Volume 639 Issue 8054, 13 March 2025

Despite the buzz surrounding smart cities in urban-policy circles, studies are lacking on the evidence for what works, what doesn’t — and who benefits.

Higher-education establishments must not be bullied into abandoning their mission of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Health has always been political, long before Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr took power. Denying this is what’s been killing us.

The presence of a pattern called a sleep spindle helps to predict which people will recover from an unresponsive state.

A network of two polymers plus sulfuric acid allows a hydrogel to keep its elasticity and softness at extreme temperatures.

Clay figurines found on top of the remnants of a pyramid in what is now El Salvador might have been used in public ceremonies.

Analysis of satellite imagery of the Brazilian Amazon, the Congo Basin and New Guinea helps to show that ‘secondary’ roads take an outsized toll.

Studies that touch on LGBT+ health, gender identity and DEI in the biomedical workforce could be terminated, according to documents obtained by Nature.

Health economist Jay Bhattacharya, who drew censure for controversial views on COVID-19, vows to provide funding but is short on details.

De-extinction company Colossal mixed mammoth and mouse mutations in a single strain to create a shaggy-haired rodent.

China’s top court says businesses that write bogus manuscripts for payment should be punished.

Study in mice and human cadavers hints that a brain-protective gene in the chromosome becomes more active with age.

The touchdown is a much-needed win for NASA’s partnerships with commercial space companies.

A brief outage has focused attention on scientists’ reliance on the US-government-funded website.

Experts weigh in on the risks of moderate drinking — and how people should assess them.

After 150,000 articles and 17 million genome sequences, what has science taught us about SARS-CoV-2?

From strange beginnings, the 100-year-old Pauli exclusion principle has become a gift that keeps on giving for scientists who aim to understand the workings of matter.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Tiny plastic particles are being found everywhere, including in the human brain. But it is not yet clear which findings can be trusted and what they might mean.

A project that intertwines data on weather, water flow and energy demand to create a 3D model of the whole river basin would enable researchers and others to make water-management decisions in real time.

Cheung, a laboratory assistant straight from university, raised the alarm over dodgy science and a duplicitous boss.

Mtamu Kililo creates alternative construction materials to confront Kenya’s housing crisis.

A study involving 14% of the people in Greenland makes a case for including under-represented groups in population genomics data — which could reduce inequalities in genetics-based clinical care and personalized medicine.

Ultrathin metals have been prepared using a benchtop hydraulic press — allowing the fascinating properties of the resulting 2D materials to be observed.

Implementing a performance-rating system with a two-point scale instead of a five-point scale could be an easy way to temper racial prejudices and tangibly improve income equality for workers from under-represented groups.

Quantum computers have gained the powerful abstractions that allow programmers of classical computers to design and integrate new apps and hardware, and connect devices into networks with ease.

Tumour cells often have problems processing messenger RNA. The finding that these splicing errors result in commonly expressed peptides that are recognized by immune cells offers a target for cancer treatments.

An international group of neuroscience researchers presents a framework for experimental designs for research using neural organoids and assembloids to study human development, evolution and disease.

A new quantum operating system architecture is described that is capable of executing applications on quantum networks in high-level software, which is a step towards bringing quantum network technology to society.

Deterministic generation of a continuous-variable eight-mode entanglement on an integrated optical chip is reported.

Experimental evidence is presented for a new implementation of supersolidity in a driven-dissipative, non-equilibrium context realized in a photonic-crystal waveguide, demonstrating the breaking of translational symmetry with exceptionally low losses.

Rhombohedral tetralayer graphene aligned to a hexagonal boron nitride substrate hosts gate-tunable superconductivity and quantized anomalous Hall states, and thermodynamic compressibility measurements further show a fractional Chern insulator at zero magnetic field, paving the way for new hybrid interfaces between superconductors and topological edge states.

