Volume 629 Issue 8014, 30 May 2024

The young nation faces some deep-rooted challenges. Solutions informed by science could make a difference.

Global warming is shifting rainfall patterns across South Asia, and each area will be affected differently — local approaches are needed to track and respond to these changes.

A single-celled organism is destroying up to 100% of urchins in parts of the Red Sea and the Western Indian Ocean.

Compounds predicted by machine learning attach to two receptors involved in appetite and weight.

A colossal object called Dracula’s Chivito, referring to an well-stuffed sandwich popular in Uruguay, is the chunkiest planetary nursery known.

A Mycenean bronze suit did not hamper movement of modern-day warriors performing fighting manoeuvres.

ChatGLM is one of hundreds of AI language models being developed for the Chinese language. It comes close to ChatGPT on many measures, say its creators.

Geological survey reveals the remains of a major waterway that ancient Egyptian builders could have used to transport materials.

As researchers mark the loss of the first living recipient of a pig kidney, they share what they’ve learnt about xenotransplantation.

Artificial-intelligence system allows a man who cannot speak coherently to have a conversation in the language of his choice.

Some scientists think the decision regarding EcoHealth Alliance is fair; others say it might negatively affect virus surveillance.

Genomic analysis suggests the common kitchen vermin spread from Europe to the world. But it wasn’t originally found in Europe.

Technique wipes away tags on DNA that must be reprogrammed during development of reproductive cells.

Researchers are striving to reverse-engineer artificial intelligence and scan the ‘brains’ of LLMs to see what they are doing, how and why.

Time spent outdoors is the best defence against rising rates of short-sightedness, but scientists are searching for other ways to reverse the troubling trend.

Can an unlimited supply of innovations and ideas maintain growth without costing the Earth? Yes, a wide-ranging book contends.

Many technologies are high-risk, and their problems cannot be fixed by policy alone; engineers must embrace social responsibility.

Cognitive scientist who boldly explored free will, the human mind and AI, and rejected the existence of God.

Decades of neuroscientific work have focused on exploring a biological basis for transgender identity — but researchers must take societal factors into account.

Hundreds of millions of people cross deficient bridges each day. With damage to these structures likely to intensify because of climate change and ageing, technicians and policymakers must act to make them safer.

Recruitment challenges and limited resources are among the challenges faced by scientists who live and work off the beaten track.

Freeman Hrabowski learnt the power of bold actions when he marched for civil rights in his youth. Since then, he has encouraged others to question the status quo — and affirm Black student success in the sciences.

Basran Burhan helped to date the oldest piece of figurative art discovered so far.

Certain neurons encode memories of events that occurred in specific physical locations known as place fields. Chickadees show patterns of neuronal activity that are specific to locations of hidden food but independent of place fields.

Both parents of oldfield mice care for offspring, whereas in deer mice, mothers usually care for pups. The discovery of a type of adrenal-gland cell that is present in oldfield mice but not in deer mice helps to explain the difference.

Cement can be reused by including it as a component of steel recycling. This opens the way to an industrial partnership that improves the use of materials and lowers carbon emissions — but only if waste resources are well managed.

Artificial neural networks that model the visual system of a male fruit fly can accurately predict the insect’s behaviour in response to seeing a potential mate — paving the way for the building of more complex models of brain circuits.

A two-in-one drug that modulates neural pathways involved in appetite and reward might prove to be more effective and longer lasting than current weight-loss drugs on the market.

A book on everyday biology that appeals to non-specialists and specialists alike, and a trek through hay fields causes one Nature reader to experience relentless ‘sneezings’, in the weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

Analysis of 70 years of snowfall in the Northern Hemisphere reveals that snow buffers the effect of varying precipitation levels on streamflow. The link highlights the need to rethink water-resource management as snow levels decline.

Observations from the Lucy spacecraft of the small main-belt asteroid (152830) Dinkinesh reveals unexpected complexity, with a longitudinal trough and equatorial ridge, as well as the discovery of the first contact binary satellite.

