Volume 637 Issue 8046, 16 January 2025

Nature’s survey of hiring in science has revealed a gulf between the expectations of people looking for jobs in science and those who hire.

Research and resources are crucial to educate parents and carers the world over about the best ways to manage their children’s use of social media.

Sensory organs on the walking legs of the male wasp spider can catch the scent of a female in a mood for romance.

Large language models can propose fine-tuning adjustments for an electron accelerator in Germany.

Blood vessels in the brain rhythmically constrict and dilate to drive waves of cleansing fluid through the organ.

Dust cloud is thought to be the first debris disk to be seen around a planetary nebula.

Nature examines whether the temperature spike is a blip or an enduring — and concerning — trend.

Research in mice points towards a mechanism that avoids ‘catastrophic forgetting’.

Researchers have questions about how so many authors have racked up a large number of citations so quickly, although some of those authors are honest overachievers.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe could solve the mysteries of the solar wind and test Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Forecasts of viral variation could improve vaccine and antiviral treatments ahead of time.

The US$2.7-billion Perseverance rover collected the samples looking for evidence of past life, but NASA is dithering about how to get them off the red planet.

Theoretical study predicts the existence of particles that are neither bosons nor fermions — and hints at applications in quantum computing.

A trove of data is providing insights into the main reasons studies are pulled from the arXiv preprint platform.

The incoming US president is expected to gut support for research on the environment and infectious diseases, but could buoy work in artificial intelligence, quantum research and space exploration.

Epidemiological studies have linked dirty air to dementia and other brain disorders. Now researchers are trying to determine how pollutants do their damage, and how much harm they cause.

The idea that evolution is driven by an organism’s development — not just the natural selection of its genes — challenges a dearly held orthodoxy among evolutionary biologists.

The trials and tribulations of the world’s first seed bank reveal botanists’ enormous generosity and sacrifice during the siege of Leningrad.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Researchers need to define ‘safe zones’ for joint work in which the benefits outweigh the political risks. Here’s how.

Early-career researchers describe how they juggled workloads, emotions and finances after having children.

A decade in, expansion microscopy is unlocking insights across biology and medicine.

Sang-Wook Han hopes that the technology will spark innovations in materials science, drug development, finance and defence.

Cancer cells often become unresponsive to multiple types of therapy. It emerges that these ‘cross-resistant’ tumour cells release lipids that reprogram cells called monocytes to stop them from activating tumour-targeting T cells.

Cutting-edge simulations reveal a new potential mechanism by which Pluto trapped its biggest satellite, Charon.

Aquatic algae called diatoms have been found to use light-sensing proteins as depth indicators. Detecting depth-related changes in the intensity and spectrum of light enables algae to modulate their physiology accordingly.

Mathematical modelling suggests that it is theoretically possible to reduce risk of common diseases using heritable genome editing. Scientists argue that the technology involves considerable risk and uncertain benefits.

US technology company Meta has produced an AI model that can directly translate speech in one language to speech in another. Two scientists discuss the technical feats and ethical questions that underpin this advance in machine translation.

The developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression (dGTEx) projects will catalogue and integrate gene expression, regulation and genetics data across 120 human donors from birth to adulthood with developmentally matched non-human primates, including 126 rhesus macaques and 72 common marmosets.

We discuss the potential consequences and ethical concerns of polygenic genome editing of human embryos to alter specific variants associated with polygenic diseases, highlighting the possibility of reducing disease susceptibility while exacerbating health inequalities.

A two-dimensional non-Hermitian topological band is created in an ultracold system of fermions, which exhibits the non-Hermitian skin effect.

Proximity ferroelectricity is reported in wurtzite heterostructures, which enables polarization reversal in wurtzites without the chemical or structural disorder that accompanies elemental substitution.

Janus graphene nanoribbons with localized states on a single zigzag edge are fabricated by introducing a topological defect array of benzene motifs on the opposite zigzag edge, to break the structural symmetry.

SEAMLESSM4T is a single machine translation tool that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation and automatic speech recognition between up to 100 languages.

A cross-linked polymer gel driven by artificial molecular motors transforms chemical energy into mechanical force, achieving powered contraction and re-expansion, demonstrating a considerable advance in understanding energy transduction mechanisms and informing nanotechnology design principles.

An organic photoredox catalyst system efficiently reduces C–F bonds, generating carbon-centred radicals for hydrodefluorination and cross-coupling reactions, enabling the general use of organofluorines as synthons and breaking down environmentally damaging forever chemicals.

Diverse methyl β-C−H functionalizations of ketones and esters are enabled by cationic Pd(II) complexes with MPANA ligands, offering access to spirocyclic and fused ring systems through enhanced catalyst–substrate affinity.

Examination of the sulfur and copper contents of global cratonic peridotites combined with new high-pressure experiments shows that the migration of carbonated melts towards cratonic margins explains the co-location of magmatic metal deposits with carbonatites.

Leveraging metabarcoding and metagenomics, a survey of bacteria in the benthic microbiome across 152 glacier-fed streams (GFSs) provides a global reference for future climate-change microbiology studies on the vanishing GFS ecosystem.

Fossils of two new worm-like aculiferan species add to the diversity of this group, showing that evolution in early aculiferans generated unusual forms comparable to other crown-group molluscs.

A connectome analysis identifies, and experiments confirm, three state-dependent circuit motifs that modify the response of an aggressive female Drosophila or a courting male to fly-sized visual objects.

Examination of the neural activity in the basolateral amygdala and ventral CA1 of mice during tasks or rest following exposure to social stress reveals signatures of resilience and susceptibility to stress.

Long-term tracking of learned actions in mouse motor cortex shows that learned actions are retained with their context, and learning new tasks creates new memories, which do not overwrite or modify existing representations.

Through analysis of developing chick embryos and in vitro differentiation of embryonic stem cells, a study develops a method to generate a model of the human trunk with a notochord.

Phylowave, an innovative phylogenetic approach, can identify the main circulating pathogen lineages with increased fitness and the associated genetic changes, enabling the timely identification of emergent strains and deployment of targeted interventions.

This study demonstrates that diatoms with phytochrome photoreceptors can detect and functionally respond to the entire visible light spectrum through these sensors, enabling them to sense depth and regulate photosynthesis accordingly in marine environments.

A population of macrophages with exclusive molecular and functional signatures in the muscle spindles express machinery for synthesizing and releasing glutamate, and a cellular component, the muscle spindle macrophages, directly regulates neural activity and muscle contraction.

We evaluated the use of chimeric antigen receptor-modified T cells targeting GD2 (GD2-CART) for H3K27M⁺ diffuse midline glioma (DMG), finding that intravenous administration of GD2-CART, followed by intracranial infusions, induced tumour regressions and neurological improvements in patients with H3K27M-mutant pontine or spinal DMG.

Inflammatory monocytes are identified as important players in T cell restimulation in the tumour microenvironment.

TMEPro profiles the glycosylated secreted and plasma membrane proteome of 100 human pancreatic tissue samples, defines cell type origins and identifies potential paracrine cross-talk mediated through tyrosine phosphorylation.

Allosteric communication between the eIF4F subunits drives mRNA cap-recognition and subsequent activation of the message.

An Arabidopsis long terminal repeat retrotransposon integrates de novo into regions occupied by centromere-specific histone variant, showing the impact of centromeric chromatin on transposable element-mediated rapid centromere evolution, with relevance across eukaryotic genomes.