Volume 638 Issue 8050, 13 February 2025

A range of initiatives, from financial-support schemes to awareness campaigns, is already changing the university’s environment.

Process turns out eggs with delectable texture and high nutritional value.

The vaccines’ effect on inflammation-promoting cells might help to explain why the jabs protect against severe disease.

The apes can tailor their communications to account for a human partner’s level of knowledge.

A Copper Age burial in Spain holds the largest collection of beads ever found ― enough to require a tonne of shellfish as raw material.

Abrupt changes to programmes including USAID inhibit global efforts to stop diseases such as HIV, malaria and more, say researchers.

Government policies, generous funding and a pipeline of AI graduates have helped Chinese firms create advanced LLMs.

Monica Bertagnolli details her concerns about Robert F. Kennedy Jr and his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ campaign.

The small trial will help to establish whether kidneys from genetically modified pigs can be transplanted into people safely and effectively.

The FDA’s nod for suzetrigine bolsters confidence in the pharmaceutical industry’s strategy to target sodium channels.

Studying crowd dynamics could inform strategies that help to prevent dense gatherings from becoming dangerous.

Database shows that researchers with retracted papers had higher self-citation rates and published more than those without retractions.

Next-generation obesity drugs will work differently from Ozempic and Wegovy — aiming to deliver greater weight loss with fewer side effects.

Plastics have infiltrated every recess of the planet, including your lungs, kidneys and other sensitive organs. Scientists are scrambling to understand their effects on health.

A book on human morality claims that although liberals and conservatives prioritize different victims, mutual understanding is still possible.

He brought cutting-edge methods to archaeological analysis, helping to reshape the field.

The nation must lose its tight focus on individual disciplines if it is to keep pace with the evolving requirements of scientific enquiry.

Ahead of the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, displaced academics describe their experiences settling into UK universities.

When Ho Thi Thanh Van isn’t creating materials for fuel cells, she is cultivating traditional medicines.

In the nineteenth century, the discovery of the fossil Archaeopteryx revealed how birds evolved from dinosaurs. A bird fossil of similar age to Archaeopteryx shows flight-aiding innovations such as the loss of a long tail.

The observation of a neutrino in an enormous underwater detector has confounded physicists. It is much more energetic than any particle observed previously, suggesting that it came from a distant astrophysical source.

Bats carry viral pathogens that typically do not lead to severe disease in the bats themselves but can be lethal to humans. Adaptations in certain immune genes might contribute to this resistance.

Three-dimensional maps of glacier surfaces across Greenland reveal that cracks are growing rapidly where land ice meets the sea — and climate change is to blame.

Data from the XRISM X-ray satellite provide unprecedented detail on how ionized plasma moves in massive galaxy clusters — a question with huge cosmological and astrophysical implications.

A drug that limits the clustering of malignant breast-cancer cells that are moving through the bloodstream to distant organs might open avenues to block the lethal spread of a tumour.

Many environmental toxins damage proteins, which then must be removed to avoid dangerous protein aggregation and disease. How cells dispose of chemically modified proteins has been unclear, but a discovery offers some clues.

A skull discovered in South Africa provides key evidence about human evolution, and early plans for a tunnel to connect England and France, in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

A review of studies on communication between the nervous and immune systems redefines the neuroimmune connectome with a focus on health and disease, and discusses how the latest techniques can advance our understanding.

Including passive CO₂ uptake as an anthropogenic removal in greenhouse gas accounting systems could undermine the Paris Agreement; measures to address this include acknowledging the need for Geological Net Zero and disaggregated accounting for carbon sinks.

This Perspective discusses strategies and challenges for the Molecular Phenotypes of Null Alleles in Cells (MorPhiC) Consortium as it aims to catalogue the molecular and cellular phenotypes associated with null alleles of all human genes.

Observations of the Phoenix cluster using the James Webb Space Telescope reveal rapid cooling in galaxy cluster cores, driven by black hole jets, with gas temperatures mapped between 10⁵ K and 10⁶ K and cooling rates of 5,000–23,000 M_⊙ yr⁻¹.

X-ray spectroscopic observations of the Centaurus galaxy cluster with the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission satellite show that the hot gas flows along the line of sight relative to the central galaxy.