We report on a method for inducing uncontaminated and precise inhomogeneous strain in nanoscale silicon ribbons and its use for determining physical effects in these strained materials, in particular, an increase in the range and control of thermal conductivity.

Inspired by the human visual system, a vision chip with primitive-based complementary pathways is developed to overcome the power and bandwidth wall of vision systems, achieving fast, precise, robust and high-dynamic-range sensing efficiently in the open world.

Use of a 20 frames per second (fps) RGB camera plus an event camera can achieve the same latency as a 5,000-fps camera with the bandwidth of a 45-fps camera without compromising accuracy.

We report on a near-zero-power flexible heat pump that uses both electrocaloric and electrostrictive properties of a tailored polymer to create a chip-scale refrigerator device.

Stretchable radio-frequency electronics based on a dielectro-elastic elastomer is demonstrated to be capable of completely maintaining operating frequencies unaffected by strain and shows superior electrical, mechanical and thermal properties compared with conventional stretchable substrate materials.

Recovered cement paste can be reclinkered if used as a partial substitute for the lime–dolomite flux used in steel recycling, which can reduce waste and carbon emissions.

Enhanced light–molecule interactions in high-finesse fibre-based Fabry–Pérot microcavities are used to detect and profile individual unlabelled solution-phase biomolecules, leading to potential applications in the life and chemical sciences.

A photopolymer platform derived from renewable lipoates can be 3D-printed into high-resolution parts, which possess properties comparable to some commercial acrylic resins, and then recycled to produce a re-printable resin.

Analysis of streamflow measurements from 1950 to 2020 across 3,049 snow-affected catchments over the Northern Hemisphere shows that seasonal streamflow occurs earlier in snow-heavy catchments but later in less snowy regions.

The adrenal gland of the oldfield mouse (Peromyscus polionotus) has a recently evolved cell type that promotes monogamous-typical parenting behaviour and is not present in closely related species.

We carried out genomic and ecological analyses of all eight extant baobab species, providing insights into their evolutionary history and recommendations for conservation efforts.

A deep neural network with ‘knockout training’ is used to model sensorimotor transformations and neural perturbations of male Drosophila melanogaster during visually guided social behaviour and provides predictions and insights into relationships between stimuli, neurons and behaviour.

Delay- and choice-related activities that are essential for working-memory performance drift during learning and stabilize only after several days of expert performance.

Screening in Escherichia coli and biochemical experiments show that in Arabidopsis thaliana, OSCA2.1 and OSCA2.2 function as plant sensors of hypo-osmolarity, utilize Ca²⁺ oscillations as second messengers and have crucial roles in pollen germination.

TWA1 is a temperature-sensing transcriptional co-regulator that is needed for basal and acquired thermotolerance in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Unimolecular integration of NMDA receptor antagonism with GLP-1 receptor agonism effectively reverses obesity, hyperglycaemia and dyslipidaemia in rodent models of metabolic disease.

A study details the results of the PARTNER trial, a prospective, randomized controlled trial of the use of neoadjuvant olaparib with carboplatin–paclitaxel chemotherapy in patients with triple-negative breast cancer who were germline BRCA1 and BRCA2 wild type.

The JAK2^V617F mutation leads to epigenetic rewiring in a cell-intrinsic and cell-type-specific manner, influencing inflammation states and differentiation trajectories in patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms.

The ubiquitin E3 ligase OsCIE1 acts as a brake to inhibit OsCERK1 during homeostasis; this brake is released after chitin stimulation.

Nuclear speckles are shown to have a functional role in mRNA splicing, whereby dynamic three-dimensional organization of DNA around these structures mediates splicing efficiency.

An atlas of the substrate specificities for the human tyrosine kinome reveals diversity of motif specificities and enables identification of kinase–substrate relationships and kinase regulation in phosphoproteomics experiments.

Time-resolved cryo-EM is used to capture structural transitions during G-protein activation stimulated by a G-protein-coupled receptor.