Volume 633 Issue 8029, 12 September 2024

Questions surrounding an often-repeated statistic about Indigenous Peoples and biodiversity show that researchers should take more care when sourcing facts.

If the European Medicines Agency takes an overly cautious approach to selecting specialists to advise on new medicines, people could be left without treatments.

Fossils hint that bats’ wings sometimes lodged in fish’s throats, leading the bat-eater to die of hunger.

Process breaks down two of the most common plastics into raw ingredients.

Modelling suggests that the Lassa virus could infect millions in a decade, but vaccines under development could sharply reduce deaths.

Beef production accounts for 3% of country’s carbon emissions, but measures such as tree-planting offer help.

As intermittent rain continues, palaeontologists in southern Brazil are working to extract dinosaur and other bones before they are damaged.

A scientist reviewing a study spotted figures that looked identical to his own, leading to a frustrating campaign to prevent its publication.

Physicists are one step closer to developing a clock based on energy shifts in atomic nuclei.

The month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.

Testosterone treatment boosts levels of an inflammatory protein to those typically seen in cis men, study finds.

The disease has a consistent mark in the brain even when symptoms are absent.

The large language model does everything from reading the literature to writing and reviewing its own papers, but it has limited applicability.

Dozens of labs around the world are striving to grow models of human embryos to study development, fertility and therapies. They are entering uncharted ethical territory.

Geneticists are trying to understand the elevated risks of heart and metabolic disease among people of South Asian ancestry, but some question whether a purely biological approach is best.

The engagement-fuelled logic of social media has bequeathed us a world in which what’s trending is a yardstick for what’s true.

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

The UN wants to put communities at the heart of its data-collection efforts in support of the Sustainable Development Goals. Now governments must step up.

As wildfires become more frequent and severe, efforts to improve the resilience of forests must be grounded in data and led by Indigenous Peoples.

Large-scale evaluation permeates the UK university system, but some countries are rejecting harsh judgements and emphasizing strategic development.

As the only ocularist in Uganda, Franklin Wasswa produces customized prosthetic eyes for people who’ve lost their own to injury or disease.

The direct recovery of microbial genomes from complex environments is now routine. Going from environmental genomes to laboratory experiments is rare, but the tide is turning.

A powerful telescope array has imaged the surface of a star called R Doradus. The observations will help astronomers to understand the fluid dynamics of evolved giant stars — a type of star that the Sun will eventually become.

By analysing the ancient genomes of individuals from Rapa Nui, researchers have overturned a contentious theory that the remote Pacific island experienced a self-inflicted population collapse before European colonization.

A family of semiconductors known as perovskites has great promise for use in optoelectronic devices. A much-needed strategy for adjusting the density of charge carriers in these materials unleashes their potential.

Authors in the 1920s and 1970s had different takes on how science would shape the future. Nature’s reviewers had similarly diverse views on how accurate these predictions would be.

The immune-signalling protein TNF has an essential role in inflammatory responses. Two people who were found to have no functional TNF are surprisingly healthy and able to fend off most infections, but are susceptible to tuberculosis.

This Review summarizes key events in the emergence of cellular complexity via eukaryogenesis in the light of developments in environmental and comparative genomics during the past decade.

Understanding how extreme solar storms affect radiocarbon dating has made it possible to obtain calendar ages with annual precision, and future studies could yield insights into archaeology, solar physics and Earth science.

JWST–NIRSpec spectroscopic confirmation of two luminous galaxies is presented, proving that luminous galaxies were already in place 300 million years after the Big Bang and are more common than what was expected before JWST.

Presenting a series of interferometric images of R Doradus, this study reveals prominent convective structures on the surface of this giant evolved star that have a timescale of about one month.

In situ measurements of the elemental abundances in the lunar southern high-latitude regions show that the local terrain is fairly uniform and mostly composed of ferroan anorthosite, a product of lunar magma ocean crystallization.

A study demonstrates the application of Floquet Hamiltonian engineering to ultracold trapped polar molecules to realize interactions relevant to quantum metrology and many-body physics.

The two-dimensional Bose glass state of matter is realized experimentally using ultracold atoms in an eight-fold symmetric quasicrystalline optical lattice, and the phase transition between Bose glass and superfluid is directly observed.

The charge carrier polarity and concentrations in an emissive perovskite semiconductor can be adjusted by incorporating a molecular dopant widely used for the passivation and structural control of optoelectronic perovskite materials.

Integration of closed-loop experiments with physics-based feature selection and supervised learning, denoted as closed-loop transfer, yields chemical insights in parallel with optimization of objective functions.

We find that 2D–3D perovskitoid passivation applied to perovskite solar cells impedes cation migration and decreases carrier recombination at the interface, providing enhanced operating stability at elevated temperatures and increased power conversion efficiencies.

Observations of strongly positive nitrogen isotopic compositions of sedimentary rocks in the 2.68-Gyr-old shallow to deep marine sedimentary deposit of the Serra Sul Formation suggest that oxygenic photosynthesis predated the Great Oxidation Event.

Analysis of 43,191 genomes obtained from publicly available marine bacterial and archaeal metagenome data provides insights into marine bacterial evolution, CRISPR–Cas defence and antibiotic resistance genes, and demonstrates the potential of marine metagenomes for biotechnological applications.

An example of hybrid incompatibility between maize and teosinte reveals a selfish toxin–antidote system mediated by small RNAs that may have contributed to the origin of maize.

An analysis of 15 ancient genomes from individuals dating to AD 1670–1950 from Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island) addresses questions about the population history of the island.

Experiments in mice show that a cortico-thalamic circuit generates prediction-error signals in primary visual cortex that amplify visual input that deviates from animals’ expectations.

The spatiotemporal activation of phagocytosis by hair follicle cells is orchestrated by lipids released from surrounding apoptotic cells and retinoids released by healthy cells.

Human TNF is required for respiratory-burst-dependent immunity to Mycobacterium tuberculosis in macrophages but seems to be largely redundant physiologically.

HPAI H5N1 virus isolated from infected cow milk is characterized in mice and ferrets, was inefficiently transmitted in ferrets, and bound to sialic acids expressed in human upper airways, showing features that may facilitate infection in mammals.

This study describes sensing of circulating cell-free DNA after stroke as the mechanism leading to recurrent ischemic events.

How MICL recognizes and autoregulates the formation of neutrophil extracellular traps is explored in mouse models and human patients where disease severity is associated with aberrant neutrophil extracellular trap formation.

Functional genomics and lipidomic analyses reveal that sphingolipid synthesis is required for tumour immune evasion and tumour growth in vivo, mediated in part by the impact of glycosphingolipid synthesis on cell surface expression of IFNγ receptors.

Visualizing chaperonin complexes in their natural cellular environment using cryo-electron tomography, the authors propose a GroEL–GroES reaction cycle that consists of linked asymmetrical and symmetrical subreactions mediating protein folding.

We describe the structure and activity of Cas14 nuclease, a component of the type VII CRISPR–Cas interference complex with Cas5 and Cas7, in different functional states.

Structures of human NET in the apo state and bound to meta-iodobenzylguanidine and radafaxine provide insights into the mechanism of substrate recognition and orthosteric inhibition of hNET.