Volume 622 Issue 7982, 12 October 2023

With two vaccines available, this killer disease could now be eliminated — but will the world pull together to make it happen?

Repeated outbreaks increase the risk of a Nipah strain emerging that is better at spreading.

Thunderstorms can increase the levels of water vapour in the atmosphere, at altitudes as high as 19 km.

Compared with adults, babies have a weaker antibody response but better protection in their noses.

The vegetable was domesticated roughly 1,200 years ago but was yellow or purple for centuries.

Technique that uses a molecular ‘glue’ allows 3D printing to make objects from challenging materials such as semiconductors.

At times, the enormous telecommunications spacecraft is brighter than some of the most iconic stars visible from Earth.

In a nation with historically high levels of spending on research and development, the proposed cuts have provoked a strong response.

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier receive award for ultra-short pulses of light, which have enabled the close study of electrons.

Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov receive the prize for their work on glowing nanoparticles that are used in fields from electronics to surgery.

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman laid the groundwork for immunizations that were rolled out during the pandemic at record-breaking speed.

People with an abundance of specific neurons are more likely to escape cognitive decline despite having signs of Alzheimer’s in their brains.

An algorithm that takes just seconds to scan a paper for duplicated images racks up more suspicious images than a person.

The main diagnostic test for obesity — the body mass index — accounts for only height and weight, leaving out a slew of factors that influence body fat and health.

A world of AI-assisted writing and reviewing might transform the nature of the scientific paper.

Geophysicist who showed how segments of Earth’s crust move.

Ada Lovelace was a visionary who first recognized the potential of computer programming. Almost two centuries on, six women in computer science and technology reflect on their experiences in the field.

Postdoctoral researchers still feel as though they are academia’s drudge labourers, but have more confidence about job prospects in a post-pandemic world.

Sri Lankan taxonomist Bhathiya Gopallawa tapped into a network of early-career researchers to unearth a botanic gem in the tropical forest undergrowth.

The analysis of fossils in sediment cores from Lake Victoria, Africa, reveals that a group of cichlid fish rapidly diversified as the lake got larger and provided new ecological niches, whereas the other fish there did not diversify.

A raft of alterations to the pig genome — removing three antigen-encoding genes, adding seven human genes and eliminating a retrovirus — allows kidneys to be transplanted into monkeys, with implications for clinical trials.

Pinpointing the state of a complex system is tricky, especially when the underlying mathematical equations aren’t known. But a data-driven technique makes light work of it — and could even change the way that models are formulated.

Evolution by natural selection peerlessly describes how life’s complexity develops — but can it be explained in terms of physics? A new approach suggests it can.

When two worlds collide, they leave more than the shambles of dusty ejecta. Astronomers have detected light from a post-collision remnant, providing the best evidence so far for planetary-scale collisions in exoplanetary systems.

Infrared brightening and luminosity observations from a young, solar-like star suggest a collision between two exoplanets producing a hot, highly extended post-impact remnant and transit of the debris causing the visible light eclipse of the host star.

Observations of the super-massive Neptune-sized transiting planet TOI-1853 b show a mass almost twice that of any other Neptune-sized planet known so far and a bulk density implying that heavy elements dominate its mass.

A parametrization strategy for stochastic variational inference with Markov Gaussian processes is presented for state estimation of a physical system whose underlying dynamical equations are partially or completely unknown.

The realization of two-qubit entangling gates with 99.5% fidelity on up to 60 rubidium atoms in parallel is reported, surpassing the surface-code threshold for error correction and laying the groundwork for neutral-atom quantum computers.

Erasure conversion and detection are used in a Rydberg quantum simulator to create Bell states with high fidelity, competitive with other state-of-the-art platforms.

This study reports gates between qubits encoded in the nuclear spin state of Yb atoms trapped in optical tweezers, reaching very high fidelity and demonstrating mid-circuit conversion of errors into erasure errors.

Proton-coupled electron-transfer reactions are used to achieve efficient chemical doping of organic semiconductor thin films under ambient conditions, and a reference-electrode-free, resistive pH sensor based on the method is proposed.

Generic single-stranded oligonucleotides used as a uniform transmission signal can reliably integrate large-scale DNA integrated circuits with minimal leakage and high fidelity for general-purpose computing.

Deep learning using a convolutional neural network trained with daily precipitation fields and annual global mean surface air temperature data demonstrates that anthropogenically induced climate change has a detectable effect on daily hydrological fluctuations.

The second Global Amphibian Assessment finds that the status of amphibians is continuing to deteriorate globally, driven predominantly by climate change, disease and habitat loss.

This study presents a continuous fossil record, extracted from a series of sediment cores, that shows how haplochromine cichlids came to dominate the fish fauna of Lake Victoria in Africa.

Assembly theory conceptualizes objects as entities defined by their possible formation histories, allowing a unified language for describing selection, evolution and the generation of novelty.

The Pharma Proteomics Project generates the largest open-access plasma proteomics dataset to date, offering insights into trans protein quantitative trait loci across multiple biological domains, and highlighting genetic influences on ligand–receptor interactions and pathway perturbations across a diverse collection of cytokines and complement networks.

A set of three papers in Nature reports a new proteomics resource from the UK Biobank and initial analysis of common and rare genetic variant associations with plasma protein levels.

Comparisons of phenotypic and genetic association with protein levels from Icelandic and UK Biobank cohorts show that using multiple analysis platforms and stratifying populations by ancestry improves the detection of associations and allows the refinement of their location within the genome.

Assembloids are integrated with CRISPR screening to investigate the involvement of 425 neurodevelopmental disorder genes in human interneuron development, showing endoplasmic reticulum displacement before nuclear translocation and interference from LNPK deletion, resulting in abnormal migration.

An in vivo single-cell CRISPR screening method identifies transcriptional phenotypes of 22q11.2 deletion syndrome associated with a broad dysregulation of a class of disease susceptibility genes that are important for RNA processing and synaptic function.

A biochemical and structural analysis demonstrates that alterations at the substrate-binding pocket of the main protease of SARS-CoV-2 can allow the virus to develop resistance to nirmatrelvir in two distinct ways.

Stress-associated catecholamines promote CD8⁺ T cell exhaustion through the β₁-adrenergic receptor, and blocking β-adrenergic signalling may help restore anti-tumour functions.

Using kidneys from a genetically engineered porcine donor transplanted into a cynomolgus monkey model, the design, creation and long-term function of kidney grafts supporting life are explored.

The endoribonuclease PUCH, a trimer of Schlafen-like-domain proteins, initiates piRNA processing in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans through 5′-end piRNA precursor cleavage.

The exploration of voltage-gated potassium channels using cryo-electron microscopy and electrophysiology identifies a mechanism of inactivation involved in regulating neuron firing.