Volume 625 Issue 7994, 11 January 2024

Scientists have been promised a front-row seat for the formulation of the EU’s proposed AI regulatory structures. They should seize this opportunity to bridge some big gaps.

Partial-heart transplant from a living donor allows an infant's heart valves to grow as he does.

The spread of rice paddies in sub-Saharan Africa helps to drive up atmospheric concentrations of a potent greenhouse gas.

Soot and other remnants of fires record ancient warfare along the storied trade route.

Macrophages clear the urine of particles that could clump together to form painful masses.

Advanced AI tools, Moon missions and ultrafast supercomputers are among the developments set to shape research in the coming year.

Improvements in the performance of large language models such as ChatGPT are more predictable than they seem.

Claudine Gay steps down in the face of intense scrutiny following controversial congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.

Scientists are devising ways to edit the genomes of immune cells without having to extract them from the people being treated.

Researchers call for more funding to study the boundary between conscious and unconscious systems.

A study shows that US children who received mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have some protection against developing long-lasting symptoms of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

A massive quake that triggered tsunamis, fires and multiple aftershocks was the largest on the country’s west coast in more than a century.

Scientists are attempting to rapidly domesticate wild plant species by editing specific genes, but they face major technical challenges — and concerns about exploitation of Indigenous knowledge.

A broad-ranging analysis asks whether we can achieve a kind of immortality by documenting our lives and deaths online.

A relentless climate scientist who was the voice of the voiceless in the global climate fight.

Studies of the microbes living on and in our bodies are conducted mainly in a few rich countries, squandering opportunities to improve the health of people globally.

Three researchers who went out on a limb to bridge a gap in their field talk to Nature about how and why they went about designing their own, unique devices — and the challenges involved.

Indigenous Canadian ecologist Jennifer Grenz abandons colonial restoration dogma to reshape land systems according to community needs.

Scientists typically look at the skies or take to the laboratory to probe the neutrino’s properties. But neutrinos produced in Earth’s atmosphere could reveal this long-sought information — and the experiments are already well under way.

Neurons with a role in navigation fire sequentially in mice, forming patterns that repeat every minute or so — but which are neither spatially organized, nor related to any visible behaviour.

Analysis of a large, varied data set reveals that snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has undergone marked changes in the past four decades. Evidence that humans caused the shift suggests that snow loss will accelerate in the future.

An exploration of more than 1,600 ancient Eurasian genomes suggests that genetic changes that increase autoimmune-disease risk in modern Europeans could have protected ancient Europeans from pathogens.

Ultrathin materials have long been touted as a solution to the problems faced by the ever-growing semiconductor industry. Evidence that 3D chips can be built from 2D semiconductors suggests that the hype was justified.

Bacteria use diverse defences against viral predators called bacteriophages. A method to identify antibacterial counter-defences in viral genomes has revealed striking modes of defence inhibition.

A stripped-envelope supernova, SN 2022jli, shows 12.4-day periodic undulations during the declining light curve, and narrow Hα emission is detected in late-time spectra with concordant periodic velocity shifts.

A scheme to prepare a magic state, an important ingredient for quantum computers, on a superconducting qubit array using error correction is proposed that produces better magic states than those that can be prepared using the individual qubits of the device.

We establish a spin nematic phase in the square-lattice iridate Sr₂IrO₄ and find a complete breakdown of coherent magnon excitations at short-wavelength scales, suggesting a many-body quantum entanglement in the antiferromagnetic state.

Evidence for a quantum magnetic analogue of a supersolid appears in a recently synthesized antiferromagnet showing a strong magnetocaloric effect of the spin supersolid phase with potential for applications in sub-kelvin refrigeration.

Monolithic three-dimensional integration of two-dimensional field-effect transistors enables improved integration density and multifunctionality to realize ‘More Moore’ and ‘More than Moore’ technologies.

Using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, the surface composition of iron and ruthenium catalysts during ammonia synthesis at pressures up to 1 bar and temperatures as high as 723 K can be revealed.

We describe an imidodiphosphorimidate-catalysed asymmetric Wagner–Meerwein shift of aliphatic alkenyl cycloalkanes to cycloalkenes with excellent regio- and enantioselectivity.

Snowpack reconstructions for major river basins in the Northern Hemisphere reveal that the snowpack has declined in almost half of the basins, with roughly one-third of the declines attributable to human-induced warming.

An analysis involving the shotgun sequencing of more than 300 ancient genomes from Eurasia reveals a deep east–west genetic divide from the Black Sea to the Baltic, and provides insight into the distinct effects of the Neolithic transition on either side of this boundary.

Analyses of imputed ancient genomes and of samples from the UK Biobank indicate that ancient selection and migration were large contributors to the distribution of phenotypic diversity in present-day Europeans.

Analysis of a large ancient genome dataset shows that genetic risk for multiple sclerosis rose in steppe pastoralists, providing insight into how genetic ancestry from the Neolithic and Bronze Age has shaped modern immune responses.

Integrated data, including 100 human genomes from the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods show that two major population turnovers occurred over just 1,000 years in Neolithic Denmark, resulting in dramatic changes in the genes, diet and physical appearance of the local people, as well as the landscape in which they lived.

Neural population activity in the medial entorhinal cortex of mice can be organized into ultraslow oscillatory sequences, with periods extending up to the minute range.

Cryogenic electron microscopy structures of amyloid filaments extracted from patient brains reveal that the protein TAF15 forms filaments that characterize certain cases of frontotemporal lobar degeneration.

A study reports the discovery and characterization of four distinct families of phage-encoded anti-defence proteins that inhibit a variety of bacterial defence systems.

X-ray crystallography, cryo-EM and biochemical analysis provide insight into the assembly of the bacterial Gabija complex, an anti-phage system, and reveal how viruses can evade this defence mechanism.

A study describes the molecular basis of sexual development of Toxoplasma gondii entirely in vitro, demonstrating the role and interaction of AP2XII-1 and AP2XI-2 in the developmental program of this protozoan parasite.

An extensive global transcriptomics analysis of in vivo responses to 86 cytokines across more than 17 immune cell types reveals enormous complexity of cellular responses to cytokines, providing the basis of the Immune Dictionary and its companion software Immune Response Enrichment Analysis.

Mitochondria have a pivotal role in the transport of dietary lipids in enterocytes, a finding that might have relevance to understanding the aberrant gastrointestinal function in patients with mitochondrial disorders.

The accuracy of eukaryotic ribosome translocation relies on eukaryote-specific elements of the 80S ribosome, elongation factor 2 and transfer RNAs, all of which contribute to the maintenance of the messenger RNA reading frame.

Genome-wide replication timing maps of mouse embryos from the zygote to the blastocyst stage were generated using single-cell Repli-seq, shedding light on the establishment of the epigenome at the beginning of mammalian development.