Volume 626 Issue 7999, 15 February 2024

Europe’s ambition for emissions reductions is to be welcomed — but look at the detail, and significant hazards emerge.

Gold nanoparticles are confirmed as the source of the flamboyant colour of the smoke produced by fulminating gold.

Those who are quick to take offence show similar levels of activity in a region of the brain that’s crucial for decision-making.

Male elephant seals generally have nothing to do with pups — but astounded scientists observed a notable exception.

Many fossilized trees consist of only the trunk, but a specimen from Canada includes most of the crown of leaves.

Researchers used artificial intelligence to decipher the text of 2,000-year-old charred papyrus scripts, unveiling musings on music and capers.

Faced with data restrictions and harassment, researchers are mapping out fresh approaches to studying social media’s political reach.

Reviewers will probably approve only one in every nine research proposals submitted in latest application cycle.

A neural network that taught itself to recognize objects using the filmed experiences of a single infant could offer new insights into how humans learn.

Rogue antibodies are drawn to the protein–RNA coating on half of the X chromosomes in an XX cell.

The goal leans heavily on the largely unproven approach of carbon removal, concerning researchers.

A feasibility study on the Future Circular Collider identifies where and how the machine could be built — but its construction is far from a done deal.

Researchers are blasting patients’ cancer cells with dozens of drugs in the hope of finding the right treatment.

Scientists and other academics worry that political pressure on universities is growing and could limit research and teaching.

Personal priorities are often trumping real needs and skewing where charitable funding goes.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

It’s tough out there, but career experts discuss how applicants can stand out from the crowd.

Peter Chatanga uses weeks-long audio recordings to build a picture of biodiversity in Lesotho’s crucial wetlands.

Why birds sing intensely in a dawn chorus during the early morning has long been debated. Evidence gathered from observing birds in the wild offers a fresh perspective on what might drive this phenomenon.

Magnetic materials with zero net magnetization fall into two classes: conventional antiferromagnets and altermagnets. Physicists have identified a property in altermagnets that widens the divide between the two groups.

In a multicellular organism, normal growth requires control of cell division to generate cells that are similar to or different from their parents. Analysis of this process in plant roots reveals how this mechanism is regulated.

A neural probe has been used to capture the activity of large populations of single neurons as people are speaking or listening, providing detailed insights into how the brain encodes specific features of speech.

Genetic sequencing data from more than 4,000 Chinese participants in the Born in Guangzhou Cohort Study provide insights into the population, and a snapshot of what is to come in future phases of the project.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

By combining materials-synthesis techniques, researchers have come up with a way of building layered structures that display intriguing wave-like patterns of electric polarization, and could be useful for next-generation electronics.

To reduce voltage drops—the depreciation of the cost–benefit profile when scaling up solutions to social problems—sufficient policy-based evidence must be generated before policymakers scale up the project.

Analyses of drivers of water stress are used to predict likely trajectories of the Amazon forest system and suggests potential actions that could prevent system collapse.

X-ray observations of two large glitches bracketing a fast radio burst in the active Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 reveal a connection between rapid spin change and radiative behaviours of the magnetar.

A trapped-ion quantum processor is used to create ground-states and excitations of non-Abelian topological order on a kagome lattice of 27 qubits with high fidelity.

A room-temperature demonstration of optomechanical squeezing of light and measurement of mechanical motion approaching the Heisenberg limit using a phononic-engineered membrane-in-the-middle cavity with ultralow noise.

Using photoemission spectroscopy and ab initio calculations, evidence is given of two distinct unconventional mechanisms of lifted Kramers spin degeneracy generated by the altermagnetic phase of centrosymmetric MnTe with vanishing net magnetization.

Examining the in-plane spin components of the noncoplanar antiferromagnet manganese ditelluride provides spectroscopic and computational evidence of materials with a new type of plaid-like spin splitting in the antiferromagnetic ground state.

The stacking of freestanding ferroelectric perovskite layers with controlled twist angles results in a peculiar pattern of polarization vortices and antivortices that emerges from the flexoelectric coupling of polarization to strain gradients.

Excitonic single-photon superradiance is reported in individual perovskite quantum dots with a sub-100 ps radiative decay time, almost as short as the reported exciton coherence time.

Phospholipids enhance the structural and colloidal integrity of hybrid organic–inorganic lead halide perovskites and lead-free metal halide nanocrystals, which then exhibit enhanced robustness and optical properties.

A global profile of tropical cyclone population exposure for the period 2002–2019 shows a steady increase, with approximately 560 million people exposed yearly and a disproportionate exposure among those with lower socioeconomic status.

Analysis of data from the Born in Guangzhou Cohort Study comprising mainly of trios and mother–infant pairs reveals novel East Asian-specific genetic associations with maternal bile acid, gestational weight gain and infant cord blood traits.

The authors identify a molecular switch that regulates the balance between neurotoxic and neuroprotective astrocyte populations, with potential application in the treatment of glaucoma and other optic neuropathies.

Initial dopamine self-stimulations reinforced not only the stimulation-producing target action, but also actions similar to the target action and actions that occurred a few seconds before stimulation, and repeated pairings led to a gradual refinement of the behavioural repertoire to home in on the target actions.

High-density single-neuron recordings show diverse tuning for acoustic and phonetic features across layers in human auditory speech cortex.

Neuropixels recordings from the language-dominant prefrontal cortex reveal a structured organization of planned words, an encoding cascade of phonetic representations by prefrontal neurons in humans and a cellular process that could support the production of speech.

Quantitative time-resolved microscopy analysis of SHR and SCR dynamics in single cells of living Arabidopsis roots shows that these transcription factors coordinate formative and proliferative cell divisions early in the cell cycle.

SlyB, a lipoprotein in the PhoPQ stress regulon in Gram-negative bacteria, forms stable stress-induced complexes with the outer membrane proteome.

A study examines the effects of mutations that occur naturally in T cell cancers, reporting that such mutations can potentially be exploited to increase the potency of T cell therapies.

Structural changes mediated by advanced glycation end-products enhance extracellular matrix viscoelasticity, and that viscoelasticity can promote cancer progression in vivo, independent of stiffness.

Analysis of the effects of more than 26,000 KRAS mutations on abundance and interactions with six other proteins is used to construct an energy landscape of KRAS and identify allosteric drug target sites.

We study the interplay between cohesin and replication by reconstituting a functional replisome using purified proteins, showing how cohesin initially responds to replication and providing a molecular model for the establishment of sister chromatid cohesion.

Single-cell expression data from bacteria are used to classify gene regulatory architectures in relation to gene expression dynamics and the cell cycle, revealing distinct categories of gene regulatory mechanisms.

Serial femtosecond crystallography reveals the structural dynamics of photosystem II during the S-state transitions that produce dioxygen, providing insight into electron transfer, water insertion, proton release and O–O bond formation on sub-microsecond timescales.