Volume 626 Issue 7998, 8 February 2024

For months, ransomware attacks have debilitated research at the British Library in London and Berlin’s natural history museum. They show how vulnerable scientific and educational institutions are to this kind of crime.

Under-represented groups face chronic barriers, creating psychological — and physical — effects. The scientific community must ease this burden.

A puzzle named after the Nobel-prizewinning physicist has been solved by experiments with a submerged sprinkler.

The environmental record preserved in ice high atop a Swiss mountain has been partially lost.

The family, genus or even species of animal that supplied the materials for a famed museum’s objects could be identified with minimal damage to the items.

Immune guardians called complement proteins are manufactured by gut cells and help to protect against pathogens.

If he wins a second term, the former US president has promised to limit the authority of federal agencies and employees, including scientists.

Data from an African observatory show that jets from a collapsed star are capable of producing some of the Galaxy’s fastest particles.

The findings support a controversial hypothesis that proteins related to the neurodegenerative disease can be ‘seeded’ in the brain through material taken from cadavers.

Several organizations are vying for the contract to manage Fermilab, after it received failing grades from the US Department of Energy.

The record-setting Mars helicopter Ingenuity broke during a final, fatal flight.

Scientists in the global south use the popular technique to protect local crops against local threats.

The blockbuster medications that reduce body weight also reduce inflammation in organs such as the brain, raising hopes that they can treat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.

Researchers are experimenting with different designs that could lower costs, extend vehicle ranges and offer other improvements.

An expedition that drilled into the sea floor near the famous Greek island found signs of a gargantuan blast 520,000 years ago and more recent eruptions.

The view of biology often presented to the public is oversimplified and out of date. Scientists must set the record straight, argues a new book.

Similar goals but different strategies underlie tensions between science and the state, an in-depth analysis explains.

Ideas of diet and exercise as the ‘best’ way to lose weight could stigmatize people taking Ozempic, WeGovy and other blockbuster drugs that affect appetite. Lessons from weight-loss surgery reveal ways to help.

Start the new year by sorting out your lab’s cold storage, to simplify purchasing, improve experiment planning and reduce the frequency of lost samples.

Anxiety and depression affect nearly half of all early-career researchers. Strengthening our communities from within can provide relief, says Taylor Tibbs.

Heather Middleton trawls England’s Jurassic Coast for specimens that might lead to a deeper understanding of palaeontology.

The shifting orbit of one of Saturn’s moons indicates that the satellite has a subsurface ocean, contradicting theories that its interior is entirely solid. The finding calls for a fresh take on what constitutes an ocean moon.

DNA analyses of skeletal fragments from a site in Germany provide evidence that humans, rather than Neanderthals, were responsible for a particular stone-tool industry called the Lincombian–Ranisian–Jerzmanowician.

In lithium-metal batteries, grains of lithium can become electrically isolated from the anode, lowering battery performance. Experiments reveal that rest periods after battery discharge might help to solve this problem.

The analysis of DNA sequences sheds light on microbial biology, but it is difficult to assess the function of genes that have little or no similarity to characterized genes. Here, scientists discuss this challenge from genomic and microbial perspectives.

The discovery that an evolutionarily conserved molecule used to make cholesterol also acts as a defence against a cell-death mechanism called ferroptosis might lead to new ways to treat cancer and other clinical conditions.

We suggest that as mitochondrial signals probably contribute to the homeostatic role of inflammation, dysregulation of these processes may lead to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, with increasing evidence pointing to the recent failure of endosymbiosis being crucial.

An analysis of the orbital motion of Saturn’s moon Mimas shows that a recently formed global subsurface ocean lies beneath its cratered icy shell and that this ocean is probably still evolving.

Ultracold polyatomic molecules can be created by electroassociation in a degenerate Fermi gas of microwave-dressed polar molecules through a field-linked resonance.

