps can help to build resilience.

Ordinary ballpoint pens loaded with conductive inks ‘write’ LEDs onto textiles, packaging and more.

A black hole created by the collision of two parent bodies can rebound at a speed of more than 28,000 kilometres per second.

RNA transcripts can discriminate between 18 categories of disease, including common bacteria and viruses as well as rare, potentially life-threatening conditions.

Exposure to burning matches makes the plants close up shop, which might explain their resilience to wildfire.

The craft has performed a technically challenging descent at the lunar south pole.

Lab-grown structures with the potential to develop into fetuses should be defined — and regulated — as embryos, some researchers say.

Two studies report considerable improvements in technologies designed to help people with facial paralysis to communicate.

An analysis of hundreds of publications finds limited efforts to accommodate scientists who are not native English speakers.

Research on the effects of climate change on health will be key in high-profile lawsuits being heard by Europe’s human-rights court.

Analysis shows that mini jets of gas help to generate the solar wind, a discovery that also illuminates how our star’s activity damages satellites.

Research is under way to determine whether the mutation-laden lineage BA.2.86 has the potential for global spread — or whether it is nothing to worry about.

Emerging treatments for achondroplasia pose difficult choices for parents. Proponents say they are changing lives. Others fear they will feed stigma and erase identity.

A community of people with type 1 diabetes got a self-built device approved. What can they offer that big companies can’t?

Computational rules might describe the evolution of the cosmos better than the dynamical equations of physics — but only if they are given a quantum twist.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Pricing credits according to how much carbon is removed, for how long and how reliably, would direct funding to the most effective climate solutions.

Many scientists credit teenage jobs and university or summer side roles for imparting important transferable skills and valuable life experiences.

Geomicrobiologist Karen Lloyd explores the roles of microorganisms that dwell in the planet’s most remote regions.

Biologists have long sought to understand the factors that enable coral reefs to thrive. A careful analysis of nutrient cycling now points to an unexpected food source that helps to sustain corals during food scarcity.

An autonomous drone has competed against human drone-racing champions — and won. The victory can be attributed to savvy engineering and a type of artificial intelligence that learns mostly through trial and error.

Two brain–computer interfaces have been developed that bring unprecedented capabilities for translating brain signals into sentences — at speeds close to that of normal speech, and with vocabularies exceeding 1,000 words.

Activation of gene transcription is precisely regulated in early embryos. The identification of key transcription factors now shows how the transcription machinery is guided to the right place at the right time in mice.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

The isotope oxygen-28 is expected to be ‘doubly magic’, with strongly bound neutrons and protons in its nucleus. Experiments now reveal that it exists in an unbound state — casting doubt on its magic status.

PSR J1953+1844 (M71E) has an orbital period of 53.3 minutes and a companion with a mass of 0.07 M_⊙, making it a bridging object between redbacks and black widows in the evolutionary track.

Observation of ²⁸O and ²⁷O through their decay into ²⁴O and four and three neutrons, respectively, is reported, with the ²⁸O nucleus being of particular interest owing to proton and neutron magic numbers and its extremely asymmetric neutron-to-proton ratio.

The magnetic phases of the geometrically frustrated triangular lattice Hubbard model are directly investigated using ultracold fermionic atoms, indicating a possible transition to ferromagnetism at a filling of 1.2.

Er³⁺ is implanted into CaWO₄, a material with non-polar site symmetry free of background rare earth ions, to realize reduced optical spectral diffusion in nanophotonic devices, representing a step towards making telecom band quantum repeater networks with single ions.

An autonomous system is described that combines deep reinforcement learning with onboard sensors collecting data from the physical world, enabling it to fly faster than human world champion drone pilots around a race track.

Using several ultrafast diffraction and microscopy techniques, demagnetization-driven interlayer shear of a van der Waals antiferromagnet is visualized at the nanoscale.

All-perovskite tandem solar cells with an immiscible 3D/3D bilayer heterojunction demonstrate a record-high PCE of 28%, as well as the ability to retain more than 90% of their initial performance after 600 h of continuous operation.

A study describes the development of a miniaturized hydrogel-based soft power source capable of modulating the activity of networks of neuronal cells without the need for metal electrodes.

Using light-based, reversible C−H sampling catalysis, a cyano functional group can be swapped with a C−H bond in a molecule, providing access to valuable structures that are difficult to obtain by other methods.

A global assessment of the mobility of 92 agricultural pesticides from points of application in major agricultural catchments downstream to rivers and oceans identifies flow pathways and pollution hotspots in which monitoring could improve risk mitigation.

Long-term experiments show that corals acquire dissolved inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus by feeding on symbiont cells, which provide essential nutrients enabling their success in nutrient-poor waters.

Africa-specific genetic variation on chromosome 1 near CHD1L is associated with HIV replication in vivo.

A speech-to-text brain–computer interface that records spiking activity from intracortical microelectrode arrays enabled an individual who cannot speak intelligibly to achieve 9.1 and 23.8% word error rates on a 50- and 125,000-word vocabulary, respectively.

A study using high-density surface recordings of the speech cortex in a person with limb and vocal paralysis demonstrates real-time decoding of brain activity into text, speech sounds and orofacial movements.

OBOX, PRD-like homeobox domain transcription factors (OBOX1–OBOX8), are key regulators of mouse zygotic genome activation and early embryogenesis.

Bacteriophage T4 uses an enzyme known as ADP-ribosyltransferase ModB to modify the translational apparatus of bacteria it infects, not only by ADP-ribosylating proteins, but also by attaching entire RNA chains in a process known as RNAylation.

Interferon-ε is a tumour suppressor expressed in the epithelial cell of origin of ovarian cancer, which it restricts by direct action on tumour cells and especially by activation of anti-tumour immunity.

Platelet factors transfer the benefits of young blood to the ageing brain in mice through CXCR3, which mediates the cellular, molecular and cognitive benefits of systemic PF4 on the aged brain.

Chromosomal instability in cancer is linked to endoplasmic reticulum stress signalling, immune suppression and metastasis, which is mediated by the cGAS–STING pathway, suppression of which can reduce metastasis.

Fine-tuning the RoseTTAFold structure prediction network on protein structure denoising tasks yields a generative model for protein design that achieves outstanding performance on a wide range of protein structure and function design challenges.

Human OPA1 embeds itself into cardiolipin-containing membranes through a lipid-binding paddle domain, and OPA1 oligomerization through multiple assembly interfaces promotes the helical assembly of a flexible OPA1 lattice on the membrane, driving mitochondrial fusion in cells.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of OPA1, mutations of which are associated with the disease dominant optic atrophy, provide insight into how structural features of OPA1 enable this protein to mediate mitochondrial-membrane fusion and remodelling.

The plasma membrane can expand the blades of the PIEZO1 ion channel, impacting channel activation.