Volume 629 Issue 8012, 16 May 2024

If Europe wants to create a high-risk, high-reward research body, it needs grass-roots backing.

Cheap data and the absence of coincidences make maths an ideal testing ground for AI-assisted discovery — but only humans will be able to tell good conjectures from bad ones.

An algorithm can monitor the health of retired vehicle batteries used to store surplus power fed into the electrical grid.

Scientists recorded green-rumped parrotlets pecking others’ chicks to death, probably to claim the nest space.

People with an inherited condition that causes vision loss in childhood had vision improvements after treatment to replace a mutated gene.

More than 2,000 years of domestication have given the popular vegetable its short stem and clumpy ‘curds’.

Latest version of the AI models how proteins interact with other molecules — but DeepMind restricts access to the tool.

New policy on high-risk biology studies aims to address criticism that previous rules were too vague.

President Javier Milei is making moves to partially privatize the sector, but in the meantime, projects have paused.

The contest to elect the next president of Paris-Saclay University has collapsed, reflecting wider issues at the giant research centre.

A clock based on energy shifts in atomic nuclei could transform fundamental-physics research.

Scientists worry that the H5N1 strain of avian influenza will become endemic in cattle, which would aid its spread in people.

Researchers are using new molecules, engineered immune cells and gene therapy to kill senescent cells and treat age-related diseases.

Autonomous weapons guided by artificial intelligence are already in use. Researchers, legal experts and ethicists are struggling with what should be allowed on the battlefield.

An exploration of the evolution of male nurturing shows why, unlike fathers among other great apes, human dads are biologically wired to be hands-on parents.

Nobel prizewinner whose insights into the foibles of human decision-making launched the field of behavioural economics and sent ripples through all social sciences.

The data are clear: taking sex and gender into account in research and using that knowledge to change health care could benefit billions of people.

By joining a collecting society, researchers can ensure they are paid when copyrighted book content and papers are reproduced.

Iroro Tanshi works to better understand a number of threatened species.

A design principle for buildings incorporates components that can control the propagation of failure by isolating parts of the structure as they fail — offering a way to prevent a partial collapse snowballing into complete destruction.

Researchers find that brief and reversible inhibition of a gene-silencing mechanism leads to irreversible tumour formation in fruit flies, challenging the idea that cancer is caused only by permanent changes to DNA.

Altering gut bacteria in male mice revealed that microorganisms are needed for normal sperm development and offspring health. Scientists discuss the implications in terms of understanding microbes, male fertility and pregnancy.

What stabilized and strengthened the oldest, most robust blocks of continental crust billions of years ago during the Archaean eon has long been a mystery. It seems that a surprise helping hand might have come from the air above.

Organelles called mitochondria are transferred to blood-vessel-forming cells by support cells. Unexpectedly, these mitochondria are degraded, kick-starting the production of new ones and boosting vessel formation.

Cardiovascular disease claims more lives each year than do the two next-deadliest diseases combined. An ultrasound technique that tracks tiny gas-filled bubbles could pave the way towards improved early detection.

This Review discusses the importance of genetic and non-genetic reprogramming events during the metastatic cascade.

Human genetic evidence increases the success rate of drugs from clinical development to approval but we are still far from reaching peak genetic insights to aid the discovery of targets for more effective drugs.

A stable tokamak plasma has been demonstrated with a high plasma density and a high energy confinement quality, both of which are simultaneously important for fusion reactors.

By emulating a 2D hard-core Bose–Hubbard lattice using a controllable 4 × 4 array of superconducting qubits, volume-law entanglement scaling as well as area-law scaling at different locations in the energy spectrum are observed.

Using an optical resonator containing two individually addressable atoms in a single cavity, fusion of deterministically generated photonic graph states to create ring and tree graph states with up to eight qubits is demonstrated.

Entanglement of two nanophotonic quantum network nodes is demonstrated through 40  km spools of low-loss fibre and a 35-km long fibre loop deployed in the Boston area urban environment.

A metropolitan-area quantum network based on the generation of pairwise entanglement is formed by three atomic quantum memories connected to a central photonic server.

Improving the long-range order of the quantum dots in perovskite LEDs can markedly enhance their operational stability.

A design approach arrests collapse propagation in buildings after major initial failures by ensuring that specific elements fail before the failure of the most important components for global stability.

Rhodium catalysts confined in zeolite pores exhibit high regioselectivity in the hydroformylation process of propene to high-value n-butanal, surpassing the performance of all heterogeneous and most homogeneous catalysts developed so far.

Nitrate observations over 11 years from autonomous biogeochemical ocean profiling combined with a Southern Hemisphere dust simulation find that iron supplied by dust supports about 30% of Southern Ocean productivity.

The geological histories of Archaean regions indicate that stabilization of the Earth’s continents and the formation of cratons was driven by continental emergence and subaerial weathering.

Analysis of a global dataset reveals spatiotemporal patterns of marine plankton and their biogeographical responses during climatic and environmental changes across the Cenozoic era.

Using a Bayesian learning approach, a study tracks the spatial representations by individual hippocampal cells over time in freely moving rats, and provides insights into how ensemble patterns form and reconfigure during sleep.

Synapses are gained during spontaneous or forced periods of wake and lost during sleep in a neuron-subtype-dependent manner in zebrafish.

Using micropipette aspiration on donated human embryos, cell surface tensions during compaction were mapped, indicating a role for defective cell contractility in poor quality embryos.

Disturbances in the gut microbiota of male mice manifest as fitness defects in their offspring by affecting plancenta function, revealing a paternal gut–germline axis.

Under stressful conditions, mesenchymal stromal cells transfer mitochondria to endothelial cells through tunnelling nanotubes, and artificially transplanting mitochondria into endothelial cells improves the ability of these cells to engraft and to revascularize ischaemic tissues.

The murine enteropathogen Citrobacter rodentium targets a specific subset of absorptive intestinal epithelial cells in the mid–distal colon, which stimulate T cells to produce sustained IL-22 signals to mitigate further spread of the pathogen.

Quantitative multimodal 3D reconstruction of human pancreatic tissue at single-cell resolution reveals a high burden of multifocal, genetically heterogeneous pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasias in the normal adult pancreas.

A transient perturbation of transcriptional silencing mediated by Polycomb proteins is sufficient to induce an epigenetic cancer cell fate in Drosophila in the absence of driver mutations.

Single-stranded DNA annealing is driven by RAD52 open rings in association with RPA.

FLVCR2 is expressed in the blood–brain barrier of mouse and human, and is the major mediator of choline uptake into the brain.

A structural, biochemical and metabolomic analysis reveals the mechanistic basis for transport of extracellular choline and ethanolamine into cells by the human transport protein FLVCR1.