Volume 632 Issue 8027, 29 August 2024

Researchers and engineers have the skills, and often the desire, to get involved with local policymaking efforts. They should take the plunge; it’s easier and more rewarding than it might seem.

Snows melted earlier than usual because of climate change, fuelling the unprecedented blazes.

Certain spiders take advantage of the fact that a male firefly can flash even after being bitten and wrapped.

Newfound compound is as effective at treating infected skin wounds as is the antibiotic of last resort.

Bursts of light hint that a star in a nearby galaxy was partially shredded in 2022 and 2024 and might be in for another round.

Construction is under way for the maximum-security Brazilian facility, which will face cost and regulatory hurdles.

Results raise hopes that methods could be developed to detect the earliest stages of neurodegenerative disease.

Former clinical scientist Patrick Vallance speaks to Nature about his priorities as the minister overseeing the nation’s research.

Advances in understanding the causes of the autoimmune disorder could aid in matching people with the right treatment.

New estimate doubles the previous figure, raising questions about which is correct and highlighting gaping data holes.

Early results from clinical trial show that the antiviral drug tecovirimat is no better than placebo against the clade I virus type.

The ways in which researchers can artificially inflate their reference counts are growing.

The country has ambitious plans for fusion power plants to provide clean, limitless energy. Can they be realized?

From supercool materials that send heat into space to shape-shifting materials that can selectively fend it off, scientists are finding new strategies to reduce urban temperatures.

Even ‘untouched’ natural landscapes bear witness to millennia of human influence, a lyrical book argues — with implications for how we seek to rewild them.

Awareness of when a paper can’t be trusted is often too low — but adopting some easy-to-use technological solutions can help researchers, publishers and referees to clean things up.

Even though geologists have rejected the designation of an Anthropocene epoch, the idea of a major planetary transition in the mid-twentieth century remains useful across physical and social sciences, the humanities and policy.

Artificial intelligence is propelling advances in all areas of science. But vigilance is needed, warn four researchers at the leading edge.

Jakub Cech creates digital versions of materials for use in the virtual world.

How do mitochondrial organelles remove damaged parts of inner membrane for recycling in the cytoplasm? The discovery of an exit route that flips inner membrane outside the organelle provides some answers.

A chromium-based superconductor is the newest member of a group of metals that show many intriguing properties simultaneously. The pronounced effects of its electron–electron interactions add to these rich phenomena.

By tracing the neural circuits that are active when mice anticipate pain relief, neuroscientists find that the placebo effect involves the cerebellum and brain stem — areas that typically mediate ‘lower’ brain functions.

A cutting-edge global model of the atmosphere combines machine learning with a numerical model based on the laws of physics. This ‘hybrid’ system accurately predicts the weather — and even shows promise for climate simulations.

A cocktail of experiments and theory provides a way of revealing complex patterns in magnetic materials, including some textures that can identify the systems as members of an elusive class known as axion insulators.

The current ‘second space age’ has enabled multiple studies on the effects of spaceflight on human physiology and health, which are contributing to the development of measures that will be needed to maintain astronaut health in future space missions.

Supermassive black holes regulate the amount of atomic hydrogen in galaxies and the atomic hydrogen gas mass to stellar masses ratio is more strongly correlated with black hole masses.

Observations of a third, less luminous persistent radio source associated with the repeating fast radio burst FRB 20201124A indicate that the burst originates from a young magnetar surrounded by a nebula of ionized gas.

The atmospheric terminator region of WASP-39 b, a hot gas giant exoplanet, is inhomogeneous, despite past assumptions, with the evening terminator being hotter and thus probably clearer, and the morning terminator probably being cloudy and consequently cooler.

The ambipolar field of Earth controls the structure of the polar ionosphere and boosts its scale height by 271%, physically driving  the polar wind and acting as the source of the magnetospheric cold H⁺ ion population.

An antimatter hypernucleus formed by an anti-lambda hadron, an antiproton and two antineutrons was observed through its two-body decay after production in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions.

The emergence of superconductivity under pressure is reported in a chromium-based kagome metal, CsCr₃Sb₅, which has strong electron correlations, frustrated magnetism and characteristic flat bands close to the Fermi level.

An on-chip platform with in situ adjustable interfacial properties, using a microelectromechanical system, provides multi-degree-of-freedom control of two-dimensional materials, including twisting and pressurizing.

By twisting two bilayers of CrSBr, which is a 2D antiferromagnet, a >700% nonvolatile tunnelling magnetoresistance at zero field is shown, demonstrating a new strategy for constructing all-antiferromagnetic tunnel junctions down to the atomic limit.

A small-molecule (646 Da) hydrogen-bond-donor catalyst accelerates the S_N2 step of an enantioselective Michaelis–Arbuzov reaction by recapitulating the geometric preorganization principle used by enzymes.

A hybrid model that combines a differentiable solver for atmospheric dynamics with machine-learning components is capable of weather forecasts and climate simulations on par with the best machine-learning and physics-based methods.

We find that rhinoceros beetles passively deploy and retract their hindwings without muscular activity, demonstrating this with insect-like microrobots.

Enhancer-driven genomic recording of transcriptional activity in multiplex (ENGRAM) is used for multiplex recording of the cell-type-specific activities of dozens to hundreds of cis-regulatory elements with high fidelity, sensitivity and reproducibility.

Comprehensive genomic and transcriptomics analyses of more than 1,300 cases of childhood T-lineage acute lymphoblastic leukaemia identify 15 distinct subtypes that are associated with specific outcomes.

Analgesia from the expectation of pain relief is mediated by rostral anterior cingulate cortex neurons that project to the pontine nucleus.

A comprehensive spatial expression atlas of the adult human proximal small intestine reveals branched villi, immune activation at the villus tip, and a switch of migrating enterocytes from lipid droplet assembly and iron uptake at the villus bottom to chylomicron biosynthesis and iron release at the tip.

We show that cytosolic inner mitochondrial membrane vesicles, devoid of outer mitochondrial membrane or mitochondrial matrix, are formed during resting state and directly herniate into lysosomes through pores formed by voltage-dependent anion channel 1 in the outer mitochondrial membrane, thereby allowing their selective removal.

We demonstrate that the ability to conserve energy coupled to methane production is not restricted to the Euryarchaeota and is much more widespread than originally thought.

Methanosuratincola petrocarbonis LWZ-6 is a strict hydrogen-dependent methylotrophic methanogen that does not ferment sugars, peptides or amino acids.

We show methanogenic growth by a member of the lineage Korarchaeia and, following cultivation, methanol reduction to methane using hydrogen as an electron donor, which could be critical for a thorough evaluation of methanogens.

A study links environmental nitrosamines to bladder cancer through their metabolism by specific commensal microorganisms occurring in the gastrointestinal tract of humans and mice.

An integrated data and sample repository for clinical, cellular and multi-omics research from diverse spaceflight missions known as Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) is presented.

SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission sent an all-civilian crew into orbit to study physiological, neurovestibular and neurocognitive changes in the astronauts and found that short-duration civilian space missions do not pose a major health risk.

FANCD2–FANCI is a sliding clamp that diffuses on double-stranded DNA but stalls when it reaches a single-stranded gap, providing a unified molecular mechanism that reconciles the roles of FANCD2–FANCI in the recognition and protection of stalled replication forks.

Structures of fetal and adult muscle acetylcholine receptors reveal a developmental switch that alters channel biophysics and pharmacology to enable neuromuscular junction maturation, uncovering pathogenic mechanisms underlying congenital myasthenic syndromes.