Volume 636 Issue 8043, 19 December 2024

An initiative from two research organizations to boost the role of science in peace-building in Africa needs to be supported.

In the United States, climate education needs shaking up — across all levels and settings.

Climate change could raise the frequency of ‘wet-snow avalanches’ at high elevations in the Swiss Alps.

Altered T cells, which have the ability to cross the blood–brain barrier, can deliver drugs straight to brain tumours.

White-crowned sparrows can migrate thousands of kilometres after churning out energy-producing organelles.

The gas planet has a density less than 2% that of Earth ― and is gradually shedding mass.

Error-correction feat shows quantum computers will get more accurate as they grow larger.

One year into Javier Milei’s presidency, scientists are exiting the country in the face of big budget cuts.

Generative-AI models require massive amounts of data — scholarly publishers are licensing their content to train them.

Australia is the latest nation to introduce restrictions, but evidence about whether they will work is limited.

Shi Zhengli, the virologist at centre of COVID lab-leak theory, reveals coronavirus sequences from Wuhan institute.

Could human–AI collaborations be the future of interdisciplinary studies?

Researchers call on technology companies to test their systems for consciousness and create AI welfare policies.

Preliminary study suggests possible link between long-term heat exposure and molecular markers of ageing.

A breathtaking total eclipse, courageous penguins, volcanic smoke rings and more.

A fraud buster, a nuclear-clock maker and a virus hunter. These are just a few of the remarkable people chosen for this year’s Nature’s 10.

Ekkehard Peik is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

Kaitlin Kharas is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

Li Chunlai is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

Anna Abalkina is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

Huji Xu is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

Muhammad Yunus is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

Placide Mbala is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

Cordelia Bähr is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

Rémi Lam is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

Wendy Freedman is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.

The influential writer talks about frighteningly accurate predictions, the creative act of reading, AI consciousness — and hope.

Bibliophile Andrew Robinson reveals 10 essential science reads from the past year.

All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — an astonishing achievement, considering no one’s really sure what it is.

Endocrinologist whose insight into how the brain controls the endocrine system shaped our understanding of bodily functions.

Instead of focusing on short-term fixes, cities such as Lahore and Delhi need a comprehensive, year-round plan to reduce air pollution.

An immunologist and his illustrator friend reveal tips and tricks to help scientists to reach peak performance and creativity.

Paul Dodd studies the region’s sea ice and salt water in readiness for increased human activity as the climate warms.

Highlights from News & Views published in 2024.

It has been hard to find fungi that normally reside in the mouse gut. The identification of one such fungus deepens our understanding of how resident fungi drive immune responses in their natural hosts.

The extent of Antarctic sea ice dropped precipitously in 2023. Analysis shows that this decline has increased the transfer of ocean heat to the atmosphere — in turn affecting ocean circulation and the frequency of storms.

Fructose aids tumour growth, but cancer cells usually lack the enzymes needed to metabolize this sugar. The liver converts dietary fructose to lipids that enter the blood, and cancer cells use the lipids to make membranes for proliferation.

Brain-wide association studies, which aim to link features of the brain to a person’s characteristics, have a replicability problem. Besides increasing sample size, what else can be done to make these studies more reproducible?

A case study has revealed widespread changes to the maternal brain during pregnancy. This is a milestone in the emerging neuroscience of ‘matrescence’ — the idea that pregnancy is a developmental stage in adulthood.

This Perspective reviews crop translational genomics and how it is helping to bring laboratory genetics to the crop field.

A dormant supermassive black hole at high redshift that is substantially overmassive relative to its host galaxy has been detected, indicating a much larger population of dormant black holes around the epoch of reionization.

Lunar rock and zircon ages were reset by a remelting event driven by the Moon’s orbital evolution, reconciling existing discrepancies in estimates for the formation time of the Moon and the crystallization time of its magma ocean.

Laser excitation of the ²²⁹Th isomer, potentially relevant for nuclear clocks, is reported in thorium fluoride thin films, which are less radioactive and amenable to integration compared with existing thorium-doped crystals.

