Volume 622 Issue 7983, 19 October 2023

The test 30 years ago of what remote sensing could tell us about our own planet shows the value of looking with unbiased eyes at what we think we already know.

Extreme-right presidential front runner Javier Milei plans to disband ministries and privatize research. That would be disastrous for Argentina’s science and for the nation.

Projected decreases in soot deposition mean that Northern Hemisphere snow will be more reflective and thus less prone to melting before 2100.

The organ that nourishes the developing embryo does not develop properly in mice that lack the usual gut microbes.

A component of bamboo itself can be used to bind the plant’s cells to form a strong material — no petrochemical glue needed.

Analysis of carved inscriptions more than 1,000 years old suggests the prominence of the Viking queen Thyra.

Survival time is one of the longest for any interspecies transplant — and moves pig organs closer to human use.

Despite last year’s CHIPS and Science Act, which was meant to boost innovation, report predicts that Congress will cut spending on science.

Samples of asteroid Bennu delivered by the OSIRIS-REx mission contain carbon, water and other ingredients from the primordial Solar System.

Researchers are using machine-learning programs to predict the evolution of viruses and design vaccines.

Neuroscientist Sergiy Sylantyev tells Nature that science and war cannot be separated.

Claudia Goldin mined 200 years of data to show that greater economic growth did not lead to wage parity, nor to more women in the workplace.

Exploring the genomes of half-forgotten and heirloom apple varieties could help to ensure the future of the incomparable fruits.

Thirty years ago, astronomer Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn a passing space probe’s instruments on Earth to look for life — with results that still reverberate today.

Agricultural scientist who introduced crops to end famine in India in the 1960s.

Scientists should carefully consider whether embryo models based on human stem cells are essential to their work because of the associated practical and ethical challenges.

Investing US$1 billion every year for the next ten years into long COVID research could improve the lives of millions and save trillions in economic costs.

Around one in three respondents to Nature’s global postdoc survey are using AI chatbots to help to refine text, generate or edit code, wrangle the literature in their field and more.

Linking mass spectrometry with cryo-electron microscopy could transform understanding of complex protein structures — if scientists can show that samples remain intact when they hit their target.

Electronic engineer Axel Bres predicts the weather from one of the world’s most isolated islands.

To explain the interplay of climate, area and isolation that underlies the marked global differences in biodiversity, a switch in focus from geographic space to climatic space offers a way forwards.

An electrically insulating quantum material turns metallic when placed between two semi-reflecting mirrors — even if there is no illumination between them. This discovery paves the way for engineering other phase transitions.

Infection by the bacterium Clostridioides difficile can be fatal in a clinical setting. Insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying such infection might offer targets for the search to develop new treatments.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

A silicon-based device uses laser light to accelerate electrons and simultaneously shape them into a narrow beam. The principle could be used to build microchip accelerators that do away with bulky conventional designs.

Researchers have used stem cells to create models that resemble human embryos at two weeks old, but bypass the earliest developmental stages — paving the way for studies that are not possible in human embryos.

Resonant X-ray excitation of the  ⁴⁵Sc nuclear isomeric state was achieved by irradiation of a Sc-metal foil with 12.4-keV photon pulses from a state-of-the-art X-ray free-electron laser, allowing a high-precision determination of the transition energy.

A scalable nanophotonic electron accelerator with a high particle acceleration gradient and good beam confinement achieves an energy gain of 43%.

Measurement-induced phases of quantum information have been observed in a system of 70 superconducting qubits.

Cavity-mediated thermal control of metal-to-insulator transition is achieved by embedding the charge density wave material 1T-TaS₂ into cryogenic tunable terahertz cavities.

Lead-free perovskite light-emitting diodes (LEDs) prepared using tautomeric mixture coordination provide improved ordering in the crystal structure, reduced recombination and enhanced exciton binding energy compared with lead-containing perovskite-based LEDs.

A route to greatly elevate joint densities of states by introducing a flat-band electronic structure is demonstrated, showing metallic λ-Ti₃O₅ powders have a high solar absorptivity and offering insights into access to cost-effective solar-to-steam generation.

A scalable total synthesis of portimines enables structural reassignment of portimine B and in-depth functional evaluation of portimine A, revealing that portimine A induces translation inhibition selectively in human cancer cells and is efficacious in vivo tumour-clearance models.

A CO₂ emissions inventory of 4,883 individual iron and steel plants along with their technical characteristics is described, allowing the identification and guidance of the most appropriate emissions mitigation and decarbonization pathways for each plant.

Anthropogenic and volcanic aerosols dominate multidecadal variability in aspects of the tropical Atlantic climate, such as sea surface temperatures, Sahel rainfall and hurricanes.

Simulations using two state-of-the-art ice-sheet models show that abrupt melting of the Greenland ice sheet following overshooting of the global mean temperature critical threshold can be mitigated by subsequent cooling to below 1.5 °C.

Nearly 90% of global variation in species richness of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles is shown to be explained by the joint effects of climate and the geographic structure (area and isolation) of climate.

Fossilized gut contents of an Ordovician trilobite shed light on the feeding habits of one of the most common and well-known extinct arthropods.

In situ spatial transcriptomic analysis of more than 1 million cells are used to create a 200-nm-resolution spatial molecular atlas of the adult mouse central nervous system and identify previously unknown tissue architectures.

The culture of genetically unmodified human naive embryonic stem cells in specific growth conditions gives rise to structures that recapitulate those of post-implantation human embryos up to 13–14 days after fertilization.

Human pluripotent stem cells can be triggered to self-organize into structures recapitulating early human post-implantation embryonic development.

Co-culture of wild-type human embryonic stem cells with two types of extraembryonic-like cell engineered to overexpress specific transcription factors results in an embryoid model that recapitulates multiple features of the post-implantation human embryo.

A computational approach to generate reference-free protein families from the sequence space in metagenomes reveals an enormously diverse functional space.

A study reports the three-dimensional structure of the Ebola virus polymerase in complex with VP35 and RNA, and reveals features required for initiation of viral replication.

The molecular mechanism underlying the severe neurogenic inflammation induced by Clostridioides difficile is presented, providing a therapeutic target for treating this infection.

Inhibition of the fatty acid oxidation metabolic pathway through inactivation of Cpt1b enhances cardiomyocyte survival and proliferation and allows heart regeneration in adult mice.

During senescence, minority mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization leads to the release of mtDNA into the cytosol through BAX and BAK macropores, in turn activating the cGAS–STING pathway, a major regulator of the senescence-associated secretory phenotype.

The novel Foldseek clustering algorithm defines 2.30 million clusters of AlphaFold structures, identifying remote structural similarity of human immune-related proteins in prokaryotic species.

The extent to which the AlphaFold database has structurally illuminated proteins that are challenging to annotate for function or putative biological role using standard homology-based approaches at high predicted accuracy is investigated.