Volume 577 Issue 7790, 16 January 2020

Feeding the world involves tackling all aspects of the food system.

Cultivation of Asgard archaea brings us closer to understanding how complex life evolved.

Without human insights, data and the hard sciences will not meet the challenges of the next decade, says Hetan Shah.

Sequencing of the Indian cobra’s genome offers hope of accessible antivenoms.

A far-reaching effort to restore lakes and rivers to health finds success in some areas.

More blazes are forecast for the iconic rainforest as the climate changes, but stringent measures could limit the damage.

But the scientific literature remains silent on lasagna.

A doctored catalyst produces a versatile industrial chemical without energy-intensive heating.

African grey parrots show a type of insightful generosity recorded in only humans, orangutans and a few other species.

Socioeconomic factors are less important than an adolescent’s assessment of their family’s place in society.

The latest science news, in brief.

Victims include 10 people linked to the University of Alberta and six at the University of Toronto.

Local networks help researchers obtain a prestigious Changjiang scholarship faster.

Latest launch includes ‘DarkSat’ prototype to reduce reflection from fleets of broadband Internet satellites.

Countries won’t say how much they have pledged to the Square Kilometre Array in Australia and South Africa.

Normal body temperatures are a fraction of a degree colder than they were in the nineteenth century.

Out-of-control blazes have killed a billion wild animals. Those remaining will struggle to survive in a scorched landscape, Michael Clarke tells Nature.

How anti-CRISPR proteins and other molecules could bolster biosecurity and improve medical treatments.

Three books warn of the perils of basing policy on untested ideas

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week’s best science picks.

To understand how people use digital media, researchers need to move beyond screen time and capture everything we do and see on our screens.

Ty Tang was told that any move out of academia was likely to be permanent. But after two years working, he has now returned to research.

Big data are difficult to handle. These tips and tricks can smooth the way.

Carla Shatz stays organized to help her spot ways in which brain circuits rewire themselves.

A chemosensory protein enriched in the legs of malaria-carrying mosquitoes gives them resistance to insecticides used to treat bed nets. This discovery points to the challenges of tackling malaria.

The fundamental machine-learning task of classification can be difficult to achieve directly in ordinary computing hardware. Unconventional silicon-based electrical circuits can be evolved to accomplish this task.

A subpopulation of adaptive immune cells patrols the brain and cerebrospinal fluid in people who have Alzheimer’s disease. This discovery should broaden our understanding of how the immune system can influence neurodegeneration.

Plaques are lipid-rich structures in the blood-vessel wall that can cause heart attacks or strokes if they rupture. It now seems that blood-cell fragments called platelets alter the function of immune cells in ways that accelerate plaque formation.

It has been difficult to make transparent materials that have extremely high piezoelectricity — a useful property related to the coupling of electric fields and mechanical strain. This hurdle has now been overcome.

Understanding the dynamics between bacteria and bacteriophages could enable the development of phage-based therapies and biotechnological tools and provide insights into the ecology and evolution of these microorganisms.

The Galactic Centre is orbited by two objects that look like gas and dust clouds but behave more like stars, and now four additional similar objects are reported.

The nonlinearity of hopping conduction in a disordered network of boron dopant atoms in silicon is used to perform nonlinear classification and feature extraction.

The semiconductor ⁶LiInP₂Se₆ is used for the direct detection of thermal neutrons at room temperature, demonstrating good energy resolution.

The use of alternating-current electric fields to control domain size in ferroelectric crystals affords excellent transparency, piezoelectricity and birefringence.

Directional solidification of a simple AgCl-KCl lamellar eutectic material is modified by the presence of a pillar template, leading to disordered, trefoil, quatrefoil, cinquefoil and hexafoil mesostructures.

Heteroepitaxy is used to precisely control the growth of Mn₃O₄ shells on the faces of a Co₃O₄ nanocube crystal, producing uniform grain boundary defects and highly ordered multigrain nanostructures.

The worldwide distribution and water supply of water towers (snowy or glacierized mountain ranges) is indexed, showing that the most important water towers are also the most vulnerable to socio-economic and climate-change stresses, with huge potential negative impacts on populations downstream.

In contrast to previous studies, analyses now show that ocean acidification does not perturb important behaviours—such as the avoidance of chemical cues from predators—of coral reef fishes.

The leg-enriched sensory appendage protein, SAP2, confers pyrethroid resistance to Anopheles gambiae, through high-affinity binding of pyrethroid insecticides; an observed selective sweep in field mosquitoes mirrors the increasing resistance reported in Africa.

Bayesian modelling of radiometric age estimates provides a robust chronology for Homo erectus at Ngandong (Java), confirming that this site currently represents the last known occurrence of this species.

The complex patterns of activity in motor cortex that control movements such as reach and grasp are dependent on both upstream neuronal activity in the thalamus and the current state of the cortex.

Neuronal targets mediate the emergence of somatosensory neuron subtypes by altering the expression of neuronal transcription factors.

An integrated analysis of several cohorts shows that clonal, antigen-experienced T cells are found in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting that the adaptive immune system has a role in age-related neurodegeneration.

Cardiac stem cell therapy in mouse models of ischaemia–reperfusion injury demonstrates that improvement in heart function is linked to an immune response characterized by the induction of CCR2⁺ and CX3CR1⁺ macrophages.

Both dietary and microbial factors influence the composition of the gut bile acid pool, which in turn modulates the frequencies and functionalities of RORγ-expressing colonic FOXP3⁺ regulatory T cells, contributing to protection from inflammatory colitis.

Male and female B cells show differing abilities to localize and contribute to germinal centres, in a way that depends on the G-protein-coupled guidance receptor GPR174 and its chemokine ligand CCL21.

Populations of KRAS(G12C)-mutant cancer cells can rapidly bypass the effects of treatment with KRAS(G12C) inhibitors because a subset of cells escapes drug-induced quiescence by producing new KRAS(G12C) that is maintained in its active, drug-insensitive state.

Two cryo-electron-microscopy images of the histone chaperone FACT interacting with components of nucleosomes shed light on how FACT manipulates nucleosomes to promote transcription, DNA repair and DNA replication.

The structure of GLP-1R and its G protein in complex with the small molecule TT-OAD2 sheds light on how the TT-OAD2 agonist can activate the receptor and provides insights into the development of therapeutic agents for metabolic disorders.