Volume 631 Issue 8021, 18 July 2024

Everyone who reviews a manuscript should answer a transparent set of questions, to ensure that scientific literature is subject to reliable quality control.

From weakening jet streams to causing bumpier flights, climate change is altering atmospheric behaviour. Researchers need to find out how.

Algorithm that distinguishes among a host of underlying causes of dementia could be used for diagnosis in hospitals and clinics.

Strontium-based timepiece gains or loses only one second every 40 billion years.

The ocean-going Desertas petrel often follows storms for days over thousands of kilometres.

Records on the quality of the grape harvest sheds light on 600 years of weather.

Researchers analysed thousands of laboratory-made plasmids and discovered that nearly half of them had defects, raising questions of experimental reproducibility.

The world’s biggest fusion-energy experiment is likely to be beaten to its goals by other projects — but the massive reactor still has value, say scientists.

Researchers say unexpected victory for Masoud Pezeshkian could spell improvements to human rights, investment in science and academic freedom — if Iran’s top leaders give him space to act.

Older populations might be more protected than younger ones because of exposure to ‘matched’ strains during childhood, but an H5N1 pandemic is likely to take a major toll all the same.

Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope point to an elusive intermediate-size black hole in the star cluster ω Centauri.

The neurons that produce a sick feeling and food aversion are distinct from those that induce a feeling of fullness.

Cultured meat that tastes and smells more appetizing could enhance public perception of artificial steaks.

Universities and institutions across the globe are exploring unique initiatives to help their students and staff cope with the stress of research.

Drama behind the scenes at the Kyoto Protocol negotiations is laid bare in a major theatrical production.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Space scientist who took humanity on a tour of the Solar System and beyond, in a journey of discovery like no other.

Gene therapies will become more affordable everywhere only if they are developed and manufactured in the regions of the world most in need of them.

Researchers describe how they developed extraordinary physical skills for their research and how to stay calm in the face of risks.

Some products are perfectly fine to use after their expiration date — if quality-control tests check out.

Ernesto Filippi tracks the health of captured specimens thanks to a citizen-science project inspired by an ancient ritual.

The need to keep therapeutic proteins, such as insulin, constantly cold can limit access to life-saving medicines. An advanced gel offers a possible solution to this issue — and might solve problems beyond health-care logistics.

Ancient specimens of a previously undescribed species of four-limbed vertebrate fill a gap in the fossil record. The evidence offers surprises about where, when and how these ancestral relatives of humans evolved.

Compounds containing copper have long been targeted in the search for high-temperature superconductivity, but experiments performed at extreme pressures suggest that nickel-based materials might also be candidates.

An unusual form of cell death called ferroptosis can sweep over embryonic tissues in a wave-like manner to ensure proper muscle development — evidence that ferroptosis has a role in normal physiology.

A compound has been discovered that increases the potency and duration of action of naloxone, a drug used to reverse the effects of opioid overdoses — possibly opening up another way to save lives.

Using an optical lattice to suspend atoms, the gravitational attraction of a miniature source mass can be determined by an atom interferometer with much greater accuracy compared with atoms in free fall.

The magnetic fields of an individual lattice plane inside materials with a non-uniform structure were observed under magnetic-field-free conditions by electron holography.

Evidence of modulated metallic and superconducting states stemming from an incommensurate structural stripe motif is reported in the bulk van der Waals superlattice SrTa₂S₅.

The application of pressure effectively suppresses the spin–charge order in trilayer nickelate La₄Ni₃O_10−δ single crystals, leading to the emergence of superconductivity.

Solar-powered, untethered, sustained flight of an ultralight micro aerial vehicle under natural sunlight conditions is achieved using an electrostatic-driven propulsion system with a high lift-to-power efficiency.

A stiff hydrogel gel is presented that encapsulates and stabilizes proteins without additives or excipients and uses mechanical strain to release them, offering low-cost and versatile delivery of therapies.

A chemical reservoir computer based on the formose reaction has been discovered that can perform several nonlinear classification tasks in parallel, predict the dynamics of other complex systems and achieve time-series forecasting.

An Earth-abundant manganese catalyst that can hydrogenate imines to amines with high enantioselectivity works even for small differences in the groups on the imine, which is still a challenge for precious metal catalysts.

Data from boreal, temperate and tropical forests over the past three decades reveal that the global forest carbon sink has remained steady during that time, despite considerable regional variation.

A global survey on the magnitude and persistence of moist forest cover change and canopy height following degradation using satellite remote sensing data finds that the effects are substantial and persist for decades.

A study describes a new giant stem tetrapod, Gaiasia jennyae, from high-palaeolatitude early Permian-aged deposits in Namibia that challenges current hypotheses of early tetrapod evolution.

A dataset of coding variation, derived from exome sequencing of nearly one million individuals from a range of ancestries, provides insight into rare variants and could accelerate the discovery of disease-associated genes and advance precision medicine efforts.

Fusion of rice Pong transposase to the Cas9 or Cas12a programmable nucleases provides sequence-specific targeted insertion of enhancer elements, an open reading frame and gene expression cassette into the genome of the model plant Arabidopsis and crop soybean.

Mapping a full allergen circuit from the lung to the brainstem and back, repeated exposure of mice to inhaled allergen activated the nuclei of solitary tract neurons in a mast cell-, interleukin-4- and vagal nerve-dependent manner.

By tracking the activity of individual neurons using microarrays and Neuropixels probes, a study examines the representation of linguistic meaning, at the single-cell level, during natural speech processing in humans.

Pseudovirus-based SARS-CoV-2 spike deep mutational scanning is used to measure how mutations across the spikes affect ACE2 binding, cell entry or escape from human sera, producing data that could enable better prediction of viral evolution.

In mouse and human, lung-specialized alveolar fibroblasts adopt multiple molecular states that are induced by pro-inflammatory and fibrotic signals and have diverse protective roles against lung injury.

Myddosomes, in which MyD88 forms barrel-like scaffold structures for effector protein recruitment and activation, contain proteins that act at all stages and regulate all effector responses of the TLR signalling pathways.

Plasmacytoid dendritic cells monitor the bone marrow for apoptotic megakaryocytes (MKs) and deliver IFNα to the MK niche, triggering local on-demand proliferation and maturation of MK progenitors.

Ferroptosis can propagate across human cells over long distances (≥5 mm) at constant speeds (around 5.5 μm per minute) through self-regenerating waves of reactive oxygen species; such waves facilitate large-scale cell death in the developing avian limb.

Lactylation of NBS1 by TIP60 promotes homologous recombination-driven DNA repair and resistance to chemotherapy in cancer cells and links altered cancer cell metabolism to increase genome stability.

The helix–turn–helix domain of an anti-CRISPR-associated (Aca) protein represses transcription of anti-CRISPR (Acr)-encoding genes and inhibits their translation to protein via distinct binding modes to DNA and RNA, respectively.

Zinc-finger proteins ZNF512 and ZNF512B are shown to target pericentric DNA through a conserved mechanism that depends on their atypical long linkers, providing insight into how constitutive heterochromatin formation is initiated across various species.

A newly discovered negative allosteric modulator of the µ-opioid receptor works together with naloxone to potently block opioid agonist signalling with reduced adverse effects.