Volume 635 Issue 8038, 14 November 2024

The network of emerging economic powers known as BRICS is ramping up its science collaboration. Researchers need to be involved in decisions as plans develop.

Researchers need to establish robust ethical protocols for online experiments.

Method could probe whether a key tenet of quantum mechanics applies to gravity, which has so far resisted quantum theory.

Analysis of billions of pages of results from searches using the Bing algorithm suggests that reliable sites appear in search results 19 to 45 times more often than do sites with low-quality content.

Satellite observations validate national reports on forest coverage and carbon storage.

Elderly big brown bats showed little sign of age-related degradation in the inner ear.

Trump’s decisive defeat of Kamala Harris spurs fears about the future of the United States among researchers.

Amid fights over conservation funding, an agreement is reached for businesses to pay for profiting from digital genetic information taken from nature.

‘Translating Time’ database compares how animal brains develop and age, enabling researchers to learn more about humans.

A vast colony of aspen clones could hold clues about how ancient organisms protect their genomes from harmful mutations.

Generative-AI technologies can create convincing scientific data with ease — publishers and integrity specialists fear a torrent of faked science.

Applications have soared, but the success rate for key grants has dropped since last year.

Through brain implants, neural interfaces and skin grafts, researchers are starting to restore sensation for paralysed or amputated limbs.

Artificial intelligence could help speedily summarize research. But it comes with risks.

The Arecibo message contained an image of a man only. But what might seem a sexist choice deserves a more subtle interpretation.

From maps of the stars to the multiverse, four enlightening art shows reveal diverse impressions of the cosmos.

Artificial-intelligence tools such as ChatGPT might soon become fully autonomous by learning to perceive and interact with their environment.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Volcanic activity will be experienced differently in a warmer world. Researchers need to understand these risks and how they could spiral.

At small or minority-serving institutions, time and resources that are needed to draft successful grant proposals are often in short supply. But help is available.

Circular RNAs are prevalent, mysterious and fascinating, but their study requires great care.

Mechanical engineer Legena Henry converts sargassum and rum-distillery waste water to produce sustainable natural gas for vehicles.

How did the characteristic pattern of embryonic cell divisions during animal development evolve? Analysis of the multicellular development of an organism related to animals now provides some answers.

Phone users around the world are enabling the creation of a space-weather monitor that will deepen our understanding of the physics governing Earth’s ionized upper atmosphere and improve the accuracy of satellite positioning.

A book discusses interesting insights from studies of growth, and a plea is made for researchers to become more involved in shaping government science policy in this week’s snippets from Nature’s past.

How do odorant receptors in the human nose recognize a wide variety of scent molecules? The structures of engineered versions of these receptors finally provide much-needed answers to this fundamental question.

Wearable robots that assist leg movements could transform the lives of people with reduced mobility — but only if the devices can adapt in real time to support a vast range of human activities. Machine learning provides a way forward.

Some bacteria can cause mutations associated with colon cancer. Insights about the surface adhesion proteins that enable these bacteria to bind to host cells point to how steps leading to tumour formation might be halted.

Searches for neutral fermionic, bosonic or anyonic excitations in unconventional insulators are discussed, and challenges in probing and using quantum insulators outlined, in this Perspective on future advancements offered by quantum materials and experimental schemes.

A study of 36 massive galaxies at redshifts between 5 and 9 from the JWST FRESCO survey finds that galaxy formation of the most massive galaxies is 2–3 times higher than the most efficient galaxies at later epochs.

Analysis of the black hole low-mass X-ray binary V404 Cygni shows that it is part of a wide hierarchical triple whose configuration provides evidence that some black holes form with nearly no natal kick.  

Measurement of the bound-state β⁻ decay of ²⁰⁵Tl⁸¹⁺ gives a new, longer half-life, allowing for the calculation of accurate stellar ²⁰⁵Pb yields and the isolation time of the early Solar System.

Magnetostirring is used to rotate the magnetic field and set a dipolar supersolid composed of ultracold atoms spinning, revealing fundamental differences in vortex seeding dynamics between modulated and unmodulated quantum fluids.

