Volume 633 Issue 8028, 5 September 2024

Powered by the enthusiasm of fans, many stars are emphasizing sustainability in their tours and live events. The industry needs to turn it up to eleven.

Under-representation of African populations in mental-health studies perpetuates inequities — change is needed.

Only a unified approach across disciplines can reduce the underappreciated threat of emerging diseases arising in the north.

An existing treatment for multiple sclerosis also prevents heart cell death and improves organ function, animal experiments show.

Climate change could compromise the pollinators’ ability to detect flowers.

Experiments reveal that human skin is most reliably cut by specific thicknesses of paper, including the kind used to print certain high-profile journals.

Recyclable spray, patch and film adhesives work as well as existing petroleum-based products.

Data from giant project show how withdrawn research propagates through the literature.

Only 63 climate-change interventions led to significant reductions in carbon emissions.

Nature talks to infectious-disease specialists about whether vaccines will curb this outbreak and more.

Nature speaks to the world’s first disabled astronaut about his hopes for the future of space exploration.

A survey of the Dolmen of Menga suggests that the stone tomb’s Neolithic builders had an understanding of science.

Exposure to air pollution and living in a country with high socio-economic inequality are linked to a bigger gap between brain age and chronological age.

In the hills of eastern Tennessee, a record-breaking machine called Frontier is providing scientists with unprecedented opportunities to study everything from atoms to galaxies.

Scientists are beginning to crack the fiendishly complex code that helps us to sense odours.

An exploration of deforestation and restoration shows that woods are much more than trees. They depend on — and provide for — people, animals and microbes.

A much-cited statistic about how much of the world’s biodiversity is under Indigenous stewardship is unsupported — and could harm the cause it is meant to support.

Climate scientist Carly McLachlan partners with the UK band to put the environmental impact of concerts centre stage.

Scientific technician and meteorologist Bernd Seiser samples ice cores to track changes in the climate of Europe’s mountains.

Machine learning has been used to turn a survey of local waste-management practices into a global inventory of plastic emissions. The data show that tackling plastic pollution will require reduced production and consumption.

What drives sex biases in the immune system? Examining how gender-affirming therapy affects the molecular profiles of immune cells of trans men reveals how hormones underpin immune responses.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming less overtly racist, but respond negatively to text in African American English. Such ‘covert’ racism could harm speakers of this dialect when LLMs are used for decision-making.

Cancer-promoting mutations are common in healthy tissue but rarely lead to tumour formation. A study of the mouse mammary gland reveals three protective mechanisms that limit the ability of cells to give rise to cancer.

An ultra-precise laser synchronized to one of the world’s most precise clocks has been used to excite rapid nuclear oscillations — promising a timekeeper that could help to tackle fundamental questions about the Universe.

A meaty menu for a peckish perennial, and a fairground-style festival of physics, in this week’s snippets from Nature’s archive.

After a heart attack, cardiac muscle cells at the border between injured and healthy tissue instigate an inflammatory response, which spreads to neighbouring cells and makes the heart wall vulnerable to tearing.

The Impact of Genomic Variation on Function Consortium is combining single-cell mapping, genomic perturbations and predictive modelling to investigate relationships between human genomic variation, genome function and phenotypes and will provide an open resource to the community.

Observations of gravitational instability in the disk around AB Aurigae using deep observations of ¹³CO and C¹⁸O line emission provide evidence that giant protoplanets can be formed from collapsing fragments of vast spiral arms.

A vacuum ultraviolet frequency comb is used to directly excite the narrow ²²⁹Th nuclear clock transition in a solid-state CaF₂ host material, marking the start of nuclear-based solid-state optical clocks.

We observe signatures of the existence and hybridization of multiple Majorana zero modes in a single vortex.

A combination of exciton sensing and optical pump–probe spectroscopy is used to investigate the dynamics of isospin orders in MATBG with WSe₂ substrate across the entire flat band, achieving sub-picosecond resolution.

Chemical lithiation of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides can be accelerated by up to six orders of magnitude using low-power illumination and a variety of phase transition agents.

A palladium-catalysed reaction converts hydrocarbon-derived precursors to chiral boron-containing nortricyclanes, and the shape of these nortricyclanes makes them plausible isosteres for meta disubstituted aromatic rings.

Fulfilment of current abatement technology at the factory level could reduce HFC-23 emissions by approximately 84%.

A global macroplastic pollution emissions inventory and methodology is developed using machine learning and probabilistic material flow analysis, to identify hotspots across more than 50,000 municipalities worldwide from five land-based plastic waste emission sources.

Results from a high-resolution ocean-bottom seismometer experiment at the ultraslow-spreading Gakkel Ridge show unexpected highly variable crustal thickness and a relatively large average value, which can be explained by an active mantle upwelling model.

Species interaction data, a field experiment and modelling of plant–insect communities show that landscapes with more habitat types support more even species, more complementary interactions, are more consistently robust to species loss, and confer greater pollination function.

Youti yuanshi is a euarthropod species newly described from a fossilized larva from Yunnan Province, China dating approximately to late Atdabanian stage, Cambrian period, and provides insights into the evolution of arthropods.

Whole-genome sequencing of more than 2,000 colorectal carcinoma samples provides a highly detailed view of the genomic landscape of this cancer and identifies new driver mutations.

A large integrated genome and transcriptome analysis of colorectal cancer identifies prognostic mutations and expression subtypes.

Despite efforts to remove overt racial prejudice, language models using artificial intelligence still show covert racism against speakers of African American English that is triggered by features of the dialect.

Examination of immunological changes in transgender individuals undergoing gender-affirming testosterone treatment reveals sex hormone-regulated pathways in humans and explains sex-divergent responses in cisgender individuals.

We combined human intestinal immuno-organoids and single-cell transcriptomics to investigate intestinal inflammation triggered by cancer-targeting biologics, which was associated with an activated population of CD8⁺ T cells that progressively acquired intraepithelial and cytotoxic features.

Cardiomyocytes are the dominant initiators of a type I interferon response in the infarct borderzone.

The orphan enzyme phosphotriesterase-related (PTER) is identified as a mammalian N-acetyltaurine hydrolase that has roles in regulating body weight and energy balance.

During fasting, hepatocytes selectively remodel the translatome while global translation is downregulated, showing a new signalling property of fatty acids and that, on a ketogenic diet, treatment with eFT508 (also known as tomivosertib; a P-eIF4E inhibitor) restrains pancreatic tumour growth.

The authors use lineage tracing to map the fate of wild-type and Brca1^−/−;Trp53^−/− cells in the adult mouse mammary gland, identifying three layers of protection that limit the spread of mutant cells at the expense of allowing a minority of mutant cells to expand, which leads to field cancerization.

Hyperactivation of sensory neurons regulates multiple aspects of metastatic progression in breast cancer.

Structural analyses of analogues of stable ubiquitin transthiolation intermediates with E1, E2 and E3 enzymes reveal a population of intermediate states that provide insights into the directional transfer of ubiquitin between E1, E2 and E3.

A study details the molecular architecture of the double-membrane-spanning pore formed by the proteins nsp3 and nsp4 in double-membrane vesicles of SARS-CoV-2.

Structures of the growing peptide chain on and off the ribosome reveal that the ribosome destabilizes the unfolded nascent chain, promoting the formation of partially folded intermediate states.