Volume 621 Issue 7977, 7 September 2023

Health outcomes, ending poverty and greening the environment are boosted when power is shared between the genders.

As Africa emerges from the COVID pandemic, combating infectious diseases must be a priority — along with treating non-communicable and mental health conditions.

Planting trees has a stronger effect on local temperature if air pollution is curbed.

Membrane material improves power generation from hydrogen gas — and catalyses the gas’s production from water.

PhD students with supervisors who are prolific inventors have an edge, as do male students.

Fragments of DNA extracted from these aquatic animals record the diversity of their neighbours.

The group that helped to revolutionize medical practice has lost key funding and is reorganizing — moves that concern some researchers.

Most of the striking ProMED staff members are prepared to return to work, although many still have concerns.

Researchers in Hawaii are studying the deadly blazes’ effects on drinking-water quality and how they might affect local marine ecosystems.

Oxygen-28 might prompt physicists to revamp theories of how atomic nuclei are structured.

Zijie Yan led a laboratory at the University of North Carolina that studied light–matter interactions on the nanometre scale.

The prized materials could be transformative for research — but only if they have other essential qualities.

The professional athlete and research technician explains why focus, collaboration and teamwork are important on and off the pitch.

Some of the most threatened animals might not survive in their current habitat because of climate change. Researchers are testing a controversial strategy to relocate them before it’s too late — starting with Australia’s rarest reptile.

Physicist Ranga Dias and his colleagues have twice claimed to make a room-temperature superconductor. But many researchers question the evidence.

From atmospheric nuclear testing to the US Dust Bowl, human activities have left a toxic legacy of particulate pollution — and the unseen fallout continues to this day.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Plant geneticist who pioneered seed conservation for famine resilience and farmer livelihoods.

There is increasing evidence that ship strikes are a major cause of mortality for whales, sharks and other ocean giants. With the global fleet growing, some simple actions can turn things around.

Record-high ocean temperatures, combined with a confluence of extreme climate and weather patterns, are pushing the world into uncharted waters. Researchers must help communities to plan how best to reduce the risks.

Leading a drive to lower your lab’s carbon footprint alongside your PhD research is tough. Start by celebrating small successes, says Caroline Giuglaris.

Snow hydrologist McKenzie Skiles takes to her skis in rural parts of the United States each spring to track dust’s impact on water resources.

Pulsatile driving of pipe flow that imitates waveforms measured in the human aorta has been shown to suppress turbulence and increase the energy efficiency of the transport of fluids in pipes.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Tidal marshes, mangroves and coral reefs support the livelihoods of millions of people. Most of these ecosystems will be vulnerable to submergence owing to rapid sea-level rise if global warming exceeds 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.

It is well established that proteins in the TRP family of ion channels assemble from four subunits. But do they always do this? A five-subunit structure has now been observed, and might be involved in channel regulation.

The pathway used by mammalian cells to make triglyceride lipids when supplies of fat molecules are high has long been known. A route that works when fat supplies are low has now been discovered.

The interaction of a molecule with a specific surface has been shown to produce consistent unidirectional motion driven by voltage pulses. The mechanism can even facilitate the transport of molecular cargo.

Images and spectroscopy obtained by the JWST from two HSC-SSP quasars show massive, compact and disc-like galaxies, indicating that the relation between black holes and their host galaxies was in place less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

JWST observations of CH₃⁺ in a protoplanetary disk in the Orion star-forming region are reported showing that gas-phase organic chemistry in the interstellar medium is activated by ultraviolet irradiation and the methyl cation.

Proximity-induced superconductivity on a single spin-degenerate quantum level of a surface state confined in a quantum corral on a superconducting substrate built atom by atom by a scanning tunnelling microscope is investigated.

Evidence is presented for a Pines’ demon as a three-dimensional acoustic plasmon in the multiband metal Sr₂RuO₄ from momentum-resolved electron energy-loss spectroscopy using a collimated, defocused beam with high momentum resolution.

Turbulence can be reduced by more than 25% in ordinary pipe flow by unsteady, pulsatile driving specifically mimicking the cardiac cycle and extending this method to large Reynolds numbers.

In situ liquid-cell electrochemical transmission electron microscopy allows the direct visualization of the transformation of lithium polysulfides over electrode surfaces at the atomic scale, leading to a new energy-storage mechanism in lithium–sulfur batteries.

An adsorbate motor that moves unidirectionally on a copper surface is achieved by inducing intramolecular hydrogen transfer in a single molecule.

We report a small-organic-molecule oscillator that catalyses an independent chemical reaction in situ without impairing its oscillating properties, allowing the construction of complex systems enhancing applications in automated synthesis and systems and polymerization chemistry.

A global assessment shows that the wildland–urban interface occurs on all continents, showing its broad-scale patterns and providing a basis for future research on dynamics and socioeconomic and biophysical processes.

Titanium isotope measurements for chondrites, ancient terrestrial mantle-derived lavas and modern ocean island basalts imply the preservation of a primordial lower-mantle reservoir for most of Earth’s geologic history.

Ground truthed thermal data from a new NASA satellite combined with experimental warming data from three continents in an empirical model suggests that tropical forests are closer to a high temperature threshold than previously thought.

Without mitigation, relative sea-level rises under current climate change projections will exceed the capacity of coastal habitats such as mangroves and tidal marshes to adjust, leading to instability and profound changes to coastal ecosystems.

Population differences in immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 can be explained by environmental exposures, but also by local adaptation acting through genetic variants acquired after admixture with archaic hominin forms.

Linked-read whole-genome sequencing reveals patterns of structural DNA variants that are specific to homologous recombination deficiency and can be used to distinguish between BRCA1- and BRCA2-deficient phenotypes.

Through leverage of whole-brain screening, in vivo calcium imaging and chemo- and optogenetic manipulations, it is demonstrated that the xiphoid nucleus serves as a key brain region in the promotion of cold-induced food-seeking behaviours.

Several independent lines of evidence demonstrated long-term potentiation induction by a structural function of calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II rather than by its enzymatic activity.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures and biochemical analyses provide insight into how short prokaryotic Argonaute proteins are assembled and activated, and reveal that oligomerization has a key role in driving catalytic activity.

Germ-free mice were colonized with complex defined communities to show T cell recognition of commensals is focused on widely conserved, highly expressed cell-surface antigens, opening the door to new therapeutic strategies.

Triacylglycerols are an energy source produced in humans by DGAT1 and DGAT2, but disrupting these enzymes reveals a noncanonical pathway involving the protein DIESL (formerly TMEM68) and its regulator TMX1, which is important during lipid scarcity.

A study describes the metabolic adaptations supporting differentiation, survival and function of tissue-resident memory CD8⁺ T cells and how to leverage them to enhance immunity against pathogens and tumours.

A combination of genome-wide CRISPR screens in target cancer cells identifies pathways that regulate γδ T cell killing and BTN3A cell surface expression.

Mice overexpressing Has2 from the naked mole-rat showed an increase in hyaluronan levels in several tissues, and a lower incidence of spontaneous and induced cancer, attenuated inflammation through several pathways, extended lifespan and improved healthspan.

High-speed atomic force microscopy single-molecule imaging and cryo-EM analysis discover and reveal the structure of a TRPV3 pentamer, providing evidence for a non-canonical pentameric TRP-channel assembly, laying the foundation for new directions in TRP channel research.