A millihertz frequency X-ray quasi-periodic oscillation has been observed near the innermost orbit of an actively accreting supermassive black hole and its frequency has evolved significantly over 2 years, a phenomenon that is difficult to explain with existing models.

A very high-energy muon observed by the KM3NeT experiment in the Mediterranean Sea is evidence for the interaction of an exceptionally high-energy neutrino of cosmic origin.  

The distribution of quantum computations is demonstrated between two photonically interconnected trapped-ion modules, using repeatable, deterministic teleported controlled-Z gates to perform Grover’s search algorithm.

By etching cavities into a thin lubricant spacer and encapsulating it with functional flakes, electric and mechanical switching of single-crystal, van der Waals stacking configurations is demonstrated.

Interfering water waves can be tailored to realize topological structures, namely wave vortices, skyrmions and polarization Möbius strips, that can be used to manipulate particles floating on the water surface.

The concept of using hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks triggered by non-invasive focused ultrasound for programmable drug activation is explored and demonstrated practically with the designer drug clozapine N-oxide for deep brain stimulation in mice and rats.

A multilayer-stacked two-dimensional polyaniline crystal shows high electrical conductivity and unique out-of-plane metallic transport behaviour, indicating potential for strong electronic coupling beyond in-plane interactions and three-dimensional metallic conductivity.

Using zirconium metal–organic frameworks as the host template for directed nucleation and precise growth of metal-halide sublattices, multi-dimensional single-crystalline porous superlattices can be achieved through a one-pot synthesis.

A state-level analysis of the impact of enhanced weathering deployment on carbon sequestration on agricultural land suggests that enhanced weathering could help the USA meet net-zero 2050 goals.

A meta-analysis of biodiversity effects on plant productivity found that complementarity effects increased over time whereas selection effects decreased, and both remained consistent across global variations in climate.

Two recently discovered bird fossils from the Late Jurassic Zhenghe Fauna demonstrate that highly derived bird-like features and the origin of birds appeared much earlier in the Jurassic period than previously estimated.

A systematic analysis of 115 mammalian genomes, including 10 new bat genomes, reveals prevalent positive selection in immune genes in bats and shows key adaptations in the antiviral gene ISG15 that aid disease resistance in bats, including to coronaviruses.

Analysis of policies for promotion criteria to full professor from academic institutions and government agencies worldwide reveals considerable variation in assessment practices, particularly between the Global North and South.

A conserved gene regulatory network involving SOX4, SOX11 and TFAP2D shapes the development of excitatory neurons in ventrolateral pallium and their connectivity with the prefrontal cortex.

Elucidation of the mechanism by which zeta inhibitory peptide erases memories, involving endocytosis of AMPA receptors on potentiated synapses, provides insight into more general mechanisms of memory maintenance and response to traumatic brain injury.

Comparing T cells in nasal polyps from repeated surgeries shows that effector memory-like persistent clones colonize the mucosal tissue during disease recurrence and promote inflammation by producing Granzyme K, a complement-activating tryptase, which is a potential therapeutic target.

A study using glioblastoma mouse models, serial magnetic resonance imaging and single-cell profiling details changes in the identity and balance of cellular states from initiation of tumorigenesis to the end point.

A study identifies three dominant genomic archetypes of breast cancer induced by discrete mutational processes, describing a continuum of genomic profiles and detailing the mechanisms underlying the progression of breast cancer.

SCF–FBXO31 scans proteins for C-terminal amidation and marks them for subsequent proteasomal degradation.

Results from a comprehensive evaluation of the function of BRCA2 variants, particularly variants of uncertain significance, provide a useful resource to improve the clinical management of individuals who carry such genetic variants.

CRISPR–Cas9-based saturation genome editing in a humanized mouse embryonic stem cell line was used for comprehensive functional characterization of single nucleotide variants in a region of BRCA2, and shows good agreement with existing variant classifications and high predictive power.

Using viral capsid architectures as template for design, higher triangulation number nanocages that require symmetry breaking offer potential advances in targeted delivery and antigen-displaying vaccines.

A new computational method for design of pseudosymmetric self-assembling protein nanomaterials has resulted in purification of cage-like protein assemblies containing 960 subunits with a diameter of 96 nm.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of native type A GABA receptors from human brain reveal diverse subunit compositions, protein binding partners and binding sites for antiepileptic drugs.