Volume 626 Issue 8000, 22 February 2024

A plan to establish Africa’s first continent-wide science fund should not be delayed any longer.

First-of-its-kind US bill would address the environmental costs of the technology, but there’s a long way to go.

Academic researchers have a unique opportunity to benefit society — and their research — by spending time in government.

The engine of a microscopic motor can be coupled or uncoupled from the rotor by means of DNA coatings that respond to a variety of stimuli.

Megastructure stretching nearly 1 kilometre long is probably one of the oldest known hunting aids on Earth.

People infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 cleared the virus more quickly if they had high levels of certain immune cells.

The animals’ shenanigans hint that mischievous play evolved well before Homo sapiens did.

Publishers are deploying AI-based tools to detect suspicious images, but generative AI threatens their efforts.

Jury awards Mann more than US$1 million — raising hopes for scientists who are attacked politically because of their work.

Universities must declare all their retractions and launch investigations into misconduct cases; a Nature analysis reveals that since 2021 there have been more than 17,000 retractions with Chinese co-authors.

Engineered petunia emits a continuous green glow thanks to genes from a light-up mushroom.

Voisin won this year’s Crafoord Prize in Mathematics for research inspired by string theory, and work on a million-dollar unsolved problem.

The laboratory-grown food uses rice as a scaffold for cultured meat.

Study of more than 70,000 people suggests that trust levels vary among countries and are linked to political orientation.

Implants and other technologies that decode neural activity can restore people’s abilities to move and speak — and help researchers to understand how the brain works.

Fed up with a lack of political progress in solving the climate problem, some researchers are becoming activists to slow global warming.

Are urban trees and parks essential to improving the environment and human health — or just a sop to middle-class ideals of gentrification? Two books debate these opposing views.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Time away from his daily responsibilities taught Brandon Brown that he is replaceable — and that’s a good thing.

Streamlined workflows for DNA and RNA sequencing are helping clinicians to deliver prompt, targeted care to people in days — or even hours.

Phil Korngut tests NASA’s SPHEREx telescope under extreme conditions at his laboratory in California.

The afterglow of a long burst of γ-rays suggests that the events leading to these explosions can be sizeable sources of some of the Universe’s rare isotopes — and that classifications of γ-ray bursts are too simplistic.

Studies reveal how neuronal populations in the fruit fly brain work together to compare the direction of a goal with the direction that the fly is facing, and convert this into a signal that steers the fly towards its target.

Cutting-edge X-ray sources have enabled the structural dynamics of proteins to be tracked during biochemical processes, but the findings have been questioned. Two experts discuss the implications of a study that digs into this issue.

A method for configuring light-trapping devices promises better optical nanodevices by amplifying light and enhancing the emission efficiency of luminescent nanomaterials — without the need for complex technology upgrades.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

It emerges from a study of human cells that smoking can influence certain immune responses to the same extent as can age or genetics. Smoking can alter the immune system in ways that persist long after quitting the habit.

A long-term fish experiment reveals how a mechanism called density dependence, in which the population growth rate slows as the number of individuals rises, affects population dynamics on time scales relevant for ecology and evolution.

This Review explores in detail the complexity of NK cell biology in humans and highlights the role of these cells in cancer immunity.

Observations from the JWST of the second brightest GRB ever detected, GRB 230307A, indicate that it belongs to the class of long-duration GRBs resulting from compact object mergers, with the decay of lanthanides powering the longlasting optical and infrared emission.

A modelling analysis shows that an unusually long gamma-ray burst gave rise to a lanthanide-rich kilonova following the merger of a neutron star–neutron star or of a neutron star–black hole.

Artificial intelligence control is used to avoid the emergence of disruptive tearing instabilities in the magnetically confined fusion plasma in the DIII-D tokamak reactor.

A spin–orbital- and angular-momentum-sensitive methodology used to study Sr₂RuO₄ reveals subtle spectroscopic signatures that are consistent with the formation of spin–orbital chiral currents at the surface of the material.

