Volume 635 Issue 8040, 28 November 2024

Analysis of neuroimaging studies shows that close attention to experimental design can increase the statistical robustness of research results.

In the wake of one of Europe’s biggest natural disasters in 50 years, scientists must work with local communities to avert further catastrophes.

Open-ended research is essential to building solid hypotheses in the social sciences — without it, even the best-planned analyses can fail.

Stimulating certain brain cells in mice seems to ease anxiety without causing hallucination-like effects.

A pall of smoke from burning cropland each year decreases rainfall in the annual monsoon.

Microorganisms on a sample of asteroid are clearly terrestrial — despite strict protocols to avoid contamination.

Six years of observations show that play encourages group efforts and eases tension between adult chimpanzees.

The University of Rochester has confirmed that it no longer employs Ranga Dias, who was found by investigators to have fabricated data.

Sweeping changes and more research scrutiny could be on the way for the US National Institutes of Health.

Understanding how human neurons cope with the energy demands of a large, active brain could open up new avenues for treating neurological disorders.

With technical advances and enthusiasm from policymakers, advocates say the time for next-generation geothermal has come.

Half a dozen drugs are in trials for conditions of the brain, but success is not guaranteed.

The largest scholarly search engine is celebrating its 20th birthday, but AI-driven competitors offer advantages.

Long-lasting changes to the cells’ epigenome are linked to a decline in their function.

PsiQuantum has ambitious goals to build a useful quantum machine by late 2027 — and has raised more than US$1 billion to do it.

A mesmerizing global tour will make readers question what they think they know about mushrooms.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

AI-enabled research might cause immense harm if it is used to design pathogens with worrying new properties. To prevent this, we need better collaboration between governments, AI developers and experts in biosafety and biosecurity.

Leading biomedical researchers outline their priorities for the incoming administration.

Alongside secret Santas and seasonal parties, many laboratories develop traditions to show appreciation to colleagues — from sweets and mulled wine to quizzes and ice-skating trips.

Methods for exploring the geography of molecular-scale processes within tissue samples are transforming cancer research, but the toolbox can be daunting.

Astronomer Desireé Cotto-Figueora detects and characterizes near-Earth asteroids to identify potential hazards.

An ambitious analysis of data has revealed the effects of the 2019–20 Australian megafires on biodiversity. It turns out that the outcome is more nuanced than just the anticipated picture of a massive loss of species.

In 1984, scientists made a crystalline alloy that had a seemingly impossible arrangement of atoms. They had discovered the first quasicrystal — a type of material that transformed ideas about how atoms can be ordered in solids.

Human children pair fast growth of a large brain with slow body growth. Ancient Homo fossil teeth reveal that hominin dental growth rates began to slow before there was a major increase in brain size compared with apes.

A neural network has learnt to correct the errors that arise during quantum computation, outperforming algorithms that were designed by humans. The strategy sets out a promising path towards practical quantum computers.

The discovery of a pathway that controls appetite and calorie burning has led to the development of a drug that modulates both by targeting one receptor, offering a promising strategy for weight loss and improved metabolic health.

By patterning an ultrathin layered structure with tiny wells, physicists have created and imaged peculiar states known as quantum scars — revealing behaviour that could be used to boost the performance of electronic devices.

A review of the literature on artificial intelligence systems to examine openness reveals that open AI systems are actually closed, as they are highly dependent on the resources of a few large corporate actors.

A recurrent, transformer-based neural network, called AlphaQubit, learns high-accuracy error decoding to suppress the errors that occur in quantum systems, opening the prospect of using neural-network decoders for real quantum hardware.

Using a graphene quantum dot creation and a wavefunction mapping technique, quantum scars are directly visualized for Dirac electrons with a scanning tunnelling microscope.

Energy-efficient, solid-state amorphization of indium selenide nanowires is achieved using direct current, avoiding the melt–quench process.

