Volume 631 Issue 8020, 11 July 2024

Walkouts, petitions and tweets: how a grass-roots movement led by students, postdocs and tenured academics radically changed government policy on science funding.

Demand from Brazil itself accounts for more than half of the demand for crops and livestock from the Amazon and the savannah that surrounds it.

‘Amber’ beads dating to the Neolithic period, lasting from the fifth to the third millennium BC, are actually mollusc shells coated with resin and natural pigments.

Immune-system assassins called killer T cells compress target cells, forming a destructive crater.

The location of an injury determines whether ants bite off or preserve a damaged limb.

Countries are grappling with how to regulate research that uses stem-cell-based embryo models. They will be watching the United Kingdom’s voluntary approach.

Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has placed several experts who aren’t politicians into government posts.

New research identifies some of the genes that could help to explain why lung cancer incidence rises with age but declines after the age of 75.

The cave-dwelling group hunted animals such as hyenas and hares to sustain themselves in harsh environments.

For the first time, scientists identify individual brain cells linked to the linguistic essence of a word.

Unconventional methods for desalination could create more drinking water, help many industries to deal with problematic brines and increase lithium supplies for batteries.

UFO hunters and anti-vaxxers might seem like modern phenomena, but they both take inspiration from a little-known anti-science movement.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Five scholars share their science-policy priorities for the incoming government as it faces urgent challenges in tackling climate change, health, inequality and more.

When data collection can be damaging, conservation scientists must balance ethical trade-offs between interference and inaction.

A programmable RNA that bridges a genetic donor and a target could herald a safer and more flexible approach to large-scale chromosome changes.

Andrew Pask develops genetic sequencing techniques for marsupials — including an apex predator that was hunted to death in the twentieth century.

Amphibian species around the world are threatened with extinction by the deadly fungal disease chytridiomycosis. A simple, low-cost solution to provide warm conditions enables frogs to clear the infection and remain disease free.

Structural insights into how anti-tuberculosis drugs interact with the enzyme that makes ATP in bacteria and humans pave the way for improved drug design to treat the disease and combat antimicrobial resistance.

Fast-moving stars have been discovered in the middle of the nearby star cluster ω Centauri using two decades of Hubble Space Telescope imaging. The stars offer evidence of a long-sought intermediate-mass black hole.

Insect respiration is commonly thought to rely solely on direct gas exchange through air-filled tracheal tubes. The discovery of oxygen-transporting blood cells in fly larvae reveals a previously unknown way to oxygenate fly tissues.

Artificial daylight lacks commercial interest, and a geologist’s thirst for knowledge kickstarts the bid for the Channel Tunnel, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

A gas of molecules that interact over long distances has been cooled to mere nanokelvins, resulting in the emergence of a state known as a Bose–Einstein condensate — the first of its kind in this type of molecular system.

Observations of seven fast-moving stars in the central 3 arcsec (0.08  pc) of ω Centauri indicate an intermediate-mass black hole in ω Centauri.

Bose–Einstein condensate of sodium–caesium molecules is observed by means of evaporative cooling and collisional shielding.

Electric-field tunable generation of entangled photon pairs is achieved by spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal, with an efficiency comparable to that of the best nonlinear crystals.

Tunable superconductivity and a series of flavour-symmetry-breaking phases are observed in electron- and hole-doped Bernal bilayer graphene.

By using a chiral halide perovskite material, spin injection at room temperature into a conventional III–V semiconductor multiple quantum well light-emitting diode is demonstrated, resulting in a semiconductor platform that can also control spin.

Solvating polar polymers with ionic liquids at appropriate concentrations can produce a unique class of materials called glassy gels with desirable properties of both glasses and gels.

A radical-based method for functionalizing native sugars shows a way to remove typical protecting-group manipulations.

We report an S_NV reaction, a rare nucleophilic substitution that involves electronically unbiased vinyl electrophiles, which allows the synthesis of cross-conjugated polyenes and bioactive compounds with multi-substituted alkenes.

The Great Oxidation Event represents a tipping point in Earth’s O₂ mass balance—when more O₂ was being produced than destroyed—that forever changed the habitability of worldwide oceans.

Matching seismic waveforms show that the inner core of Earth gradually super-rotated from 2003 to 2008, and then more slowly sub-rotated from 2008 to 2023 back through the same path.

Artificial thermal refugia—sites heated to temperatures higher than that of the surrounding environment—provide a way to protect an endangered Australian frog species from a fungal disease that has caused the extinction of many amphibians.

Drosophila haemocytes collaborate with the tracheal system to reserve and transport oxygen through the phase transition of PPO2 crystals, facilitating internal oxygen homeostasis in a process that is comparable to vertebrate respiration.

Automated reconstruction of dense neural networks in the ventral nerve cord of the fruit fly provides a resource for investigating the neural control of movement.

We use connectomics to compare the wiring logic of premotor circuits controlling the Drosophila leg and wing, finding that both premotor networks cluster into modules that link motor neurons innervating muscles with related functions.

Motor units in the superior colliculus of mice exhibit poorly defined representation of static visual fields and instead rely largely on kinetic visual features to link visual inputs to behavioural outcomes.

Mathematical modelling of 15 years of data from South Africa reveals the spread and vaccine-driven changes in fitness and antimicrobial resistance of Streptococcus pneumoniae.

An effector protein called LnaB from Legionella pneumophila catalyses a unique type of AMPylation, and LnaB and its homologues represent a distinct family of AMPylases with specific structural features.

A study presents the results of surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 in animal and environmental samples from a market linked to early human cases of coronavirus disease 2019.

Cryogenic electron microscopy structures of Mycobacterium tuberculosis ATP synthase and human ATP synthase bound to the anti-tuberculosis drug bedaquiline or its analogue TBAJ-587 shed light on drug binding and could lead to new treatments for tuberculosis.

The density and size of contact gradients between the endoplasmic reticulum and the plasma membrane control the speed and direction of cell migration by restricting receptor signalling to the front.

Cells actively sense external and internal signals to stay quiescent or proliferate, and this trigger relies on being in a reversible primed G1 state of partial retinoblastoma inactivation and E2F activation.

Antisense RNAs boost gene expression by accelerating the export of mRNA from the nucleus to the cytoplasm through the Dbp2-mediated formation of double-stranded RNAs, which might explain the prevalence of antisense RNAs.

RNA-guided transcription factors arose repeatedly via the domestication of transposon-encoded tnpB genes, representing a parallel evolutionary path to CRISPR-Cas adaptive immunity.

A deep learning approach enables accurate computational design of soluble and functional analogues of membrane proteins, expanding the soluble protein fold space and facilitating new approaches to drug screening and design.

A cryogenic electron microcopy study of structures of a human receptor for bitter taste finds that cholesterol can activate the receptor, while the tastant molecule acts allosterically on the receptor.