Volume 625 Issue 7993, 4 January 2024

The global community needs to break the web of transnational crime networks and corruption threatening one of the world’s largest carbon sinks.

Researchers at the National Ignition Facility are consistently creating reactions that make more energy than they consume.

Large language model improves on efforts to solve combinatorics problems inspired by the card game Set.

Some researchers hoping that gene-editing technology can conquer forms of Alzheimer’s caused by genetic mutations.

Some researchers publish a new paper every five days, on average. Data trackers suspect not all their manuscripts were produced through honest labour.

In collecting genomic data for Indigenous Australians, scientists hope to expand knowledge of human genetic diversity and improve health for this group.

A candidate for the largest known protein might help killer aquatic bacteria to devour other microbes — but it’s not easy to study the behemoths, or prove they’re even real.

Bedrock extracted from beneath the island’s frozen covering offers hints of the ice sheet’s past and future.

Not only is the prevalence of the condition poorly understood, but it’s also often ignored by physicians and the wider public.

An exploration of the biological reasons that people age celebrates the role of worms and flies in enabling scientific discovery — and investigates how to age well.

As the race to extract minerals and metals for clean-energy technologies accelerates, researchers must take more steps to map and study mines globally.

Don’t rely solely on academic papers to raise your professional profile. General readers are interested in your opinions, too.

By putting on my scuba suit and keeping track of corals in French Polynesia, I hope to determine how much stress they’re under.

Machine learning and satellite imagery have been used to map industrial infrastructure at sea — from fishing vessels to wind turbines. The findings provide a more comprehensive picture of maritime activity than ever before.

An expanded version of a human-genome database called gnomAD, containing 76,156 whole-genome sequences, has enabled investigation of how variants in non-protein-coding regions of the genome affect health.

The integration of non-silicon semiconductors into systems on chips is needed for advanced power and sensing technologies. A semiconducting graphene ‘buffer’ layer grown on silicon carbide is a step on this path.

A suppressive type of immune cell called a regulatory T cell has a key role in helping muscles to adapt to exercise — guarding muscle mitochondrial organelles against damage mediated by proinflammatory factors generated during physical activity.

Modified components of messenger RNA can cause the protein-production machinery to stall during the process of translation. This might change the protein being made, a finding with implications for vaccines or therapies.

A tool that tags individual cells in a tissue with a unique barcode means that the gene-expression profile of each cell can be plotted in its original location. This allows spatial information to be captured at single-cell resolution.

A roadmap towards solving the cis-regulatory code using a combination of machine learning and massively parallel assays of exogenous DNA is proposed.

Evaluation of evidence generated to test 19 proposed policy recommendations and guidance for the future.

The JWST MIRI transmission spectrum of WASP-107b, a transiting planet with Neptune-like mass and Jupiter-like radius, shows observations of sulfur dioxide and silicate clouds but no methane in its atmosphere, providing evidence of disequilibrium chemistry and active photochemistry.

The authors suggest that a probable Keplerian disk is feeding an optically revealed massive young stellar object in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Semiconducting epigraphene aligned with single-crystal silicon carbide substrates has a band gap of 0.6  eV and room temperature mobilities 20 times larger than that of other two-dimensional semiconductors, making it suitable for nanoelectronics.

DEED captures the balance between entropy gains and costs, allowing the correct classification of functional synthesizability of multicomponent ceramics, regardless of chemistry and structure, and provides an array of potential new candidates, ripe for experimental discoveries.

Enzyme-bound ketyl radicals derived from thiamine diphosphate are selectively generated through single-electron oxidation by a photoexcited organic dye and shown to lead to enantioselective radical acylation reactions.

Physical analysis of processes universal to raised peatlands produces an equation that explains their morphology and carbon storage across biomes, from Alaska to New Zealand.

Satellite imagery, vessel GPS data and deep-learning models are used to map industrial fishing vessel activities missing from public tracking systems and changes in offshore energy infrastructure in the world’s coastal waters during 2017–2021.

A genomic constraint map for the human genome constructed using data from 76,156 human genomes from the Genome Aggregation Database shows that non-coding constrained regions are enriched for regulatory elements and variants associated with complex diseases and traits.

Slide-tags enables multiomic sequencing of single cells and their localization within tissues.

Offline cortical reactivations predict the gradual drift and separation in sensory cortical response patterns and may enhance sensory discrimination.

A time-resolved cryogenic electron microscopy analysis provides structural information on the processes of primary and secondary nucleation of tau amyloid formation, with implications for the development of new therapies.

In zebrafish embryos, active complexes of Wnt5b and its membrane-bound receptor Ror2 are transported between cells via cellular protrusions called cytonemes to initiate paracrine Wnt5b signalling in cells that do not endogenously express the receptor.

Exposure to early variants of SARS-CoV-2 results in immune imprinting in mouse models and in humans, reducing neutralizing antibody titres against Omicron variants, which could be mitigated with multiple updated boosters.

Two Prevotella copri metagenome-assembled genomes that are positively associated with ponderal growth are the principal contributors to MDCF-2-induced expression of metabolic pathways involved in utilizing the component glycans of MDCF-2—a microbiome-directed complementary food.

Single-cell transcriptomics studies on human and mouse non-small cell lung cancer and conditional knockout mouse models show that IL-4 from bone marrow basophils drives the development of granulocyte-monocyte progenitors to myeloid cells that suppress antitumour immunity.

Oxytocin derived from peripheral sympathetic neurons is shown to regulate lipolysis and systemic metabolism.

Messenger RNAs transcribed from olfactory-receptor genes may have non-coding functions that include recruitment of transcriptional enhancers and inhibition of potentially thousands of competing alleles to ensure stable transcription of a single allele.

A study demonstrates that nucleotide modifications in mRNA-based therapeutics can lead to +1 ribosomal frameshifting during translation, yielding products that can trigger immune responses.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the PP2A:B55 holoenzyme bound to its inhibitors ARPP19 and FAM122A show distinct binding modes of the two inhibitors.