Phosphorene nanoribbons demonstrate extraordinary magnetic properties, ranging from large internal fields in films to macroscopic alignment in solution, which can be coupled to photoexcitations that localize to the magnetic edge of these ribbons.

Melting and squeezing pure metals between two sapphires covered in molybdenum disulfide produces diverse two-dimensional metals at the ångström thickness limit.

Construction of a phosphate passivation layer on the surface of a cathode to withstand fluctuating operation in alkaline seawater is proposed following understanding the mechanism behind the dynamic evolution and degradation of cathode in intermittent electrolysis.

Mechanistic insights into a photocatalyst with an intramolecular junction and two different active sites could inspire further exploration of ‘intramolecular heterojunctions’ as the basis of selective and stable photocatalysts for C–H activation and C–C coupling.

A biocatalytic approach to enantioselective nucleophilic aromatic substitution (S_NAr) was achieved through laboratory evolution of highly efficient and selective S_NArase biocatalysts.

An intercomparison exercise reassesses mass loss from glaciers worldwide based on the main in situ and satellite methods from 2000 to 2023; the results are consistent with previous assessments and provide a refined and comprehensive observational baseline for future impact and modelling studies.

An analysis of global deforestation linked to consumption of products in the supply chains of large economies finds greater losses for vertebrate species’ ranges outside these countries than in them.

Changing from a five-point scale to a two-point scale for rating workers reduces racial discrimination by making customers focus on whether the work was good or bad instead of their own personal biases.

We illustrate that including data from Greenlandic Inuit can greatly reduce inequity in genomic-based healthcare in Greenland and other indigenous Arctic populations.

Lentivirus-based reporter assays for 680,000 regulatory sequences from three cell lines coupled to machine-learning models lead to insights into the grammar of cis-regulatory elements.

Behavioural experiments to study decision-making in response to context-dependent accumulation of evidence provide testable models that are consistent with the heterogeneity in neural signatures among rats that perform well in trials.

Dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area have a role in modulating aggression in adult male mice, and this effect of dopamine depends strongly on fighting experience.

In plant immunity, sensor NLR resistosomes can generate heterotrimer complexes comprising the helper NLR NRG1, and investigation of cryo-EM structures shows the mechanisms of these heterotrimers in immune activation and suppression.

In Arabidopsis, mechanisms for NRG1A activation by recognition of a modified host EDS1–SAG101 complex, and NRG1A inhibition by NRG1C through sequestration of activated EDS1–SAG101, show activation and constraint of a central plant immune response system.

This study uncovers a highly conserved jumbo phage protein, Imp1, that possesses multiple interfaces to license protein import into a proteinaceous nucleus-like compartment, using a genetic selection that forces the phage to decrease or abolish the import of specific proteins.

A study identifies public neoantigens generated by tumor-wide aberrant mRNA splicing activity across distinct cancer types.

A phase I trial of a neoantigen-targeting personalized cancer vaccine led to durable and polyfunctional T cell responses and antitumour recognition, and was associated with no recurrence in patients with high-risk clear cell renal cell carcinoma.

Profiling of the location and transcriptome of tissue-resident memory CD8 T cell formation at single-transcript resolution finds regionalized signalling as the basis of immune diversity in the intestine and provides a conceptual framework for the study of tissue immune networks.

Transcriptional adaptation upregulates UTRN in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) patients, as supported by several lines of evidence, including the use of splice-switching antisense oligonucleotides to induce the skipping of out-of-frame exons of the DMD gene.

Epicardial engineered heart muscle allografts from induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes can safely and effectively remuscularize chronically failing hearts in rhesus macaques, leading to improved cardiac function and paving the way for human clinical trials.

Ochre, a strain of Escherichia coli engineered to have a single stop codon, enables reassignment of four codons for non-degenerate functions, such as incorporation of non-standard amino acids into proteins.

A computational deep learning approach is used to design synthetic proteins that target the neosurfaces formed by protein–ligand interactions, with applications in the development of new therapeutic modalities such as molecular glues or cell-based therapies.