Volume 634 Issue 8035, 24 October 2024

Scientists are increasingly arguing that coral-reef restoration is a lost cause — but done right, it can still benefit ecosystems and local communities.

We can anticipate many false claims, including alleged mass voting by non-citizens or ‘suspicious vans’ outside polling booths. We should quickly counter them.

Tent made from the smart material can maintain a comfortable interior for external temperatures of 14–33 °C.

Humans can distinguish between sequences of odours that are presented only 60 milliseconds apart.

A survey found that some mammals are ‘lunar phobic’ and a select few are more active when the Moon shines bright.

Modelling of an outbreak at a US university suggests that a nimble vaccination campaign can limit transmission.

Microscopy technique allows scientists to image how proteins and chromosomes interact in an intact cell.

The Europa Clipper spacecraft will use its various instruments to probe whether the icy ocean world is habitable.

A crop of referee reports from the Royal Society’s archive reveal discussions about cutting printing costs, reviewer holidays and even editing images.

The awards’ strict constraints often prompt frustration — if these prestigious prizes were created for the twenty-first century, how would they be different?

The ability to link private and public data sets could be putting research participants’ private health information at risk.

Many are bizarre and live in salt lakes, hydrothermal vents and other extreme environments.

A ‘neural tourniquet’ increases blood-clot stability in human tests.

Across the animal kingdom, models have vastly underestimated the energy costs of reproduction.

This year's pivotal election will shape the future of US science. Rising international competition and domestic concerns are also at play.

Five specialists share essential books for understanding threats to democracy past and present, and finding ways to guard against them.

Quantum technologies can help to defend nations, but they also threaten human rights and values. Their design and development need ethical guidance now.

Hiring managers want applicants to show passion and dedication, but not overconfidence or exaggerations.

Minh Ha Quang’s work at a Japanese AI research centre aims to understand how machines extract image data from the real world.

Migrating animals can bring food and contaminants to their destination. An assessment of Pacific salmon migrations from 1976 to 2015 reveals changes in the scale of this coupled transport and potential effects for consumers.

Improving air quality by discontinuing combustion-engine vehicles would slash health-care costs in the United States, but the projected savings in rural areas depend on how the replacements are powered.

Scientists have engineered a modified insulin that reduces its activity at low glucose levels. This glucose-responsive insulin could prevent people with diabetes from experiencing dangerously low blood glucose.

Data can be stored on DNA, but the methods involve time-consuming DNA synthesis and must be done by experts. A user-friendly approach has been developed that potentially solves these problems.

The British–American space satellite Ariel-5 launched in 1974, plus the curious ablutions of squirrels, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

In 2004, physicists reported something remarkable: they had isolated ultrathin films of carbon atoms using sticky tape alone, and found that the films had astounding properties. The finding would forever change condensed-matter physics.

How much of Earth’s plant diversity is distributed across islands, and how might this affect conservation efforts? It emerges that islands contain a disproportionately large share of global plant diversity and endangered species.

An unexpected link has been found between the metabolic pathways that produce energy for embryo growth, and the cellular signalling systems that regulate cell specialization and movement during early development.

This Perspective discusses the strengths and limitations of future biobank sampling strategies based on oversampling close relatives as opposed to the current population-based approach.

The detection and modelling of nine X-ray quasi-periodic eruptions from a nearby tidal disruption event shows that these eruptions arise in accretion disks around massive black holes, left behind by tidally disrupted stars, and that an orbiting body colliding with this disk is a plausible explanation for the X-ray variability.

An astrometric analysis of Gaia data identified two waves of massive runaway stars that have been dynamically ejected from the young cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Electronic rotons and Wigner crystallites have been observed experimentally and numerically in a two-dimensional dipole liquid.

A scheme for watermarking the text generated by large language models shows high text quality preservation and detection accuracy and low latency, and is feasible in large-scale-production settings.

We present a DNA self-assembly based molecular data writing strategy to enable parallel movable-type printing for scalable DNA storage.

A bio-inspired supramolecular material combines tiny amino acid sequences present in proteins with equally small segments of the plastic poly(vinylidene fluoride), yielding high-performance sustainable ferroelectric nanostructures with potential for future resorbable bioelectronics, ultra-low power devices, and large-scale information storage.

By not treating plasticity as a mode of failure and instead using it in balance with buckling instability, mechanical metamaterials can be designed that buckle sequentially and show superior shock-absorption performance.

We report a method for the design of a non-natural photodecarboxylase based on the excitation of enzyme-bound catalytic intermediates, rather than reliance on cofactor excitation.

An analysis of the effect of mesophyll diffusion on the dynamics of the uptake of carbonyl sulfide by plants estimates global contemporary gross primary productivity to be 157 (±8.5) petagrams of carbon per year.

Analyses based on high-spatial-resolution data demonstrate that sea surface temperature variability in the western boundary currents has a more robust signature in local climate variability than previously indicated.

A standardized checklist of all known vascular plants shows the distribution of island native and endemic species, identifies their conservation status and highlights the need for actions to conserve them.

Pacific salmon transport of nutrients and contaminants to freshwaters increased by 30% and 20%, respectively, between 1976 and 2015, an increase dominated by pink salmon, which had the highest nutrient-to-contaminant ratios.

In an information-abundant landscape, people can accurately judge the reputations of others by researching only a fraction of the available information while forgiving some instances of bad behaviour.

Brain-wide recordings in mice show that learning leads to sensory evidence integration in many brain areas simultaneously, allowing sensory input to drive global movement preparatory dynamics, which collapse upon movement onset.

An oestrus cycle-dependent hypothalamic line attractor is discovered to encode the dynamics of female mating behaviour.

Single-cell optogenetic stimulation and calcium imaging experiments provide direct evidence of line-attractor dynamics, including functional network connectivity, in the mammalian hypothalamus.

Two waves of glucose metabolism provide distinct ERK-mediated cellular signals during gastrulation, which regulate cell fate and specialized cellular functions that are necessary for development.

Four distinct tuft cell states are identified by combining analysis of primary human intestinal resection material and organoids, and studying tuft cell development shows that they represent a damage-induced reserve intestinal stem cell pool in humans.

Neurons in the dorsal motor nucleus of vagus are involved in the absorption of fat in the intestine, and the natural compound puerarin shows utility in modulating this brain–gut axis to reduce fat absorption.

NNC2215 is an insulin conjugate that can reversibly adjust its bioactivity in response to a diabetes-relevant glucose range in vivo.

NKp46⁺ innate lymphoid cells are identified as pivotal signal amplifiers of autoinflammatory responses in lupus nephritis.

CD8⁺ T cell–macrophage interactions have a central role in impairing alveolar regeneration and driving fibrotic sequelae after acute viral pneumonia in a mouse model of long COVID.

A study describes the development of a generalizable foundation machine learning framework to extract pathology imaging features for cancer diagnosis and prognosis prediction.

In male mouse germline development, the precise DNA methylation of young, active transposons requires a two-step process in which SPIN1 and SPOCD1 mark young LINE1 elements before the piRNA pathway triggers DNA methylation.

Chromatin-associated retrotransposon RNA 5-methylcytosine can be recognized by the methyl-CpG-binding-domain protein MBD6, which guides deubiquitination of nearby monoubiquitinated Lys119 of histone H2A to promote an open chromatin state in TET2-deficient cells.

By experimentally sampling from sequence spaces larger than 10¹⁰ and using thermodynamic models, the genetic structure of at least some proteins can be well described, indicating that protein genetics is simpler than anticipated.