Volume 626 Issue 8001, 29 February 2024

Ukraine’s universities have adapted by blending innovative forms of remote learning. Lessons from this experiment are relevant to the rest of the world.

The discovery of a molecular recycling system in mouse oocytes might help scientists to understand why fertility declines with age.

Bumping up the detergent content allows a laser pulse to carve a groove in ethereal films.

Text on an artefact found in northern Spain resembles a present-day Basque word that means ‘of good fortune’.

Even talking to a non-specialist during pregnancy was enough to reduce the risk of depression and anxiety after birth.

Two RNA-editing therapies for genetic diseases have in the past few months gained approval for clinical trials, raising hopes for safer treatments.

Massive environmental DNA project will take a record-setting snapshot of biodiversity worldwide.

Some palaeontologists want more rigorous guidelines for naming species, along with action to address problematic historical practices.

Vittrup Man, who died in his thirties, was a Scandinavian wanderer who settled down between 3300 and 3100 bc.

The EU AI Act is the world’s first major legislation on artificial intelligence and strictly regulates general-purpose models.

Prestigious awards such as the Fields Medal, Abel Prize and Breakthrough Prize have been awarded predominantly to men.

A system that edits RNA rather than DNA can give new life to exhausted CAR T cells.

Effective, affordable antimicrobial drugs aren’t moneymakers, despite being desperately needed. Can non-profit organizations pick up the slack?

Indigenous Americans’ relationships with and knowledge of animals have influenced how Europeans have thought about animals since 1492.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Explaining isolated steps on the road from simple chemicals to complex living organisms is not enough. Looking at the big picture could help to bridge rifts in this fractured research field.

The proposed Pandemic Agreement must ensure that COVID-19 vaccine nationalism is never repeated; 290 scientists call for action.

Two years after the end of the controversial China Initiative, academics describe being treated like spies, a loss of talent and a chilling atmosphere that is stifling science.

Imaging and molecular manipulation reveal how biomolecular condensates form and offer clues to the role of phase separation in health and disease.

Soukaina El Idrissi Faouzi works to optimize the performance of the world’s biggest working solar farm.

Reciprocal cooperation can be advantageous, but why it is more common in humans than in other social animals is a puzzle. A modelling and experimental study pinpoints the conditions needed for reciprocity to evolve.

The molecules of liquid crystals and proteins can form liquid-like condensates, but such a phenomenon had not been observed for supramolecular polymers, which are held together by non-covalent bonds — until now.

The lack of a tail is one thing that separates apes — including humans — from other primates. Insertion of a short DNA sequence into a gene that controls tail development could explain tail loss in the common ancestor of apes.

A big-data analysis shows that men are starkly over-represented in online images, and that gender bias is stronger in images compared with text. Such images could influence enduring gender biases in our offline lives.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Implantable electric pacemakers save millions of lives worldwide, but they aren’t perfect. A proof-of-concept study shows that using light to regulate a heartbeat might be a better option than existing strategies.

This Review describes the various mechanisms of ion-coupled transport across membranes and how the activities of transporter proteins are modulated by the composition of the lipid bilayer.

An analysis of eight ultra-faint galaxies during the epoch of reionization with absolute magnitudes between −17 mag and −15  mag shows that most of the photons that reionized the Universe come from dwarf galaxies.

Observations from the JWST MIRI/LRS show the detection of SO₂ spectral features in the 5–12-μm transmission spectrum of the hot, Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-39b, suggesting that photochemistry is a key process in high-temperature exoplanet atmospheres.

Vectorial optoelectronic metasurfaces are described, showing that light pulses can be used to drive and direct local charge flows around symmetry-broken plasmonic nanostructures, leading to tunable responses in terahertz emission.

A silicon-based electrode system is described that allows tunable spatiotemporal photostimulation of cardiac systems, with the optoelectronic capabilities of these devices being demonstrated in mouse, rat and pig heart models.

We successfully rebuild an approximate void-free additive manufacturing microstructure in Ti-6Al-4V titanium alloy by the development of a void-free additive manufacturing processing technique through an understanding of the asynchronism of phase transformation and grain growth.

Stress release at stepped platinum surfaces is shown to influence the strain experienced by atoms near the steps, resulting in effects on the catalytic activity of the whole surface.

Spontaneous liquid–liquid phase-separation behaviour of high-aspect-ratio fibrils, obtained from supramolecular polymerizations of synthetic components, forms tactoids by means of an entropy-driven pathway.

A study of a new route to proteinogenic peptides reveals how heterochiral preference can lead to homochiral peptides in a prebiotic world.

Bandit optimization models are used to identify generally applicable conditions by efficient condition sampling and evaluation of experimental feedback.

Models show that human cooperation cannot evolve reliably under repeated interactions or under intergroup competitions, but combining the two mechanisms predicts a distinctive strategy, observed experimentally in Papua New Guinea, in which individuals exhibit cooperative reciprocity with ingroup partners and uncooperative reciprocity with outgroup partners.

An insertion of an Alu element into an intron of the TBXT gene is identified as a genetic mechanism of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes, with implications for human health today.

We find that gender bias is more prevalent in images than text, that the underrepresentation of women online is substantially worse in images and that googling for images amplifies gender bias in a person’s beliefs.

A stream of young neurons migrating into the entorhinal cortex (EC) continues postnatally in humans, but not in macaques; these young neurons, which belong to a unique class of local circuit cells, continue to be recruited in the EC during infancy and early childhood.

Studies in mice show that observational fear learning is encoded by neurons in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in a manner that is distinct from the encoding of fear learned by direct experience.

A neural stem cell culture system derived from induced pluripotent stem cells forms a network of synaptically connected and electrophysiologically active neurons that were used as a model system to identify a mechanism of TDP-43-induced neurodegeneration.

Single-cell transcriptome profiling of mouse embryos and newborn pups is combined with previously published data to construct a tree of cell-type relationships tracing development from zygote to birth.

Using viral sequence data, individuals with persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections were identified, and had higher odds of self-reporting long COVID, in a large community surveillance study.

We demonstrate the role of the ligand-gated purinergic ion channel P2RX4 in maintaining mouse plasma cells in their bone marrow niche.

Serum MMP8 is increased in stress-susceptible mice following chronic stress and leads to brain structure and behavioural changes in mice.

SAFB proteins protect genome integrity by preventing retrotransposition of L1 elements yet maintaining splicing integrity, via prevention of the exonization of previously integrated transposable elements, a major constituent of human genes.

A study identifies a new bacterial ribosome hibernation factor, Balon, and describes its association with EF-Tu and its initiation of mRNA-independent hibernation during protein synthesis.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of intermediates formed during the degradation of the 30S ribosomal unit shed light on how the 3′ to 5′ exonuclease ribonuclease R controls the ribosomal degradation process.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the human calcium-sensing receptor in complex with G_i and G_q proteins reveal how this receptor activates distinct G protein subtypes and how its function is modulated by a variety of ligands.