Volume 630 Issue 8018, 27 June 2024

Artificial-intelligence algorithms could identify scientists who need support with translating their work into real-world applications and more. Leaders must step up.

Textile keeps its cool even when surrounded by urban surfaces that absorb and release heat.

Hubble observations of faint galaxies suggest that such objects could have been the seeds of very early supermassive black holes.

Findings support one idea about why self-directed immune responses are more common in some populations.

Samples taken near a capital of the pharaohs reveal an overhaul of the Nile 4,000 years ago.

As the patents on various weight-loss drugs near expiry, companies in India and China are vying to make lower-cost versions that will widen access to such treatments.

Study finds that antibodies from people with the debilitating condition trigger similar symptoms in mice.

A growing body of research reveals the deaths and diseases linked to rising temperatures across the continent.

The US$5 billion facility would be cheaper, bigger and faster to build than a similar one proposed by European scientists.

Different patterns of brain activity help to distinguish between images recalled from memory and the sight of physical objects.

Demonstrations are on the rise, and scientists are revealing which types work best.

Rampant deepfakes and false news are often blamed for swaying votes. Research suggests it’s hard to change people’s political opinions, but easier to nudge their behaviour.

Science and reason underpinned early surveys, but sociopolitical ideals left their mark on the nation too, a historical account concludes.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

One UK institute has produced a dozen Nobel laureates and biomedical breakthroughs across the board. How does Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology do it? Our study found out.

Full-body, continuous wearable ultrasound will benefit health care and biomedical research. Seven key obstacles must first be overcome.

Past attendees of the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting describe how the event can benefit early career researchers.

Vishwanath Srikantaiah works to restore India’s historic wells to provide better protection for water resources.

More than 7,000 languages are in use throughout the world, but popular translation tools cannot deal with most of them. A translation model that was tested on under-represented languages takes a key step towards a solution.

A little-studied sensory structure called the Krause corpuscle is responsible for detecting light touch and is essential for normal sexual behaviour in mice. The findings have interesting implications for human sexual intimacy.

Carbon storage in Earth’s oceans is controlled by deep-sea mixing processes, but the details have proved difficult to test. Ambitious efforts to track ocean mixing using dye have now demonstrated the pivotal role of the sea floor.

In June 2004, the results of an ambitious Antarctic ice-drilling project brought insight into hundreds of thousands of years of climatic changes. The extraordinary sample still has much to offer climate research — even as its successor is being drilled.

RNA-guided recombinase enzymes have been discovered that herald a new chapter for genome editing — enabling the insertion, inversion or deletion of long DNA sequences at user-specified genome positions.

Lasers are essential in scientific laboratories and medical clinics across the globe, but integrating them into other technologies is not easy. A material platform that puts a standard laser on a microchip offers a solution.

Observations of the warm Neptune WASP-107b show that the planet has a hot interior with an intrinsic temperature of about 460 K.

Analysis of the panchromatic transmission spectrum of the warm, low-density, Neptune-sized exoplanet WASP-107b from instruments aboard the HST and JWST suggests that tidal interaction with its host star led to changes in its atmospheric chemistry.

Scaling neural machine translation to 200 languages is achieved by No Language Left Behind, a single massively multilingual model that leverages transfer learning across languages.

Direct visualization of oxygen vacancies and self-doped ligand holes reveals the role of ligand oxygen in La₃Ni₂O_7−δ and provides further understanding of superconducting nickelate materials.

A photonic platform enables miniaturization and scalability of titanium:sapphire photonic technology, reducing footprint and cost by three orders of magnitude.

Multilayer composites of 2D nanomaterials manufactured using a layer-by-layer methodology demonstrates strong polarization rotation, mechanical robustness and operational temperatures as high as 250 °C, despite being nano-achiral and partially disordered.

We introduce a self-assembly strategy that uses the interface of an aqueous two-phase system to template and stabilize molecularly thin biomimetic block copolymer bilayers of scalable area that can exceed 10 cm² without defects.

The operando imaging of the early formation stages of covalent organic frameworks with the optical technique interferometric scattering microscopy leads to mechanistic insights, enabling the rational development of a synthesis protocol at room temperature instead of elevated temperatures.

A method is reported that produces highly strong, tough and elastic 2D COF films, using a sacrificial go-between, which endows them with new properties, enhances their current applications and paves the way for new applications.

A dye-release experiment within a sloping submarine canyon provides direct evidence that vigorous mixing at topographic features, such as canyons, leads to rapid diapycnal upwelling of deep water.

An extended nonlinear recharge oscillator model shows skilful and explainable El Niño–Southern Oscillation forecasts at lead times up to 16–18 months, better than global climate models and comparable to the most skilful artificial intelligence forecasts.

A symbiosis between a diatom and a newly discovered species of alphaproteobacteria, ‘Candidatus Tectiglobus diatomicola’, can fix nitrogen in the ocean, providing evidence that nitrogen fixers other than cyanobacteria have a key role in the marine environment.

Cross-hatch impressions from Ediacaran rocks in China are interpreted as having been left by a crown-group sponge fossil, Helicolocellus cantori gen. et sp. nov., characterized by an organic latticework skeleton.

We present genome-wide data from 64 subadults interred in Chichén Itzá around ad 500–900 that gives insight into burial rituals, and shows that their genomic legacy is still present and has adapted to immune challenges post-1492.

A trial investigating the effects of a hybrid working schedule in a Chinese technology firm in 2021–2022 shows that working from home two days a week improved job satisfaction, reduced quitting and did not affect performance.

Krause corpuscles of the clitoris and penis are highly sensitive mechanical vibration detectors that mediate sexually dimorphic mating behaviours in mice.

A study of neuronal activity in rats finds that sleep loss adversely affects hippocampal function and memory by dissociating hippocampal sharp-wave ripples from memory replay and reactivation events.

 A method for topological automatic cell type classification across subcellular resolution spatial transcriptomic platforms is proposed, resolving cell type information and locating sparsely dispersed cells in human kidney and mouse kidney and brain.

In mouse experiments and in clinical trials in humans, boosting with Omicron-specific mRNA following immunization with Wuhan-1 spike mRNA results in immune responses focused on conserved rather than variant-specific epitopes.

Using cryo-electron microscopy, insights into the structural and mechanistic function of the DdmDE system that is responsible for plasmid elimination in Vibrio cholerae seventh pandemic strains are explored.

A study demonstrates that metabolic signalling and inflammatory cues associated with obesity selectively induce expression of PD-1 on tumour-associated macrophages to suppress anti-tumour immunity.

Subsets of ILC3s upregulate the immunoregulatory checkpoint molecule CTLA-4 after stimulation in a microbiota-dependent manner, and advances to support CTLA-4⁺ ILC3s may represent a treatment opportunity in IL-23-driven chronic inflammation.

A bispecific non-coding RNA expressed by the IS110 family of mobile genetic elements forms the basis of a programmable genome-editing system that enables the insertion, excision or inversion of specific target DNA sequences.

Using cryo-electron microscopy, the structural mechanism by which non-coding bridge RNA confers target and donor DNA specificity to IS110 recombinases for programmable DNA recombination is explored.

Solution and cryogenic electron microscopy studies using IS21 as a model transposase system show how AAA+ ATPases induce structural changes to prime target DNA and activate their associated transposases.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of cross-exon pre-B and B-like complexes contribute new insights into the molecular mechanisms that mediate the switch from a cross-exon to a cross-intron organized spliceosome.