Volume 638 Issue 8052, 27 February 2025

Artificial-intelligence tools and community science can help in places where data are scarce, so long as funding for data collection does not falter in the future.

A standardized system to measure contributions in mentorship, collaboration and more could bring about systemic change in science.

Sustained investments can deliver quantum devices that handle more information, more rapidly and more securely than can classical ones.

The virus is related to the pathogen that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome and capitalizes on the same ‘entry receptor’ used by SARS-CoV-2.

A catalyst that reduces usage of an expensive rare metal could help to make hydrogen fuel affordable.

Satellite imagery helps to identify two hotspots of deforestation in the Atlantic Forest along Brazil’s eastern coast.

Newly discovered species of leopard-sized carnivore lived some 30 million years ago in what is now Egypt.

The breakneck pace and devastating impact of the administration’s policy changes has shocked researchers.

An artificial-intelligence network trained on a vast trove of sequence data is a step towards designing completely new genomes.

The child, who is now almost three years old, shows no signs of the often fatal motor neuron disease.

The Trump administration is exploiting a loophole to keep a funding freeze in place, leaving researchers in limbo.

CAR-T-cell therapy treated a girl with a rare childhood cancer, raising hopes for future recipients of the approach.

The tech giant aims to make ‘topological’ quantum computers that will reach useful scales faster than competing technologies.

Armed with an influx of cash and public enthusiasm, researchers are looking to improve how ageing is measured.

Measuring poverty is the first step to delivering support, but it has long been a costly, time-intensive and contentious endeavour.

Generative artificial-intelligence illustrations can be helpful, but fall short as scientific records.

A methodical analysis of pandemic policies in Chicago, Illinois, reveals why short-term interventions are unable to tackle systemic inequities that affect marginalized communities.

After years of storytelling and running classes and festivals, I’ve seen first-hand how a love of nature makes people want to protect it.

Promising methods are emerging to reduce emissions, resource use and waste from construction industries.

These seven scientists escaped big-city life after completing their PhDs. Here’s how they make it work.

Mariola Sánchez-Cerdá works to track the elusive European wildcat’s movements and habits.

A system of ocean currents called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation strongly affects climate, but is showing signs of shutting down. An analysis now suggests that total collapse is unlikely this century.

How immune responses arise against microorganisms living on the skin is not fully understood. The discovery that skin maintains its own system to form antibody responses reveals an unexpected vaccination route.

Metallurgists have designed an extraordinary titanium alloy that is light, strong and flexible, and which recovers its original shape after large amounts of deformation — even when as cold as liquid helium or hotter than boiling water.

When a cancer cell no longer makes a particular functioning protein, it can become dependent on another protein for survival. The identification of one such relationship has uncovered a therapeutic target.

Defining a cell’s ‘type’ by the RNA transcripts it expresses is popular in biological research, but evidence from zebrafish neurons suggests that transcriptionally similar cells can be functionally diverse.

This Review summarizes advances in mass-spectrometry-based proteomics and explores the potential applications of these technologies in the clinic.

A proof-of-principle study reports a complete photonic quantum computer architecture that can, once appropriate component performance is achieved, deliver a universal and fault-tolerant quantum computer.

Two below-threshold surface code memories on superconducting processors markedly reduce logical error rates, achieving high efficiency and real-time decoding, indicating potential for practical large-scale fault-tolerant quantum algorithms.

Bosonic qubits can be engineered to feature intrinsic protection against certain kinds of errors, which makes quantum error correction across many bosonic qubits possible with less overhead.

Signatures of superconductivity in La₃Ni₂O₇ thin films are demonstrated, facilitated by the application of epitaxial compressive strain, suggesting that the observed low zero resistance T_c of around 2 K can be attributed to several factors.

A new optical technique, modulated ringdown comb interferometry, is introduced for measuring the concentration of gas species in a complex sample and its efficacy demonstrated using exhaled human breath and ambient air in the mid-infrared.

