Volume 634 Issue 8036, 31 October 2024

The annual toxic smog that forms over swathes of India and Pakistan is preventable, but the nations’ scientists have too little opportunity to help tackle the problem.

Predictive models don’t make the news, but they have a crucial role in democracy.

Partnerships between developers and researchers could help to improve the quality of educational apps and other technologies.

Laboratory collisions that create the superheavy element livermorium could help scientists to discover new elements.

A single-celled alga takes water into a bladder, allowing it to migrate to the sea’s sunlit surface zone.

Immune-system responses help to explain why some people with high viral loads stay healthy.

The deadly earthquake led to unexpectedly large deformations some 700 kilometres from the epicentre.

Scitility’s tool Argos identifies work whose authors have a record of misconduct.

A device that delivers a small electrical current to the brain has beneficial effects in cases of depression that doesn't respond to drugs or therapy.

Extensive scans reveal rhythmic changes in the brain throughout the menstrual cycle and while on the pill.

Real-world demonstration in chatbot responses could encourage other firms to label material produced by AI.

Pioneering crystallographer Helen Berman helped to set up the massive collection of protein structures that underpins the Nobel-prize-winning tool’s success.

‘Bricks’ of DNA, some of which have chemical tags, could one day be an alternative to storing information electronically.

The resistive magnet required a significant amount of energy to produce a field of 42.02 tesla.

In the wake of unprecedented floods that displaced half a million people in southern Brazil, researchers are investigating how to prevent long-term mental trauma and provide lessons for other regions dealing with disasters.

Nobel prizewinner Alain Aspect’s ‘crackpot’ studies of quantum entanglement have explored the tricks reality plays on us — and built on ideas from a physics great.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

Not all wildfires can be averted, but data, models and collaborations can help to chart a course to a fire-resilient future.

Biodiversity-credit markets could succeed in ways that, so far, carbon-credit markets have not — as long as the right rules of play are in place from the start.

Why we must treat decarbonization policies as an experiment and put in place measures now to evaluate what works best.

Researchers share their inspiration and tips for working with unusual plants and animals.

Researchers can craft their own polished, professional figures and images with the help of these tools and design principles.

Chen Mo’s work in marine conservation will build a database to help safeguard little-studied whale species.

Burning crop waste causes devastating pollution in South Asia. When local administrators have appropriate incentives to control burning, incidents go down — a finding that could guide future efforts to manage air pollution.

The lidar method for aerial archaeology identifies human-modified landscapes. Detection of a massive urban settlement on a mountainous Uzbekistan site challenges preconceptions about medieval urbanization high in Central Asia.

Materials called ferroelectrics are being used to build energy-efficient electronics, but their benefits diminish when their size is scaled down. A proposed solution using mechanical strain could transform computer microelectronics.

Researchers have used artificial-intelligence models to create regulatory DNA sequences that drive gene expression in specific cell types. Such synthetic sequences could be used to target gene therapies to particular cell populations.

Precise calculations on the erection of Stonehenge’s boulders, and a bright aurora stretches between the stars, in our weekly peek at Nature’s archives.

An innovative approach to 3D printing has been developed in which acoustic vibrations and light control the formation of a solid at an air–liquid interface. The strategy enables fast printing of objects with highly detailed features.

The isolation of the BRCA1 gene 30 years ago ushered in the era of genetic testing for breast and other cancers, launched a long-lasting patent battle and eventually led to a tailored cancer therapy.

The chances of detecting fast radio bursts from a galaxy may be affected by its inclination angle, showing a potential selection bias in determining the sources of the bursts.

Analysis of the cool brown dwarf Gliese 229 B suggests that it is actually a close binary of two less massive brown dwarfs, explaining its low luminosity and settling the conflict between theoretical predictions and measurements.

Laser spectroscopy measurements of the fermium isotopic chain show a smooth trend in the nuclear size of heavy actinide elements, and diminishing shell effects on the size evolution compared with lighter nuclei.

