Volume 634 Issue 8032, 3 October 2024

The final text from the UN Summit of the Future offers a glimmer of hope for a world beset by multiple crises.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Paris agreement must align their schedules — or progress will slip.

Fieldwork can be deadly: heads of expeditions must be taught how to cope in a crisis.

Ant larvae infected with a pathogenic fungus had better watch out for Mum.

Analysis finds that the mini-world Ceres hosts a frozen ocean that is progressively filled with impurities farther from the surface.

Artefacts found in modern-day Germany suggest that northern and southern peoples clashed in the Tollense Valley millennia ago.

Children under the age of five infected with SARS-CoV-2 produce lower levels of some immune cells than older children and adults do.

‘Soft cells’ — shapes with rounded corners and pointed tips that fit together on a plane — feature in onions, molluscs and more.

The finding comes from a reanalysis of genomic data.

Funders launch projects with US$70 million to develop tools that make rapid syntheses of the world’s science.

Researchers sent engineered heart tissue to the International Space Station and measured how it fared.

Body counts are a crude measure of the war’s impact and more reliable estimates will take time to compile.

Neurons in certain brain areas integrate ‘what’ and ‘when’ information to discern hidden order in events in real time.

Pulses of light and sound seem to have beneficial effects. But some argue it is too soon to market experimental devices.

An exploration of James Lovelock’s career, scientific work and personal life doesn’t pull its punches.

Artificial intelligence can help to reduce the impacts of natural hazards, but robust international standards are needed to ensure best practice.

Pathogenic viruses and antibiotic-resistant bacteria thrive on plastic. The biohazard risks of this ‘plastisphere’ shouldn’t be overlooked in efforts to tackle the pollution crisis.

At this Dutch festival, scientists learn about participants’ sex, drugs and rock-and-roll habits.

As the non-profit plasmid repository celebrates two decades, Nature looks at the stories behind some of its most requested DNA tools.

Federico De Pascalis works to protect European storm petrels from a changing world.

Neuroscientists have reconstructed the first complete wiring map of the fruit-fly brain, including 140,000 neurons and more than 50 million connections. This resource has already begun to revolutionize the field.

Aircraft observations of high-energy rays emitted by thunderstorms reveal that they are both intense and dynamic. Long-lasting glows that switch to rapidly flickering flashes could offer clues to how lightning forms.

A platform for visualizing the accessibility of urban areas reveals striking inequalities in and between the world’s cities.

Tiny cellular tubes between neurons and brain cells called microglia serve as conduits for the export of toxic protein aggregates from neurons and the import of healthy organelles, keeping neurodegeneration at bay.

The efficacy of cancer treatment in 1924, and an offer of carnivorous plants for experimentation, in our weekly dive into Nature’s archive.

An in-depth investigation of gene regulation and cell populations at sites of fetal blood-cell production provides clues as to why children with Down’s syndrome are predisposed to developing leukaemia.

If a cell can diversify its own genome, this can be advantageous in the face of changing environmental conditions. Bacteria have been found that can alter encoded proteins by using the trick of sequence inversion inside genes.

A study demonstrates the interpretation of a neuronal wiring diagram of the optic lobe of Drosophila, yielding theoretical predictions about visual functions of this structure.

When the cone angle between the solar wind velocity and the solar wind magnetic field is small at Mars, the induced magnetosphere degenerates.

Measurements from the heavily shielded Orion spacecraft during the uncrewed Artemis I mission show dose-rate reductions due to shielding and orientation for Van Allen belt crossings and quantify the interplanetary cosmic-ray radiation in a human-rated spacecraft.

Flickering gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial thunderstorms have been observed, which may be the missing link between gamma-ray glows and TGFs.

Tropical thunderclouds over ocean and coastal regions are shown to emit gamma rays for several hours over areas of up to a few thousand square kilometres, contradicting the quasi-stationary picture of glows.

Scaling up and shaping up large language models increased their tendency to provide sensible yet incorrect answers at difficulty levels humans cannot supervise, highlighting the need for a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence design towards reliability.

Opto-twistronic Hall effect driven by structural chirality and coherence length is observed in a three-dimensional self-assembled twisted spiral superlattice of WS₂.

Superconducting transmon qubits have been fabricated in a 300 mm complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) pilot line using industrial fabrication methods, achieving relaxation and coherence times exceeding 100 μs.

Free-standing nitrogen-doped amorphous monolayer carbon consisting of mixed five-, six- and seven-membered rings was prepared through the polymerization of pyrrole within the confined interlayer cavity of a removable layered-double-hydroxide template.

Frontal polymerization spin mode dynamics is used to autonomously fabricate patterned crystalline domains in poly(cyclooctadiene) with multiscale organization.

A novel theoretical framework reveals how topography surrounding rivers causes dramatic changes in their courses, with implications for natural hazard prediction, particularly in the Global South.

We find that massive genome expansion seems to be related to a reduction of PIWI-interacting RNAs and C2H2 zinc-finger and KRAB-domain protein genes that suppress transposable element expansion, and lungfish chromosomes still conservatively reflect the ur-tetrapod karyotype.

Using single-cell and multi-omics data of fetal blood, a high-resolution molecular map of dysregulated haematopoiesis in Down syndrome is provided.

FlyWire presents a neuronal wiring diagram of the whole fly brain with annotations for cell types, classes, nerves, hemilineages and predicted neurotransmitters, with data products and an open ecosystem to facilitate exploration and browsing.

A consensus cell type atlas for the fly brain provides both an intellectual framework and open-source toolchains for brain-scale comparative connectomics.

The network of the fly brain is highly recurrent and displays rich-club organization, with a large population (30%) of preferentially connected neurons.

An analysis of the Drosophila connectome yields all cell types intrinsic to the optic lobe, and their rules of connectivity.

Electron-microscopy data are used to reconstruct the neurons that make up the anterior visual pathway in the Drosophila brain, providing insight into how visual features are encoded to guide navigation.

Two halting mechanisms, ‘walk-OFF’ and ‘brake’, are shown to be engaged by distinct neural circuits in Drosophila, in a context dependent manner.

Analysis of the whole-brain fly connectome reveals high-dimensional dynamics supported by many small independent circuits, motivating a proposal for optogenetic perturbation to efficiently learn a whole-brain causal neural dynamics model.

We create a computational model of the adult Drosophila brain that accurately describes circuit responses upon activation of different gustatory and mechanosensory subtypes and generates experimentally testable hypotheses to describe complete sensorimotor transformations.

TREE1 and its homologue DAZ3 are expressed exclusively in Arabidopsis sperm, showing how genetic deficiencies can exert enduring paternal effects on specific plant organ differentiation and how parental-of-origin genes interact to ensure normal embryogenesis.

Fur farming represents an important hub of cross-species transmission for viral zoonoses.

Reversible DNA inversions found entirely within genes enable increased coding capacity by encoding multiple versions of a protein in bacteria and archaea.

We find that, relative to central neuropeptide Y, peripheral neuropeptide Y produced by sympathetic nerves has the opposite effect on body weight by sustaining energy expenditure independently of food intake.