A heteroepitaxial-strain-based strategy for enhancing the stability of perovskite quantum dots for spectrally narrow (pure) red LEDs is reported.

A new method ‘hypotaxy’ enables wafer-scale, single-crystal transition metal dichalcogenides growth directly on crystalline, lattice-mismatched and amorphous substrates.

A Ti–Al-based shape-memory alloy adhering to the stringent criteria of lightness, functionality and extreme thermal fluctuation resistance is introduced, showing excellent superelasticity with a recoverable strain exceeding 7% and an ultra-wide temperature window from 4.2 K to 400 K.

Reactions of Mg-rich silicates with calcium carbonates/sulfates result in the formation of materials that could potentially be used for low-cost carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere.

Concise routes to 25 naturally occurring picrotoxanes were devised using a virtual library of intermediate analogues triaged by reactivity; this approach can overcome challenges in the use of computers for synthesis design.

Climate models suggest that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is unlikely to collapse this century, owing to stabilization from wind-driven upwelling in the Southern Ocean.

Global-scale analyses of marine, terrestrial and freshwater assemblages found that temporal rates of species replacement were faster in locations with faster temperature change, including warming and cooling, and vulnerable assemblages were especially responsive.

Phosphate storage in foraminifera is found to be widespread, indicating that these organisms are probably relevant for marine phosphorus cycling and potentially buffer anthropogenic eutrophication in coastal environments.

Ancient genome-wide data of 722 individuals and interdisciplinary analysis of large seventh- to eighth-century ce neighbouring cemeteries near Vienna are used to address the impact of the encounter between Eastern Asian Avars and Europeans.

Loggerhead sea turtles, which undergo long-distance migrations, can learn magnetic signatures associated with different geographic areas and have two different magnetic senses, each based on a different underlying mechanism.

Transcriptomic profiling of neurons from the zebrafish optic tectum identified more than 60 cell types; functional imaging revealed that response tuning, morphology and connectivity of specific cell types vary systematically with the neurons’ positions in the tissue.

In macaques, motor cortex activity associated with motor learning tasks is reactivated during brief breaks between learning blocks and predicts subsequent performance gains.

A study reveals that the skin acts as an autonomous lymphoid organ, producing antibodies to control the local biomass of the microbiota and protect against systemic infection, maintaining homeostasis between the host and its microbiota.

Staphylococcus epidermidis induces a potent, durable and specific antibody response that is conserved in humans and non-human primates, and which could be redirected against pathogens as a new form of topical vaccination.

Moscot is an optimal transport approach that overcomes current limitations of similar methods to enable multimodal, scalable and consistent single-cell analyses of datasets across spatial and temporal dimensions.

IL-33 induces tertiary lymphoid structures.

In a 23.4-million-cell atlas of 412 single-cell RNA-sequencing studies, SCimilarity query of macrophage and fibroblast profiles from interstitial lung disease reveals similar cell profiles across other fibrotic diseases and tissues.

PELO–HBS1L and SKI complexes in the human mRNA quality control pathway exhibit a synthetic lethal interaction and may represent novel targets for the development of cancer therapies.

Analysis of large-scale CRISPR screening data, combined with experiments in patient-derived tumour organoid models, identifies PELO as a potential therapeutic target in chromosomal 9p21.3-deleted cancers and microsatellite-unstable cancers harbouring specific mutations.

The transcription factor FOXM1 forms functional condensates, the formation of which can be targeted with a specific peptide to suppress breast cancer growth and metastasis.

This study presents cryogenic electron microscopy structural analysis of a diversity-generating retroelement (DGR) reverse transcription system from Bordetella bacteriophage, with results indicating that RNA surrounding the template controls reverse transcription through mechanisms that are conserved across distant taxa.

Serine 118 phosphorylation drives conformational changes through the disruption of hydrophobic interactions between aromatic-rich clusters, showing how hydrophobic mutations can restore oestrogen receptor-mediated transcription.