Volume 638 Issue 8051, 20 February 2025

Nature is proud to be associated with a new award for women in technology. The world needs more prizes for exceptional researchers and innovators.

Widely grown crops can be bioengineered to make a form of coenzyme Q taken by people seeking a health boost.

Astronomers trace the striking pattern to an encounter between a big galaxy and a much smaller one some 50 million years ago.

Droughts, extreme heat and destructive flooding plagued the region in the sixteenth century, historical documents show.

Make mine blueberry: Goffin’s cockatoos add flair to plain vegetables with a dip into fruity soya yogurt.

Researchers in Gaza tell Nature of ‘unwavering commitment to education and knowledge’ as most universities lie damaged or destroyed.

The company’s AlphaGeometry 2 reaches the level of gold-medal students in the International Mathematical Olympiad.

The mass-archiving effort is in response to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removing some of its web pages.

Centuries of isolation have given Greenlanders a genetic profile that includes Arctic-specific variants.

Drug companies are trialling a host of medications that they hope will offer benefits beyond weight loss.

High living costs paired with stagnant stipends are being blamed for a drop in PhD enrolments in several countries.

Earthquakes ringing through the planet illuminate how its heart is transforming.

Scientists identify nine genetic variants that could have helped a man to avoid dementia for at least two decades longer than expected.

A first-of-its-kind analysis by Nature reveals which institutions are retraction hotspots.

Drugs that can prevent or relieve migraine attacks are only effective for some people. Research is starting to untangle the reasons why.

The famed 1975 conference about a controversial genetic technology is feted as an example of how scientific self-regulation works. But more significant is what wasn’t discussed.

The country is betting on AI to develop practical, cost-effective business tools for global markets, especially lower-income countries.

A fascinating exploration of microbes that can travel through the air reveals how the pandemic marked a turning point for a crucial research field.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

The biochemist introduced the first heel-prick tests for newborn babies in Spain, protecting infants from life-changing metabolic conditions.

‘Challenge’ prizes are growing in popularity, but stimulating creativity takes more than financial incentives.

Synthetic biologists have the know-how and ambition to retool whole genomes. But the hidden complexity of biological systems continues to surprise them.

Juan Carlos Navarro shares his hopes and frustrations as he works to protect his country’s biodiversity and fight climate change.

An analysis of published data reveals how genetic diversity has been changing in populations of 622 terrestrial and marine species and the effectiveness of different types of intervention to boost genetic diversity.

The mechanism that causes static electricity to build up is a mystery. Experiments now reveal that materials ‘remember’ past contacts with each other — and this determines how electric charge is transferred in future contacts.

The pros and cons of a word gaining popularity, and publication of an updated edition of a book by Charles Darwin in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

Insights into how cholesterol-carrying low-density lipoproteins are structured, and how they interact with receptors to enter cells, could help to clarify the role of these particles in cardiovascular disease.

Analyses of 45,000-year-old bones from Europe allow scientists to pin down when modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, shedding light on the histories of populations with no present-day descendants.

This Perspective considers the application to infectious disease modelling of AI systems that combine machine learning, computational statistics, information retrieval and data science.

Ongoing hydrogen loss from two sibling exoplanets provides support for the role of such hydrogen loss in the evolution of close-orbiting sub-Neptunes.

An innovative method using superconducting sensors precisely measures the recoil energy of lithium-7 nuclei, setting a lower limit on the spatial extent of neutrino wavepackets, advancing understanding of neutrino properties and weak nuclear decays.

The altermagnetic order in CrSb films can be manipulated via crystal symmetry; the reconstructed altermagnetic order generates a room-temperature spontaneous anomalous Hall effect and designable switching modes as field-assisted and field-free modes.

A device architecture based on indium arsenide–aluminium heterostructures with a gate-defined superconducting nanowire allows single-shot interferometric measurement of fermion parity and demonstrates an assignment error probability of 1%.

A state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence model of a video game is introduced to allow the support of human creative ideation, with the analysis of user study data highlighting three necessary capabilities, namely, consistency, diversity and persistency.

