Volume 621 Issue 7978, 14 September 2023

The United Kingdom will be part of the world’s largest research funding scheme once more. And it’s not a moment too soon.

Lignin and a catalyst allow for green and efficient production of alternatives to bisphenol A.

Species in Costa Rica decline on large-scale industrial farms — except species that tend to thrive in degraded habitats.

Scientists estimate the magnitude of the 1859 ‘Carrington flare’, the biggest of its kind ever recorded.

New RNA sequences show the path that the virus travelled from the Amazon to the densely populated south.

UK researchers had been frozen out of the scheme for two years, amid disagreements over Brexit.

UK researchers can once again access the €95-billion funding programme — for some, the deal has come too late.

Nature looks at the detective work required to confirm a controversial claim of finding interstellar debris.

The fossil is as old as the ‘first bird’, Archaeopteryx, and might have specialized in running or wading instead of flying.

Aditya-L1 will join other spacecraft from Europe and the United States in an attempt to understand our stormy star.

Historical bad practices have left a legacy of pollution, but efforts are under way to chart a better future.

Researchers say safety concerns over RAAC concrete in UK schools could be “the tip of the iceberg”.

The United Nations has ambitious aims to end poverty and clean up the planet by 2030. See whether you know how the world is faring on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Behind the UN Sustainable Development Goals is a stirring tale of people overcoming huge odds against hostile institutions.

Drilling down into why the UN Sustainable Development Goals are so hard to achieve, and showing policymakers pathways to follow, will help the planet and save lives.

A group of older women in Switzerland has taken the government to court over its inaction on climate change. Our experience of preparing evidence for the case offers six lessons for researchers.

Cost-of-living pressures, a dismal job market and stagnant US federal budgets are leaving lab leaders scrambling to balance the books.

While working to safeguard habitat for pig-like animals in Argentina, Micaela Camino relies on the region’s Indigenous communities.

During translation, messenger RNA guides protein production, and certain conditions can favour particular proteins. Helicase enzymes and mRNA structure control translation during defence responses in plants.

The obscuration of light from a distant galaxy has raised the possibility that a type of carbon dust existed in the earliest epochs of the Universe — challenging the idea that stars had not yet evolved enough to make such material.

With messenger RNA therapeutics being developed for uses beyond vaccines, problems of RNA instability must be addressed. A new algorithm optimizes mRNA sequence for both stability and the encoding of amino acids.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Marine heatwaves are on the rise. A surprising result from the analysis of data for fish populations in Europe and North America could change ways of thinking about the ecological consequences of such events.

Understanding the processes that lead to tumour formation in the pancreas might help in efforts to develop therapies. A new bioinformatics tool called Calligraphy analyses cell–cell signalling to provide fresh insights into how tumours arise.

An (ultraviolet) dust attenuation feature at 2,175 Å, attributed to carbonaceous dust grains in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, also exists in galaxies up to a redshift of 7.

Two instances of approximately 5-Hz transient periodic oscillation features from the source detected in the 1.05- to 1.45-GHz radio band that occurred in January 2021 and June 2022 are reported.

Quantum oscillations in the three-dimensional topological semimetal CoSi are reported, where selected oscillation frequencies have no corresponding extremal Fermi surface cross-sections, representing instead oscillations of the quasiparticle lifetime.

Room-temperature-solution (20 °C) and low-temperature-solution (80 °C) synthesis procedures are developed for a new class of metal halide perovskite high-entropy semiconductor single crystals.

Analysis of a large dataset of scanning transmission X-ray microscopy images of carbon-coated lithium iron phosphate nanoparticles shows that the heterogeneous reaction kinetics of battery materials can be learned from such videos pixel by pixel.

Using tagging spectroscopy, the infrared spectrum of a single organic molecule in the gas phase has been successfully measured.

We report the production of MoS₂ nanosheets with high phase purity, showing that the 2H-phase templates facilitate epitaxial growth of Pt nanoparticles, whereas the 1T′ phase supports single-atomically dispersed Pt atoms.

We present a sustainably sourced adhesive system, with performance comparable to that of current industrial products, made from epoxidized soy oil, malic acid and tannic acid, all biomass derived, low cost and readily available.

Catalysis of simple organic carbon molecules into complex macromolecules by Fe and Mn may play a fundamental role in organic carbon preservation, to a degree that could substantially affect the Earth’s carbon and oxygen cycles.

Comparison of the carbon balance during 2010–2018 with 2019 and 2020 shows that a decline in law enforcement may have led to an increase in Amazon forest carbon emissions.

Of 248 marine heatwaves between 1993 and 2019 in North American and European seas, the effects on fish biomass were often minimal, and the heatwaves were not consistently associated with tropicalization or deborealization.

An assessment of variations in phytoplankton nutrient limitation in the tropical Pacific over the past two decades finds that phytoplankton iron limitation is more stable in response to ENSO dynamics than models predict.

An avialan species from the Zhenghe Fauna—a collection of vertebrate fossils from the Late Jurassic of China—had an unusual combination of features, including very long hindlimbs, suggesting that it had a terrestrial or wading lifestyle.

We present the complete 62,460,029-base-pair sequence of a human Y chromosome from the HG002 genome (T2T-Y) that corrects multiple errors in GRCh38-Y and adds over 30 million base pairs of sequence to the reference.

De novo assemblies of 43 Y chromosomes spanning 182,900 years of human evolution reveal considerable diversity in the size and structure of the human Y chromosome.

A multi-omic atlas of brain organoid development facilitates the inference of an underlying gene regulatory network using the newly developed Pando framework and shows—in conjunction with perturbation experiments—that GLI3 controls forebrain fate establishment through interaction with HES4/5 regulomes.

We develop a high-throughput CRISPR screening system in cerebral organoids and identify vulnerable cell types and gene regulatory networks associated with autism spectrum disorder from single-cell transcriptomes and chromatin modalities.

An appetite-regulating subnetwork in humans involving the lateral hypothalamus and the dorsolateral hippocampus is implicated in obesity and related eating disorders.

Faecal carbohydrates, particularly host-accessible monosaccharides, are increased in individuals with insulin resistance and are associated with microbial carbohydrate metabolisms and host inflammatory cytokines.

An algorithm based on concepts established in computational linguistics enables rapid principled design of mRNA vaccines optimizing both structural stability and codon usage, resulting in improved half-life, protein expression and immune responses.

Epitope engineering of donor haematopoietic stem/progenitor cells endows haematopoietic lineages with selective resistance to CAR T cells or monoclonal antibodies, without affecting protein function or regulation, enabling the targeting of genes that are essential for leukaemia survival and reducing the risk of tumour immune escape.

In mitosis, genome integrity is maintained by DNA polymerase theta-dependent repair of DNA double-strand breaks, which is regulated by Polo-like kinase 1 activity.

Double-stranded RNA structures downstream of start codons play a role in translation initiation by regulating start-codon selection in plant immune responses, and also contribute to translational reprogramming in mammalian systems.