Volume 639 Issue 8055, 20 March 2025

Attacks on vaccines and the cancellation of research into what causes vaccine hesitancy puts people in harm’s way.

National agencies too often use spurious reasons to deny researchers unfettered access to resources that are key to understanding past and future climate change.

The importance of diversity in science is an unshakeable reality that the scientific community must stand by.

A well-timed atmospheric river dropped enough snow on Greenland for its ice sheet to lose 8% less mass than expected.

The paralysing toxin deployed by the male blue-lined octopus might help to protect him from being eaten.

The drop in body temperature that occurs during a torpid state is linked to molecular markers of longer life in mice.

Prosthetic appendage uses three layers of touch sensors to accurately differentiate between textures.

Researchers at Stand Up for Science rallies voice defiance against the policies of US President Donald Trump’s administration.

Tiny anvil squeezes metal atoms into super-thin sheets with strange properties.

Abrupt cuts by the Trump administration to the US National Institutes of Health threaten progress in medical research globally.

Analysis pokes holes in protocol that underpins Microsoft’s claim to have created the first topological qubits.

Trainees in big research groups tend to go on to greater academic success than their small-group counterparts — but are more likely to quit academia altogether.

Scientists also identified anti-ageing drugs and experimental compounds that could target the genes to reverse decline.

Top advisers in the Office of the Chief Scientist are among the first to go amid downsizing effort.

The European physics laboratory CERN is planning to build a mega collider by 2070. Critics say the plan could lead to its ruin.

SpaceX and other companies plan to launch tens of thousands of satellites, which could mar astronomical observations and pollute the atmosphere.

Is a revolution of standards in public life the key to tackling our intertwined environmental crises? A compelling book argues it is.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

The biologist’s theories about how environments prompt rapid species evolution and extinction propelled her onto the world stage.

Why failing to control defunct satellites leaves everyone at risk from their impacts.

Failure to agree on global grants to help low- and middle-income countries to achieve net-zero emissions cannot be the end of the story. An urgent solution is needed.

Scientists around the world are recognizing that their research method isn’t the only way.

Alba Graciela Ávila Bernal’s research focuses on power-storage technologies, but she also builds custom probes to test water quality.

Gills and mammalian ears bear little resemblance, yet examination of gene regulation reveals that key supportive cartilage tissue arises from similar embryonic cells guided by an evolutionarily conserved genetic program.

An analysis of peat from ancient wetlands provides a reconstruction of how sea level increased millennia ago — and how it might rise again with global warming.

Cellular organelles called mitochondria contain DNA and can fuse together or split apart. It emerges that excess fusion is averted by stress-activated regulators, preventing the potentially harmful release of mitochondrial DNA.

Inherited repeat mutations in the HTT gene expand in neurons over decades before crossing a toxic threshold, revealing a long time window for therapy.

Plans to broadcast TV to villages in India to improve literacy rates, and camels that have settled in the Nevada desert, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

The enzyme SPO11 has a crucial role in meiosis, the process that forms sperm and egg cells. The activity of purified SPO11 has now been reconstituted in a cell-free system — enabling the enzyme’s role to be studied in detail.

Long-term studies provide insights into the complex interplay between evolutionary process and pattern across multiple systems and timescales.

A real–momentum topological photonic crystal that harnesses real-space disorder is used to generate a Pancharatnam–Berry phase while preserving momentum-space topology.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be optimized using TextGrad, a framework that performs optimization by backpropagating large-language-model-generated feedback; TextGrad enables optimization across diverse tasks, including radiotherapy treatment plans and molecule generation.

A mixed-precision heterogeneous memristor combined with a compute-in-memory artificial intelligence (AI) processor allows optimization of the precision, energy efficiency, storage and wakeup-to-response time requirements of AI edge devices, which is demonstrated using existing models and datasets.

MatterGen is a model that generates stable, diverse inorganic materials across the periodic table and can further be fine-tuned to steer the generation towards a broad range of property constraints.

By suppressing compositional heterogeneities in cadmium-free quantum dots, environmentally friendly pure-blue-light-emitting diodes with enhanced efficiencies, lifetimes and spectral purity are achieved, rivalling state-of-the-art cadmium-based blue quantum-dot light-emitting diodes.