Nominally identical materials are found to spontaneously order into triboelectric series over repeated processes, which is found to be driven by the act of contact itself using experiments as well as numerical simulations.

A recycling strategy based predominantly on the use of water to restore and reuse valuable components from perovskite photovoltaic waste is described, with recycled devices showing similar efficiency and stability compared with fresh devices.

A strategy is reported that improves the performance and lifetime of lithium-ion batteries by adding organic Li salt after assembly, which decomposes during cell formation, liberating Li ions and expelling organic ligands as gases.

Extruded zinc alloys of dilute compositions can achieve ultrahigh strength and excellent durability when their micron-scale grain size is increased.

Atomically dispersed inert oxide nano-overlays on a highly active Pt/γ-Mo₂N catalyst can block the redundant surface sites of γ-Mo₂N responsible for surface oxidation of this reactive support and the resulting deactivation, without compromising the intrinsic activity of active Pt@Mo2N interface.

Aromatic ring-opening metathesis using Schrock–Hoveyda molybdenum catalysts enables the efficient cleavage of stable aromatic compounds such as tetraphene and naphthalene, offering controlled transformations without reagents or photoexcitation and overcoming previous challenges in aromatic bond cleavage.

A comprehensive meta-analysis of global terrestrial and marine genetic diversity covering more than three decades of research demonstrates rapid loss of genetic diversity and identifies conservation interventions that could mitigate this process.

High-coverage and low-coverage genomic data for some of the earliest modern humans in Europe provide insights into recent admixture with Neanderthals and familial relationship links with distant communities approximately 45,000 years ago.

A cross-sectional study from four African countries shows the importance of investigating the gut microbiome in previously under-represented populations and provides a framework for equitable microbiome research.

Persistent DNA lesions can occur throughout the human lifespan and can remain in the genome of affected cells for several years and generate a substantial proportion of the mutational burden.

A neocortical–entorhinal–hippocampal network model based on grid cell states recapitulates experimental results and reconciles the spatial, associative and episodic memory roles of the hippocampus.

Nuclear calcium oscillations initiate plant–arbuscular mycorrhiza and nitrogen-fixing bacteria symbioses for nutrient acquisition, with a newly discovered autoactive CNGC15 mutant enhancing these partnerships, potentially improving crop nutrition and reducing inorganic fertilizer dependence.

RELMβ mediates a gut immune–epithelial circuit regulating tolerance to food antigens, offering targetable candidates for the prevention and treatment of food allergies.

Trained on unlabelled, unpaired image and text data, the Multimodal transformer with Unified maSKed modeling excelled in outcome prediction, image-to-text retrieval and visual question answering, potentially improving cancer diagnosis and therapy precision.

We developed PRINT, a computational method that identifies footprints of DNA–protein interactions from bulk and single-cell chromatin accessibility data across multiple scales of protein size.

Transferrin receptor targeting chimeras have been developed that enable targeting of drug resistance in epidermal growth factor receptor-driven lung cancer and reversible control of human primary chimeric antigen receptor T cells, representing a promising new family of bifunctional antibodies for targeted cancer therapy.

Computationally designed genetically encoded proteins can be used to target surface proteins, thereby triggering endocytosis and subsequent intracellular degradation, activating signalling or increasing cellular uptake in specific tissues.

A synthetic receptor platform that enables mammalian cells to respond to soluble factors allows specific signalling networks to be precisely controlled, with a variety of therapeutic applications.

Divergent satellite DNA shapes influence architectural protein binding and chromatin organization in two mouse species so that the satellites can be packaged and centromere function maintained, mitigating the evolutionary cost of satellite DNA expansion.

A massively parallel assay developed to map the essential photosynthetic enzyme rubisco showed that non-trivial biochemical changes and improvements in CO₂ affinity are possible, signposting further enzyme engineering efforts to increase crop yields.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of apolipoprotein B100 (apoB100) in complex with the LDL receptor (LDLR) provide insight into binding interfaces and explain how mutations in apoB100 or in LDLR can give rise to familial hypercholesterolaemia.

The structure of apolipoprotein B100 provides insights into how the various domains of apoB100 act in concert to maintain low-density lipoprotein shape and cohesion across a range of particle sizes.