Volume 613 Issue 7943, 12 January 2023

UN climate conferences are too beholden to oil and gas interests. Like-minded nations must come together to keep climate hopes alive.

Here’s how NASA is incentivizing open science, and how you can too.

Compounds derived from eucalyptus and other plants are formulated into an ink for printing electronic components.

Photosynthetic bacteria that swarm the oceans could acquire beneficial genetic material using ‘tycheposons’.

Fossils of adult and infant ichthyosaurs suggest that the ocean-going giants congregated to have their young.

Strong efforts to reduce carbon emissions could slow, but not stop, the disappearance of glaciers.

Suspended nests with long entrances give fledglings more time to mature.

The technology relies on Bayesian inference to reduce the training time for complex tasks.

Cells at the base of the nail are key to regeneration of missing digit tips.

A new algorithm is probably not efficient enough to crack current encryption keys — but that’s no reason for complacency, researchers say.

Prevalence of a new subvariant of Omicron is increasing, but whether it will cause a big surge in infections or hospitalizations isn’t clear.

Insufficient investment and fears about rebound and side effects are driving down use of a lifesaving antiviral.

The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction has plummeted over the past half-century.

Analysis of Young Thousand Talents Plan comes amid mounting competition and suspicion between the United States and China.

Reports of deaths potentially linked to the treatment have cast a shadow on what many hail as a landmark approval.

Sections on climate change have become shorter and moved farther back in biology textbooks since the 2000s.

Data show how privileged groups still dominate many of the country’s elite research institutes.

A major clinical study raised questions about one of the most celebrated cancer-screening procedures available, but a close look at the data tells a different story.

Agricultural sciences have for too long ignored traditional and local knowledge about crop plants and how best to grow them. That must change if the world is to ensure future food security.

Researchers reflect on past sabbatical breaks and give advice on taking one after the stresses of the pandemic.

Health-care systems are rolling out artificial-intelligence tools for diagnosis and monitoring. But how reliable are the models?

Marine biogeochemist Clare Ostle tracks the stories that plankton tell from all corners of the globe.

The pitch of oscillations detected in the γ-rays that are emitted when neutron stars collide could provide insight into the hottest and densest matter in the Universe — revealing physics that cannot be studied with terrestrial experiments.

A microorganism that is a proposed relative of our cellular ancestors has been grown successfully in the laboratory. Its internal architecture offers clues to the early evolution of eukaryotic cells.

An anomalous measurement from a nuclear reactor triggered a three-year campaign to find an elusive particle called the sterile neutrino. The search shows definitively that sterile neutrinos don’t exist — but the anomaly persists.

Radiation-damaged paternal DNA has been found to cause embryos of the second generation of nematode worms, but not the first, to die. The proposed mechanisms help to explain the observed lack of such an effect in humans.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Our understanding of the origin of birds took a major step forward in 1998, thanks to the reported discovery of a remarkable fossil that unveiled the existence of feathered dinosaurs. Fossil publications that year caused a sensation.

Two signals identified in short gamma-ray bursts from archival Burst and Transient Source Experiment data show kilohertz quasiperiodic oscillations, implying the ringing of a hypermassive neutron star before collapsing to a black hole.

Accurate measurements of the antineutrino energy spectrum of ²³⁵U fission by the STEREO detector reject the sterile neutrino hypothesis and point to biases in the nuclear data to explain the discrepancies with the prediction.

The authors measure elastic p-wave interaction energies in pairs of fermionic atoms occupying the lowest two orbitals of an optical lattice; isolation of individual pairs of atoms protects against three-body recombination, enabling a theoretical maximum of interaction energy to be achieved.

Placing monolayer tungsten diselenide on Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene promotes enhanced superconductivity, indicating that proximity-induced spin–orbit coupling plays a key role in stabilizing the pairing, paving the way for engineering tunable, ultra-clean graphene-based superconductors.

The electrical contact of two-dimensional transistors is pushed close to the quantum limit by hybridization of the energy bands with antimony; the contacts have low contact resistance and excellent stability.

An electrically driven motor on the molecular scale based on [3]catenane is described, in which two cyclobis(paraquat-p-phenylene) rings operate by means of redox reactions, demonstrating highly unidirectional movement around a circular loop.

A three-dimensional metal–organic framework reversibly binds ammonia by cooperative insertion into its metal–linker bonds to form a dense, one-dimensional coordination polymer, enabling high-capacity ammonia uptake with intrinsic thermal management.

Analysis of a continuous record of water-isotope ratios from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide ice core reveals a dominant role for annual maximum insolation in determining West Antarctic summer temperature during the Holocene.

Theoretical and experimental analysis of the effect of grain shape in bed load sediment transport is performed and a shape-corrected sediment transport law that provides greater accuracy in predictions is proposed.

The authors model the creep of MgO periclase at lower mantle pressures and temperatures, finding that it deforms more slowly than bridgmanite at mantle strain rate.

Evolutionary analyses of single-nucleus transcriptome data for testes from 11 species are reported, illuminating the molecular evolution of spermatogenesis and associated forces, and providing a resource for investigating the testis across mammals.

Behavioural studies with deafened rats show that locus coeruleus activity and plasticity are key to rapid adaptation to and long-term hearing performance with cochlear implants.

Infection of Caenorhabditis elegans by Pseudomonas aeruginosa causes an increased pheromone response via the pheromone receptor STR-44 and increases mating with males, a potential mechanism for promoting adaptation in the host.

Culture and analysis of ‘Candidatus Lokiarchaeum ossiferum’—a member of the Asgard phylum—reveals an elaborate cell architecture with extensive membranous protrusions.

A study reveals how land-use change and climate interact to drive the spillover of a zoonotic virus, and identifies an ecological mechanism that prevents spillover.

A dataset of 3D images from more than 200,000 human induced pluripotent stem cells is used to develop a framework to analyse cell shape and the location and organization of major intracellular structures.

We describe a human DNA methylome atlas based on deep whole-genome bisulfite sequencing, allowing fragment-level analysis of cell-type-specific markers and providing an essential resource for studies of gene regulation and for deconvolution of cell mixtures and liquid biopsies.

In Caenorhabditis elegans, paternal exposure to ionizing radiation results in HIS-24 and HPL-1-dependent genome instability phenotypes, causing embryonic lethality in the offspring.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of Staphylococcus aureus BlaR1 reveal dynamic signalling states regulating broad spectrum β-lactam antibiotic resistance through cleavage of the transcriptional repressor BlaI and induced expression of the β-lactamase blaZ and the β-lactam-resistant cell-wall transpeptidase mecA.

Using cryo-electron microscopy, structural and mechanistic insights into how the METTL1–WDR4 complex catalyses methylation of tRNAs are shown.

Structures of the human METTL1–WDR4 complex are revealed, providing molecular insights into substrate recognition, modification and catalytic regulation by the N⁷-methylguanosine methyltransferase complex.