An alternative route to drive the transverse optical phonon softening sheds light on developing a unified theory for ferroelectricity enhancement in ultrathin films free from depolarization fields using ionic radius differences and strains, among other methods.

By making use of the hydrodynamic behaviour of phonons in graphitic materials, a thermal version of a micrometre-scale Tesla valve is demonstrated, resulting in a method for thermal rectification in solids.

An impurity-healing interface engineering strategy is developed to address the issue in small-area solar cells and large-scale submodules.

Dynamic interface printing is a new form of 3D printing that leverages an acoustically modulated, constrained air–liquid boundary to rapidly generate centimetre-scale 3D structures within tens of seconds.

Large-scale roll-to-roll-assisted blade coating is used in the production of scalable ultrastong MXene films with superior mechanical, electromagnetic shielding and bone regeneration properties.

With climate change, mesoscale eddies are increasing in importance as drivers of subsurface extreme marine heatwaves and cold spells that do not correlate with surface events, with implications for severe impacts on marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and services.

Pairing of very-high-resolution surface modelling with semiautomated feature detection produces a detailed plan of monumental fortifications and architecture spanning 120 ha at Tugunbulak, Uzbekistan, demonstrating one of the largest highland urban constellations in premodern Central Asia.

Around 1.8–2.7 deaths per 1,000 births (4.4–6.6% of the average child mortality) could be prevented in Pakistan and India if bureaucrats control crop burning across all areas of their jurisdiction as they do in places where fires would pollute their own district.

A study demonstrates how experimental measurements of only the connectivity of a biological neural network can be used to predict neural responses across the fly visual system at single-neuron resolution using deep learning techniques.

In the brain of fruit flies, the mushroom body achieves flexible learning by using interconnected short- and long-term memory units for dopamine-mediated integration of innate valences with learnt valences obtained through experience.

CRISPR–Cas9 screens in cultures of young and old neural stem cells (NSCs) and in vivo in old mice identify gene knockouts that can boost old NSC activation and neurogenesis, with Slc2a4, which encodes the glucose transporter GLUT4, showing particular efficacy.

A study shows that many phages are capable of evading antiphage defence systems of bacteria by reconstituting NAD⁺ from its degradation products in infected cells.

Untargeted metabolomics reveals that 11,12-epoxyeicosatrienoic acid released from macrophages via gasdermin G pores has a key role in promoting fibroblast growth factor-dependent muscle regeneration following injury.

Visium spatial transcriptomics, single-nucleus RNA sequencing and co-detection by indexing are used to identify distinct spatial microregions in tumours and their microenvironment across six diverse solid cancer types.

Using a multipurpose, single-cell CRISPR platform, we demonstrate precise timing of tissue-specific cell expansion during mouse embryonic development, unconventional developmental relationships between cell types, new epithelial progenitor states and insights into precancer initiation by leveraging genetic histories.

Multicolour lineage tracing and mutagenesis studies in a mouse model show that many intestinal tumours are polyclonal, with multiple clones exhibiting independent Apc mutations driven by differences in KRAS and MYC signalling.

Plant ESCRT component FREE1 forms liquid-like condensates that associate with membranes to drive intraluminal vesicle formation.

A generalizable framework to prospectively engineer cis-regulatory elements from massively parallel reporter assay models can be used to write fit-for-purpose regulatory code.

Homologue juxtaposition during meiosis is examined in real time by imaging of tagged chromosomal loci at high resolution in budding yeast, showing that corresponding loci come together and complete pairing in a very short time.

The tRNA synthases AARS1 and AARS2 are identified as evolutionarily conserved sensors of intracellular l-lactate to mediate the global lysine lactylome.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the human lysosomal transmembrane protein LYCHOS show that it comprises a transporter-like domain fused to a G-protein-coupled receptor, and that the transporter domain is similar to the plant PIN family.