Volume 630 Issue 8017, 20 June 2024

The field is taking a leap forward thanks to innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Researchers must improve consent procedures and public involvement.

Scientists, health-care professionals, carers and individuals affected by the condition must work more closely with one another to improve people’s lives.

As the election campaign in the United Kingdom marches on, politicians are hardly discussing the country’s global standing in science. Here’s why that needs to change.

Buried items show that the poor got poorer as the Assyrian empire and its bureaucracy swelled.

Emissions reductions achieved under the landmark Montreal Protocol mean that the ozone hole could close sooner than expected.

The gene-editing system, normally used to disrupt a gene, is applied to improve the function of a gene in rice.

Data recorded at an observatory in Chile do not fit with a black hole, a supernova, a pair of merging stars or anything else.

Hackers are targeting universities and research institutes with ransomware, leaving staff and students without the ability to work.

Trove of health data from space tourists and astronauts reveals the effects of microgravity, radiation and more.

Sports physicist Eric Goff explains how updates to the technology can help referees to make the toughest calls.

Germany has raised doubts about the affordability of the Large Hadron Collider’s planned successor.

Synthesizing research on which policies are most effective is a key priority in climate science, advocates say.

Study in rats shows that a key brain signal linked to memory formation deteriorates after broken sleep.

Engineers are harnessing the powers of graphics processing units (GPUs) and more, with a bevy of tricks to meet the computational demands of artificial intelligence.

In a year in which numerous countries are going to the polls, many election-watching scientists are under pressure.

Huge planetary problems were fixed in the past, yielding lessons for the current climate crisis — yet this time a solution is justice.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

The world should redouble its efforts on the SDGs, not abandon them. Here’s how to progress the United Nations’ agenda towards 2050.

The legacy of a palaeontology expedition into Native American lands 150 years ago should prompt a rethink of where and how fossil collections are curated.

Cringing colleagues can be an occupational hazard when pre-trip discussions cover periods — others welcome frank conversations.

A steadily growing toolbox is giving researchers the ability to monitor and measure the physical forces that shape embryonic development.

Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi conducts palaeontology on a riverbank.

Certain air sacs have evolved in multiple lineages of soaring birds, and it emerges that these probably function to reduce the force required from the major flight muscles as they hold the wings in place during gliding and soaring.

Knowing the occupation timescales for ancient sites offers insights into population dynamics. A dating approach now establishes the time frame during which prehistoric hearths were in use at a high level of precision.

The enzyme angiogenin functions in stress responses and aids the formation of blood vessels. It emerges that the ribosome takes a break from its usual role of making proteins to activate angiogenin and position it to cleave transfer RNA.

The number of errors produced by an LLM can be reduced by grouping its outputs into semantically similar clusters. Remarkably, this task can be performed by a second LLM, and the method’s efficacy can be evaluated by a third.

DNA from organelles called mitochondria is not inherited from the father. But mitochondrial RNAs that sense paternal diet and mitochondrial quality are delivered from sperm to egg, affecting offspring metabolism.

Curious volcanic activity confounds tourists near Naples, and Maxwell reviews a textbook on bubbles, in the weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

A sheet of graphene sandwiched between electrolytes can host independently tunable proton and electron currents — setting the stage for a device that serves both computer-memory and logic functions.

Evidence from neuroscience and related fields suggests that language and thought processes operate in distinct networks in the human brain and that language is optimized for communication and not for complex thought.

This Perspective considers the implications of advances in human physiology, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics and long-term culture of resected human brain tissue for the study of network-level activity in human neuroscience.

This Perspective views brain development in terms of developmental tempo along the human lineage and reviews the contributions of recent technical advances to our understanding of neurodevelopment.

The thermal emission spectrum of the rocky exoplanet 55 Cancri e obtained by the NIRCAM and MIRI instruments aboard the JWST indicates that it has a secondary volatile-rich atmosphere, possibly arising from a magma ocean.

In this work, stable trapping of a two-dimensional Wigner crystal of above 500 ions is achieved, and the quantum simulation of 300 ions with individual state detection demonstrated.

Independent control of the electric field and charge-carrier density in double-gated graphene allows the decoupling of proton transport and lattice hydrogenation, enabling both accelerated proton transport and proton-based logic operations.

Hallucinations (confabulations) in large language model systems can be tackled by measuring uncertainty about the meanings of generated responses rather than the text itself to improve question-answering accuracy.

A dual-additive crystallization method using PyNI and 5AVA as additives results in highly efficient 3D perovskite films with enhanced photoluminescence quantum efficiencies and external quantum efficiencies, and hence increased LED performance.

Assessment of surface contamination shows that trace oxygen is a key factor influencing the trajectory and quality of graphene grown by low-pressure chemical vapour deposition, with oxygen-free synthesis showing increased reproducibility and quality.

The development of advanced polymer electrochemical liquid cells for transmission electron microscopy allows direct monitoring of the atomic dynamics of electrified solid–liquid interfaces during copper-catalysed CO₂ electroreduction reactions.

Deformation of soft colloidal crystals lead to work hardening, similar to that seen in the deformation of metals.

Charged-sorbents are a new class of designer sorbent materials for the capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and can be regenerated at low temperatures with direct heating generation using renewable electricity.

Microbial pre-emption of mineralized soil P limits the capacity of trees for increased P uptake and assimilation under elevated CO₂ and therefore restricts their capacity to sequester extra C.

High-resolution time differences between six Middle Palaeolithic hearths from El Salt Unit x (Spain) obtained through archaeomagnetic and archaeostratigraphic analyses show sometimes decade-long intervals between hearths.

An investigation of the subpectoral diverticulum—an inflatable air sac structure between the major flight muscles—in 68 avian species reveals that the respiratory system has a role in the mechanics of flight in soaring birds.

Oligodendrogenesis is shown to be involved in reward learning, with dopaminergic neuronal activity-regulated myelin plasticity being an important reward circuit modification.

Command-like descending neurons in Drosophila melanogaster recruit additional descending neuronal networks to co-ordinate behaviours that require multiple motor subroutines controlling numerous body parts.

The body–brain axis regulates body pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory immune responses following an immune insult.

Measurements of activity in the entorhinal cortex of monkeys indicate that the recruitment of a cognitive map is a key part of mental navigation, and that cognitive maps can support behavior in the absence of external sensory input.

A genetic screen that expresses single guide RNA libraries targeting host genes in the human cytomegalovirus genome enables identification of host factors and provides insights into their roles during the viral replication cycle.

A study shows that epididymal spermatozoa are sensitive to preconception diet, identifies mitochondrial tRNAs and their fragments as sperm-borne factors and demonstrates epigenetic inheritance of mitochondrial tRNAs.

An antibody–drug conjugate that targets the pan-haematopoietic marker CD45 combined with transplanted stem cells engineered to be shielded from it can eradicate leukaemic cells while preserving haematopoiesis.

Proximity labelling of phagosomal contents is used to identify proteins that localize to phagosomes in host–microorganism interactions.

How strand-asymmetric processes such as replication and transcription interact with DNA damage to drive mechanisms of repair and mutagenesis is explored.

A DNA sequencing method with single-molecule fidelity detects mismatches and damage present in only one of the two DNA strands with patterns that are both similar and distinct compared to known mutation patterns.

Structures of the kainate receptor GluK2 with and without concanavilin A and BPAM344 show how these ligands modulate channel activity and reveal the molecular basis of kainate receptor gating.

Angiogenin binds to the ribosomal A site to cleave tRNA.