Volume 632 Issue 8024, 8 August 2024

The country can tackle its energy crisis by diversifying its energy sources, using storage systems and continually optimizing its grid.

Loosely packaged DNA might make these nerve cells better able to encode memories.

Long-theorized ‘ball lightning’ black holes formed from light would require much too much energy.

Injections of the drug lenacapavir protected sexually active women and girls in Africa from the virus.

Moths also accumulate static charge during flight that allows them to harvest pollen from flowers several millimetres away.

A man in Germany is HIV-free after receiving stem cells that are not resistant to the virus.

AlphaProof showed its prowess on questions from this year’s Mathematical Olympiad — a step in the race to create substantial proofs with artificial intelligence.

Unions are joining the Biden administration’s campaign to promote scientific integrity and protect government scientists from political interference.

Unintended interbreeding between hatchery-bred and wild-born pink salmon could reduce resiliency of fish stocks.

The government has focused on areas of national pride and applied science, as many researchers expected.

High-resolution images of the underside of a formation in Antarctica could help researchers to refine projections of sea-level rise.

Detailed profile of the immune cells in the upper airway could help to improve nasal vaccines.

Scientists are closing in on biomarkers that reflect the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and could improve treatments.

Scientists are using consumer-genomics databases to link living people to ancestors from the recent and not-so-recent past. But the meaning of these connections isn’t always clear.

An insider’s story of the discoveries that revealed the dazzling abilities of RNA, and the therapeutic possibilities that emerged.

Biochemist who helped to draw up guidelines for recombinant-DNA technology and championed women in science.

Melting roads and buckling rails are disrupting travel, with the most vulnerable populations affected the worst. A concerted approach is needed to keep people moving as the world gets hotter.

A collective of researchers in South Korea, working on the genetics of immune diseases, share the lessons they’ve learnt about harnessing regional knowledge to support large-scale research.

Do fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality, says computer scientist Cal Newport, in his latest time-management book.

The fast-growing discipline needs more scientists from under-represented groups. A raft of initiatives is rising to the challenge.

Clever, cat-sized rodents are learning to clear land mines with the help of Bahati Abuu.

Precursor messenger RNA is edited into its final form by an RNA–protein assembly called the spliceosome. Structural evidence provides insights into how the spliceosome is disassembled when its job is complete.

How spreading tumour cells gain the ability to grow in organs away from where they originated is not fully understood. The discovery that normal liver cells help invading tumour cells to thrive in this organ sheds light on this process.

Pupil and teacher characteristics underpinning successful physics classes, and the astronomical appeal of planetarium light shows, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

Systems that emulate biological neural networks offer an efficient way of running AI algorithms, but they can’t be trained using the conventional approach. The symmetry of these ‘physical’ networks provides a neat solution.

Ocean warming has repeatedly led to mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in the past 20 years, threatening its existence. Coral skeletons show that reef temperatures reached historical highs during this period.

Antiferromagnetic phase transition is observed in a three-dimensional fermionic Hubbard system comprising lithium-6 atoms in a uniform optical lattice with approximately 800,000 sites.

Precision measurement of the dynamical magnetoelectric coupling in an exfoliated van der Waals multiferroic shows a giant natural optical activity at terahertz frequencies.

We present fully forward mode learning, which conducts machine learning operations on site, leading to faster learning and promoting advancement in numerous fields.

Singularity enables breaking the optical diffraction limit in a dielectric nanolaser.

A living passivation strategy enables dynamic self-healing of perovskite solar cells to ensure device performance and stability on exposure to heat or moisture.

A peri-fused polyaromatic core structure is used to produce a relatively chemically inert and structurally rigid molecular contact that improves the efficiency and durability of perovskite solar cells.

A trititanium hydride framework is used to achieve direct hydroamination of simple feedstock hydrocarbons with inert nitrogen gas to obtain the corresponding alkyl amines.

A glycosylation platform is demonstrated that enables selective coupling between a wide range of unprotected or minimally protected donor and acceptor sugars, producing 1,2-cis-O-glycosides in a catalyst-controlled, site-selective manner.

High ocean temperatures that caused mass coral bleaching and mortality on the Great Barrier Reef in the past decade are the warmest in 400 years and are the result of human-caused climate change.

By integrating geological observations, statistical analysis, geodynamic simulations and landscape-evolution models, a physical model is proposed to link the coevolution of craton margins and interiors with continental rifting.

Across 46 proglacial landscapes worldwide, environmental properties and biodiversity have shown complex patterns of change since glaciers retreated.

A reconstruction of Cenozoic marine biodiversity in the Indo-Australian Archipelago reveals decreasing rates of net diversification and identifies the factors that have established it as the richest marine biodiversity hotspot.

By profiling immune cell variation in bone marrow of 54 genetically diverse mouse strains and analysing the evolutionary record, we found that genes associated with the frequency of a particular cell type but expressed in a different cell type increase the evolvability of the immune system.

A brain-derived hormone, CCN3, is newly identified to have a role as an osteoanabolic factor to build bone in lactating females and in the viability of offspring.

Experiments in mice show that brain circuitry centred on the posteromedial nucleus of the cortical amygdala has a key role in consolidating socially transmitted long-term memories.

AcrIF25 inhibits the type I-F CRISPR–Cas system by disassembling its ribonucleoprotein effector complex without an external energy source.

A study identifies TMEFF1 as a neuron-specific restriction factor essential for prevention of replication of herpes simplex virus type 1 in the central nervous system.

A study of two childhood cases of herpes simplex encephalitis shows that TMEFF1 interacts with the HSV-1 cell-surface receptor NECTIN-1, preventing HSV-1 from fusing with the cell membrane and entering cortical neurons.

A human in vitro model of coeliac disease comprising duodenal organoids that maintain both epithelium and an immune microenvironment finds a previously unsuspected role for IL-7 in gluten-induced epithelial destruction.

Interactions between plexin B2 on hepatocytes and sempahorins on disseminated tumour cells regulate metastatic seeding in the liver.

A CRISPR-based strategy for screening genes that affect clonal expansion finds that genes that are frequently mutated in squamous cell carcinoma converge on a TNF signalling module involving macrophages.

An atlas of tumour vasculature shows that tumour angiogenesis is initiated from venous endothelial cells and extended towards arterial endothelial cells.

Cryo-electron microscopy shows five structural states of inverted formin 2 and two of formin diaphanous 1 bound to F-actin, providing step-by-step visualization of the mechanisms of F-actin severing and elongation by formins.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of human and nematode spliceosomes show that the disassembly of this complex is initiated by the licensing of the disassembly helicase to act on the catalytic U6 small nuclear RNA.

Propofol repairs malfunctioning mutant HCN1 channels associated with epilepsy, and its unusual mechanism of action on these ion channels can potentially be exploited to design precision drugs targeting HCN channelopathies.