Integer and fractional quantum anomalous Hall effects in a rhombohedral pentalayer graphene–hBN moiré superlattice are observed, providing an ideal platform for exploring charge fractionalization and (non-Abelian) anyonic braiding at zero magnetic field.

An experimental design consisting of a photonic-crystal nanoslab covered with upconversion nanoparticles demonstrates the phenomenon of supercritical coupling, resulting in giant enhancement of upconversion by photonic bound states in the continuum.

Optical nanoscale disk memory with petabit-level capacity is developed by extending the recording architecture to three dimensions with hundreds of layers, and exabit-level storage can be achieved by stacking the disks into arrays.

A bulk ceramic composed of interlocked boron nitride nanoplates with a laminated structure of twist-stacked nanoslices is created using hot-pressing and spark plasma sintering, which exhibits large elastic and plastic deformability and high strength at room temperature.

Pinning-point changes over three epochs spanning the periods 1973–1989, 1989–2000 and 2000−2022 were measured, and by proxy the changes to ice-shelf thickness back to 1973–1989 were inferred.

A machine learning model for generating crop-specific and spatially explicit NH₃ emission factors globally shows that global NH₃ emissions in 2018 were lower than previous estimates that did not fully consider fertilizer management practices.

Variant-to-gene-to-program is a new approach to building maps of genome function to link risk variants to disease genes and to convergent signalling pathways in an unbiased manner; its strength is demonstrated in coronary artery disease.

In Drosophila, FC2 neurons signal a navigational goal, which is compared with the fly’s heading by PFL3 neurons to guide moment-to-moment steering.

Here we show how PFL2 and PFL3 neurons in the Drosophila brain compare a representation of direction with internal spatial goals, both anchored in world-centric coordinates, and produce body-centric steering commands that act to correct deviations from the goal direction. 

A survey of 136 factors that may influence cytokine secretion identify smoking, cytomegalovirus latent infection and body mass index as influential factors, with varying effects on innate and adaptive immunity.

Dissection of the nuclear pore complex provides a model in which the HIV capsid enters the nucleus through karyopherin mimicry, a mechanism likely to be conserved across other viruses.

The HIV-1 capsid behaves like a nuclear transport receptor entering and traversing an FG phase, with its interior serving as a cargo container, bypassing an otherwise effective barrier to viral infection.

Acyltransferase activity of the enzyme bile salt hydrolase is identified and shown to mediate microbial bile acid conjugation, diversifying the bile acid pool and expanding their role in gut physiology.

We find that bile salt hydrolase N-acyltransferase activity can form bacterial bile acid amidates that are positively correlated with the colonization of gut bacteria that assist in the regulation of the bile acid metabolic network.

The Kupffer cell lineage-determining factor ID3 selectively endows macrophages with the ability to phagocytose live tumour cells and orchestrate the recruitment, proliferation and activation of natural killer and CD8⁺ T lymphoid effector cells to restrict the growth of a variety of tumours.

The E3 ligase SIFI is identified as a dedicated silencing factor of the integrated stress response, a finding that has implications for the development of therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases caused by mitochondrial protein import stress.

The slow maturation of human neurons is regulated by epigenetic modification in nascent neurons, mediated by EZH2, EHMT1, EHMT2 and DOT1L.

Translation actively dislodges stalled transcription elongation complexes (ECs) from damaged DNA, which enables lesion repair and restoration of transcription activity, and coupled ribosomes discriminate between active ECs and stalled ECs, ensuring destruction of only the latter.

A computational model generates conformational ensembles of 28,058 intrinsically disordered proteins and regions (IDRs) in the human proteome and sheds light on the relationship between sequence, conformational properties and functions of IDRs.

Ultrafast time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography is used to investigate a photodissociation reaction in a protein, revealing the strong impact of the pump laser fluence on the structural changes  and the reaction mechanism.