Intense terahertz pulses are used to induce metastable magnetization with a remarkably long lifetime of more than 2.5 milliseconds in a van der Waals antiferromagnet, FePS₃.

Single-crystalline materials can be grown on amorphous surfaces at below 400 °C, enabling monolithic three-dimensional integration of vertically stacked transistors.

A eutectic phase change material composed of boric and succinic acids demonstrates a transition at around 150 °C, with a record high reversible thermal energy uptake and thermal stability over 1,000 heating–cooling cycles.

Edge-exposed exfoliation using sticky tape is shown to be a simple and reliable method for scaling up the production of ultrathin, ultraflat and ultraflexible polycrystalline diamond membranes for diverse electrical, optical, mechanical, thermal, acoustic and quantum applications.

The record-low Antarctic sea-ice decline in 2023 substantially altered Southern Ocean–atmosphere interaction leading to unprecedented wintertime turbulent ocean heat loss to the atmosphere, enhanced storminess and increased dense water formation.

Seasons with more frequent atmospheric rivers (ARs) also have warmer than average temperatures in many mid-latitude regions, and AR events are associated with temperature anomalies of 5–10 °C above the climatological mean.

Nitrogen isotope evidence of Mid-Devonian photosymbiotic associations in certain types of corals suggests that autotrophic and heterotrophic corals co-existed on extinct reefs, as today, but in warmer oceans, indicating the current warming rate, not temperature, is causing coral bleaching.

A pangenome analysis of 76 wild and domesticated barley accessions in combination with short-read sequence data of 1,315 barley genotypes indicates that allelic diversity at structurally complex loci may have helped crop plants to adapt to agricultural ecosystems.

Using single-cell DNA sequencing we show that most healthy women harbour rare populations of aneuploid epithelial cells with copy number alteration events in their breast tissue that expand and accumulate with age.

Mice generalize complex task structures by using neurons in the medial frontal cortex that encode progress to task goals and embed behavioural sequences.

Central pattern generators of a type usually known to control motor rhythms may also organize vertebrate ultradian sleep rhythm.

Soils from 30 grasslands across Europe were subjected to 4 contrasting extreme climatic events under drought, flood, freezing and heat conditions, with the results suggesting that soil microbiomes from different climates share unified responses to extreme climatic events.

Kazachstania pintolopesii is a highly prevalent fungal symbiont that can trigger type 2 immunity and influence the composition of the gut mycobiome, as well as immune and disease phenotypes.

Analysis of a human isolate of the A/Texas/37/2024 strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) virus in the ferret model demonstrates its pathogenicity and transmission in both direct and indirect contact settings, including airborne transmission.

A/Texas/37/2024 (huTX37-H5N1), a virus isolated from the eyes of an infected farm worker who developed conjunctivitis, proved lethal in mice and ferrets, spreading systemically with high titres in both respiratory and non-respiratory organs, and transmitted by respiratory droplets in ferrets.

Optimizing study design is critical for increasing standardized effect sizes and replicability, and the features that increase replicability in cross-sectional and longitudinal brain-wide association studies are explored.

A study generates a clinicogenomics dataset resource, MSK-CHORD, that combines natural language processing-derived clinical annotations with patient medical data from various sources to improve models of cancer outcome.

Dietary fructose enhances tumour growth in animal models of melanoma, breast cancer and cervical cancer indirectly via metabolite transfer.

A study uses single-molecule footprinting to measure protein occupancy at regulatory elements on individual molecules in human cells and describes how different properties of transcription factor binding contribute to gene expression.

Cryo-electron microscopy and biochemical studies elucidate the read–write mechanisms of non-canonical PRC1-containing RYBP in histone H2A lysine 119 monoubiquitination and their roles in maintaining epigenetic inheritance.

Studies on protein–protein interactions using proteins containing d- or l-amino acids show that stereoselectivity of binding varies with the degree of disorder within the complex.