High-enthalpy elastic metamaterials constructed from freely rotatable chiral metacells have high stiffness, large recoverable strain and improved buckling strength.

Pattern-based detection and attribution methods that make use of trend pattern information as a function of month and height provide evidence that reduction of ozone-depleting substances has resulted in the beginning of Antarctic ozone recovery.

An early Holocene sea-level curve based on data from the North Sea reveals two phases of accelerated sea-level rise owing to meltwater from the North American and Antarctic ice sheets.

Our assessment of a 27-country weather station dataset in the Mediterranean region revealed long-term stability in precipitation over 150 years, along with substantial short-term variability on annual to decadal scales driven by atmospheric circulation; these findings align with the precipitation trends seen in CMIP6 models.

Long-term increases in heavy daily and hourly precipitation in Austria from different climatic mechanisms emphasize the need for flood management adaptation, especially in smaller catchments affected by the increased hourly rainfall.

Children who learn maths working in markets and children who learn maths only from school were both unable to transfer their skills to new contexts, highlighting a need to reconsider how maths is taught in school.

A study on the evolutionary origin of the mammalian outer ear finds that it shares genetic programs with the gills of fishes and amphibians, indicating that elements of an ancestral gill have been reused.

In the Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment, diploid yeast evolve to be tetraploid under selection for larger multicellular size, revealing how whole-genome duplication can arise due to its immediate benefits, persist under selection, and fuel long-term innovations via aneuploidy.

Complete human recombination maps are presented that enable exploration of both cross-over and non-cross-over events during meiosis, with the potential to provide insight into the causes of aneuploidies and pregnancy loss.

HYPOMAP integrates single-nucleus RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomic data to create a comprehensive spatio-cellular map of the human hypothalamus.

D1- and D2-expressing striatal neurons encode separate parts of a learned reward distribution, paralleling modern approaches in machine learning.

Caspase recruitment domains (CARDs) are present in defence systems that protect bacteria against phage, where the bacterial CARD domain is essential for protease-mediated activation of bacterial gasdermins that promote cell death.

A study reports optimized mitochondrial base editors with reduced off-target effects to facilitate the generation of mouse models of human mitochondrial diseases.

IL-27 promotes tumour control by preventing dysfunction and enhancing cytotoxicity of tumour-specific CD8⁺ T cells.

As proof of principle, an analysis using a suite of human-aligned immunocompetent mouse models of hepatocellular carcinoma identifies a promising therapeutic candidate, cladribine, which acts in a highly effective subtype-specific manner in combination with standard-of-care therapy.

Electrical excitability in neuroendocrine SCLC cells promotes tumour progression through action potential firing, increasing ATP demand and oxidative phosphorylation dependency, whereas non-neuroendocrine cells provide metabolic support, driving a tumour-autonomous cycle that enhances tumorigenesis and metastasis.

We find that, in mice, although the individual loss of Parkin or OMA1 does not affect mitochondrial integrity, their combined loss results in small body size, low locomotor activity, premature death, mitochondrial abnormalities and innate immune responses.

Reconstitution of recombinantly expressed SPO11–TOP6BL complex recapitulates its DNA cleavage function and together with structural modelling and biochemical experiments, provides insights into the regulation and mechanism of SPO11 activity.

A biochemical system recapitulates the hallmarks of meiotic double-strand break formation, with mouse SPO11 catalysing break formation in the absence of any partners and remaining covalently attached to 5′ broken strands.

The in vitro characterization of a key event in the early stages of meiosis—the induction of double-strand DNA breaks by the SPO11–TOP6BL complex—provides insight into the catalytic mechanism and evolution of SPO11.

Structural and cellular assays and molecular dynamics simulations reveal the mechanism of action of γ-glutamyl carboxylase, which involves cholesterol and vitamin K.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures reveal the mechanisms underlying multiple-substrate specificity, coupling of epoxidation with carboxylation and allosteric motions during VKGC catalysis, offering potential strategies for targeting haemostatic and non-haemostatic disorders associated with defects in γ-carboxylation.