Replacing ZnSeS with a thickened ZnSe layer in green InP-based QD-LEDs improves the efficiency and lifetime, boosting electron injection and reducing leakage, enabling 26.68% external quantum efficiency and 1,241 h T₉₅ lifetime.

A new surface passivator cyclohexane 1,4-diammonium diiodide naturally contains two isomeric structures with ammonium groups on the same or opposite sides of the hexane ring, and the two isomers demonstrate completely different surface interaction behaviours.

Using a mixture of 4-fluorophenethylamine and 4-trifluoromethyl-phenylammonium to create a tailored 2D perovskite layer reduces the inhomogeneity at the top interface of all-perovskite tandem cells and results in the highest efficiency reported so far.

High-quality micron-thick perovskite films with high-Miller-index-oriented grains can be used to achieve high-performance solar cells and modules.

Perovskite solar cells degrade quickly under natural day/night cycling, compared with continuous illumination, owing to periodic lattice strain during cycling; the lattice strain can be regulated by adding phenylselenenyl chloride.

A modular autonomous platform for general exploratory synthetic chemistry uses mobile robots to integrate an automated synthesis platform and two analysis platforms.

Data collected from more than 2,000 taxa provide an unparalleled opportunity to quantify how extreme wildfires affect biodiversity, revealing that the largest effects on plants and animals were in areas with frequent or recent past fires and within extensively burnt areas.

Fossil tooth development suggests an extended human growth phase occurred at least 1.77 million years ago, possibly reflecting a shift towards extended parenting and reproductive success, rather than increasing brain size.

In the tunicate Ciona, we show that pigment cell lineage also produces neural progenitor cells that form regions of the juvenile nervous system after metamorphosis, suggesting that neural crest cell multipotency precedes the emergence of vertebrates.

A study presents archaeogenomic data for 131 individuals from 38 sites spanning 6,000 years, and details the demographic processes of the Caucasus and the surrounding steppe zone throughout the Bronze Age.

Uprooting stem cells from their native environment and transplanting them to other individuals exaggerates selective pressures, distorting and accelerating the loss of clonal diversity in contrast to the unperturbed haematopoiesis of donors.

The temporal order of neuronal firing within bursts of population spiking in the human anterior temporal lobe is dependent on the category as well as the identity of the individual stimulus, and this encodes information independently of spike rate or latency.

How the navigational system of the brain constructs spatial maps that require both rapid changes and representational accuracy is explored.

We provide evidence that circadian plasticity has diverged through evolution of the neuropeptide gene Pdf, conferring a selective advantage for Drosophila melanogaster at elevated latitude, whereas Drosophila sechellia probably suffers fitness costs outside its range.

In Klinefelter syndrome, gene dysregulation due to the extra X chromosome leads to delayed development of fetal germ cells (FGCs), and aberrant interactions between Sertoli cells and FGCs disrupt the migration of late FGCs to the basement membrane.

Rifaximin use, particularly in patients with liver cirrhosis, may be compromising the clinical use of daptomycin.

A strategy using engineered functional customized viral receptors enables the development of functional infection models for coronaviruses whose native cellular receptors are unknown.

In mouse and nonhuman primate models, treatment with selective, long-acting neurokinin 2 receptor agonists aids weight loss by suppressing appetite and increasing energy expenditure, as well as by increasing insulin sensitivity.

Cell-type-resolved spatial proteomics of the skin from patients with toxic epidermal necrolysis reveals that it is driven by JAK/STAT signaling, leading to successful treatment of this potentially fatal condition in patients using JAK inhibitors.

Together with the fatty-acid-binding protein  FABP5, the cytoskeletal organizer TAGLN2 is an essential factor for fatty acid uptake, mitochondrial respiration and anticancer function in CD8⁺ T cells.

A study introduces AI²BMD, an artificial intelligence-based dynamics simulation program that uses protein fragmentation with a machine learning force field to accurately and efficiently model the folding and unfolding of large proteins.