Phonons at the FeSe/STO interface are imaged at atomic scale, uncovering new optical phonon modes that couple strongly with electrons, shedding light on the microscopic origin of the interfacial EPC and providing insights into achieving superconducting transition temperature enhancement.

A task-agnostic controller assists the user on the basis of instantaneous estimates of lower-limb biological joint moments from a deep neural network so exoskeletons can aid users across a broad spectrum of human activities.

Inspired by the art of kirigami, a haptic device based on a miniaturized electromechanical structure combined with skin as an elastic, energy-storing element demonstrates bioelastic state recovery and can be used in sensory substitution.

A method for design of polymer membranes uses strategically placed pendant groups with specific hydrophobicity to precisely tailor hydrated pore size, with applications in ion-conducting membranes for redox flow batteries.

Fluorochemicals are obtained directly from fluorspar activated in water at low temperature, without the requirement to manufacture hydrogen fluoride, a toxic and hazardous gas that is central to the current industrial process.

Data from millions of smartphones are used to map the ionosphere in greater detail, leading to improved smartphone location accuracy, particularly in parts of the world with few monitoring stations.

A long-term experiment in grassland communities finds that, over 24 years, enriching nitrogen caused increasingly greater diversity loss when carbon dioxide levels were increased, raising further concerns over the impacts of global environmental change on biodiversity.

The exceptionally preserved skull of a starling-sized fossil bird from 80 million years ago allows reconstruction of the brain, enabling detailed endocranial description of an archaic bird that is evolutionarily intermediate between Archaeopteryx and living birds.

The ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii develops via symmetry breaking and cleavage divisions, and it forms spatially organized colonies with distinct cell types.

Development of a constraint model specifically for mitochondrial DNA and applied to data from the Genome Aggregation Database provides insights into which sites in the mitochondrial genome are important for health and disease.

Calcium-permeable AMPA receptors are identified to have a role in maintaining low feature selectivity in a specific population of inhibitory interneurons, and this function is conserved across ferrets, rodents, marmosets and humans.

Experiments using conditional RIM1 and RIM2 knockout mice and acute pharmacological manipulations clarify the role of rapid dopamine dynamics, whereby these dynamics are dispensable for movement initiation but important for reward-guided conditioned behaviours.

A study presents an approach to establish and track a new endosymbiotic partnership by implanting bacteria in a non-host fungus and shows that stable inheritance of the implanted bacteria is possible with positive selection.

A fibroblast lineage marked by FAP gives rise to POSTN-expressing fibroblasts resembling matrifibrocytes and IL-1β regulates FAP/POSTN fibroblast specification by directly signalling to cardiac fibroblasts, highlighting a role for immunomodulators in targeting cardiac fibrosis.

Conditional deletion of the transcriptional co-activator Brd4 in infiltrating Cx3cr1⁺ mouse macrophages ameliorates heart failure and substantially reduces fibroblast activation.

RAMP3, a component of the receptor for the neuropeptide CGRP, has a cell-intrinsic role in T helper type 1 cell fate determination.

Probiotic Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 is engineered as an antitumour vaccination platform optimized for enhanced production and cytosolic delivery of neoepitope-containing peptide arrays to safely induce specific, effective and durable systemic antitumour immunity.

Alterations in the tumour suppressor genes STK11 and/or KEAP1 can identify patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer who are likely to benefit from combinations of PD-(L)1 and CTLA4 immune checkpoint inhibitors added to chemotherapy.

The oncogenic potential of pks⁺ Escherichia coli depends critically on bacterial adhesion to host epithelial cells mediated by the type 1 pilus adhesin FimH and the F9 pilus adhesin FmlH.

Using a single-nucleus multi-omics approach, a study jointly profiles the reorganization of the epigenome and the three-dimensional chromatin conformation during the development of the human hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.

Transcriptome-wide profiling studies in mammalian cells show that the stringency of start-codon selection is increased during mitosis, and that this is regulated by nuclear eIF1 to preserve mitotic arrest physiology.

Use of the consensus protein design method facilitated the generation of stable engineered mammalian odorant receptors to gain insight into the molecular properties of odorant–receptor interactions.