This study describes experiments with ultracold lithium Fermi gases in which many-body pairing leads to the emergence of a pseudogap, and it confirms theoretical predictions relevant to cuprate superconductivity.

We provide evidence for superconducting topological Fermi arcs in PbBi₂—a Weyl semimetal previously studied mostly for its bulk properties—from which Marjorama fermions could be derived for research in quantum computers.

Polariton-enhanced Purcell effects can be used to reduce the triplet density in blue phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes, thereby extending their operational lifetimes by decreasing the annihilation of high-energy, long-lived blue triplets.

Calendar ageing of lithium metal batteries in the discharged state improves capacity retention through isolated lithium recovery, which is in contrast with the capacity degradation observed during charged state calendar ageing.

A Ca–O₂ battery that relies on a highly reversible two-electron redox to form chemically reactive calcium peroxide as the discharge product is reported to be stable in air and rechargeable for 700 cycles at room temperature.

Contrary to expectations from pollen and dust records, Southern Hemisphere subtropical regions experienced the greatest climatic moisture during glacial periods of the Late Pleistocene, which may not have been an obstacle to movement and expansion of animals and plants.

A bottom-up assessment of the net greenhouse gas emissions of the pulp and paper industries of 30 countries from 1961 to 2019 leads to country-specific strategies to achieve net zero by 2050.

Predator mass-mortality events lead to the proliferation of diverse consumer and producer communities resulting from weakened top-down predator control and stronger bottom-up effects through predator decomposition.

Through archaeological excavation, morphological and proteomic taxonomic identification, mitochondrial DNA analysis and direct radiocarbon dating of human remains, a study reports the presence of Homo sapiens in Germany north of the Alps more than 45,000 years ago.

In mice, the neural mechanisms underlying aversive social learning, specifically avoidance and fear after defeat, involve oxytocin signalling in the anterior subdivision of the ventromedial hypothalamus, ventrolateral part.

Authentic hypoblast cells created from naive human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) spontaneously assemble with naive hPSCs to form a three-dimensional bilaminar structure (bilaminoids) with a pro-amniotic-like cavity.

A genetically inducible stem cell-derived embryoid model of early post-implantation human embryogenesis captures the codevelopment of embryonic tissue and extra-embryonic endoderm and mesoderm niche with early haematopoiesis, with potential for drug testing and disease modelling.

We analysed 149,842 environmental genomes from multiple habitats and compiled a curated catalogue of 404,085 functionally and evolutionarily significant novel gene families exclusive to uncultivated prokaryotic taxa spanning multiple species.

Intratracheal boosting with a bivalent Ad26-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine results in substantial induction of mucosal humoral and cellular immunity and near-complete protection against SARS-CoV-2 BQ.1.1 in rhesus macaques.

Experiments in a mouse model of natural parainfluenza virus transmission show that tissue-resident memory T cells in the respiratory tract have important interferon-γ-dependent roles in protection against and limiting the transmission of viral disease.

Proferroptotic activity of 7-dehydrocholesterol reductase is shown along with an unexpected prosurvival function of its substrate, 7-dehydrocholesterol, indicating a cell-intrinsic mechanism that could be used by cancer cells to protect phospholipids from oxidative damage and escape ferroptosis.

7-Dehydrocholesterol (7-DHC) is a natural anti-ferroptotic metabolite and pharmacological manipulation of 7-DHC levels shows promise as a therapeutic strategy for cancer and ischaemia–reperfusion injury.

A new discovery strategy, ‘reverse metabolomics’, facilitates high-throughput matching of mass spectrometry spectra in public untargeted metabolomics datasets, and a proof-of-concept experiment identified an association between microbial bile amidates and inflammatory bowel disease.

Structures of human vesicular monoamine transporter 2 in complexes with serotonin and three clinical drugs provide insights into the structural basis for serotonin transport and inhibition of transporter activity by the drugs.

A study describes a direct computational approach without experimental optimization to design high-affinity proteins that bind small helical peptides.