Volume 631 Issue 8022, 25 July 2024

The new French government should support education and research by improving budgets.

Connections between three interstellar clouds of gas and dust offer a glimpse into their birth.

Genomic analysis reveals the complex roots of the modern fruit.

Meanwhile, deer kept a low profile — perhaps because the deafening noise of the insects made it hard to hear predators.

An oil well in Kazakhstan dumped more than 100,000 tonnes of the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

CAR-T therapy, which harnesses a person’s own immune cells, racks up some astonishing success stories against deadly brain tumours in children.

Humans also have the protein, called IL-11, offering hope for a future longevity treatment.

Inhibiting a protein associated with chronic inflammation improves lung health in mice with COVID-19.

Without up-to-date data on the population, scientists say studies on fertility, migration and health outcomes have become unreliable.

The 3D arrangement of the DNA in the animal’s cells hints at which genes were active.

A ‘base editor’ successfully modified a gene in more than 90% of Escherichia coli bacteria without unwanted side effects.

The psychedelic drug causes some lasting changes to the communication pathways that connect brain regions.

Nature talks to tornado specialists and scientific advisers for the new disaster film about how it stacks up.

Graduate students are building big followings, making money and overturning science stereotypes by posting on social media.

Researchers have tried a bunch of strategies to get more negative results into the literature. Nature asks whether they are working.

Ten of Nature’s recent contributors share their current book obsessions.

In an age of geopolitical tensions, researchers need to be realistic and think beyond fundamental science to chart a safe path for collaboration.

Nature sent a reporter to find out as part of an investigation into dud events.

Companies are using artificial intelligence tools to help scientists to query their data without the need for programming skills.

Materials scientist Shiva Shirani measures how cement hardens at the nanoscale to inform how to develop a more eco-friendly material.

Can forest-degradation thresholds be identified to assess whether logged sites have conservation value? A long-term multi-species study reveals the effects on biodiversity when tropical forests are logged at differing intensities.

Generative AI models are now widely accessible, enabling everyone to create their own machine-made something. But these models can collapse if their training data sets contain too much AI-generated content.

Field studies reveal that the woody surfaces of upland trees are a substantial global sink for methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The findings help to fill a hole in the global methane budget and should improve the accuracy of climate models.

How plants sense their orientation in relation to gravity and steer their root and shoot growth accordingly is not fully understood. The discovery of key steps needed for this process fills in some of the gaps in our knowledge.

Centennial celebrations mark the discovery of oxygen, and a physicist shares ideas about why the pyramids were built, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

Amyloid-β peptides and tau proteins form filaments in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. Using an electron microscopy approach to visualize thin slices of brain tissue in 3D, these filaments can be seen in their native environment.

We find that, in the quantum transition of Ising spin glass, the closing of the gap at the critical point can remain algebraic by restricting the symmetry of possible excitations, which is crucial for quantum annealing.

 Analysis shows that indiscriminately training generative artificial intelligence on real and generated content, usually done by scraping data from the Internet, can lead to a collapse in the ability of the models to generate diverse high-quality output.

Comparison of terahertz spectroscopy measurements with theoretical results for the Heisenberg–Ising chain antiferromagnet demonstrates the existence of repulsively bound magnons in large transverse fields below the quantum critical point.

Layer-stacking domain walls in van der Waals heterostructures form a broadly tunable Luttinger liquid system, including both isolated and coupled arrays.

In an application of terahertz phonon engineering, terahertz phonons were generated, detected and manipulated through precise integration of atomically thin layers in van der Waals heterostructures.

The thermoelectric material Mg₃Bi₂ is shown to be ductile in single-crystal form along certain directions, with a room-temperature tensile strain of 100%, which is attributed to the gliding of dislocations.

Three-dimensional photo-printable resin chemistry yields an elastomer with tensile strength of 94.6  MPa and toughness of 310.4  MJ  m⁻³, both of which far exceed that of any three-dimensional printed elastomer.

Metal carbenes are accessed using a metallaphotoredox platform that exploits iron carbene reactivity using readily available chemical feedstocks and α-elimination.

Studies of in situ woody surface methane exchange in upland tropical, temperate and boreal forest trees find that methane uptake can result in a net tree methane sink that is globally significant and demonstrates an additional climate benefit provided by trees.

Analysis of peridotites reveals ultralow oxygen fugacity, suggesting that rafts of ancient, ultrareduced mantle were generated by deep melting at high temperatures and continue to circulate in the modern mantle, although they contribute little to modern ridge volcanism.

An analysis of the impact of logging intensity on biodiversity in tropical forests in Sabah, Malaysia, identifies a threshold of tree biomass removal below which logged forests still have conservation value.

A cave art scene at Leang Karampuang, Indonesia, dated to at least 51,200 years ago using laser-ablation uranium-series imaging, depicts human-like figures interacting with a pig.

Analyses of 475 ancient horse genomes show modern horses emerged around 2200 bce, coinciding with sudden expansion across Eurasia, refuting the narrative of large horse herds accompanying earlier migrations of steppe peoples across Europe.

Glutamate functions as a positive allosteric modulator for acid-sensing ion channels to exacerbate ischaemic neurotoxicity.

Using a globally distributed standardized aerial sampling of fungal spores, we show that the hyperdiverse kingdom of fungi follows globally highly predictable spatial and temporal dynamics, with seasonality in both species richness and community composition increasing with latitude.

A study reports the structure and molecular mechanism of the Bil anti-phage defence system, demonstrating that it is the closest prokaryotic homologue of canonical eukaryotic ubiquitination pathways.

To mitigate phage infection, an antiphage defence system in bacteria conjugates a ubiquitin-like protein to a structural protein of the phage, demonstrating that conjugation of ubiquitin-like proteins is an antiviral strategy conserved across all life forms.

Insufficient AHR activation has been suggested in SLE, and augmenting AHR activation therapeutically may prevent CXCL13⁺ T_PH/T_FH differentiation and the subsequent recruitment of B cells and formation of lymphoid aggregates in inflamed tissues.

A liver-intrinsic mechanism is presented that suppresses effective anti-hepatitis virus B responses in mice and humans by rendering virus-specific CD8 T cells refractory to activation causing loss of effector functions.

Tumour cells adapt to anticancer drug treatments by a series of cellular state transitions, each inducing distinct gene expression programmes and leading to increased drug resistance.

Embedding of a new engineered thermostable hydrolase into polymer materials enables the production of biodegradable and home-compostable plastics suitable for industrial packaging applications.

The effect of transcription factor binding on transcription initiation is dependent on the position of the transcription factor binding site.

Using cryo-electron tomography and single-particle cryo-electron microscopy of functional synaptic vesicles, a V-ATPase–synaptophysin interface was found to regulate synaptic vesicle biogenesis and alter seizure susceptibility.

Cryo-electron microscopy and X-ray structures of the glutamylation eraser CCP5 in complexes with glutamylated microtubules and tubulin tails show that the substrate backbone adopts a bent conformation that presents the branch glutamate to a substrate-binding pocket on CCP5.

The in-tissue architectures of β-amyloid and tau pathology in a postmortem Alzheimer’s disease donor brain are determined, showing fibril heterogeneity is spatially organized by subcellular location and suggesting applications to a broad range of neurodegenerative diseases.