News & Comment

Chalcogenide aerogels are receiving widespread attention due to their unique properties. Here we comment on a recent work about amorphous Na–Mn–Sn–S chalcogels featuring local structural control, and provide an outlook for the development of chalcogels and the metal-organic sulfide framework.

The development of photocatalysts is greatly hindered by false positives or non-reproducible data. Here, The authors describe the current known causes of non-reproducible results in the literature and present solutions to mitigate these false positive results.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can harm mental health across the lifespan and reduce life expectancy. We provide a commentary of evidence on the health impacts, and how creative arts and digital interventions may support prevention and recovery.

We spoke to Professor Kylie Vincent – professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Oxford, co-founder of HydRegen Ltd, and Academic Champion for Women in Entrepreneurship – about turning academic research into industrial products.

In this work, Morgenstern and colleagues describe an approach involving functionalized nanobodies which decrease the activity of voltage-gated Ca²⁺ channels associated with β₁ subunits and promote their removal from the surface membrane of neurons and muscle.

Earthquakes are a natural hazard affecting millions of people globally every year. Researchers are working on understanding the mechanisms of earthquakes and how we can predict them from various angles, such as experimental work, theoretical modeling, and machine learning. We invited Marie Violay (EPFL Lausanne), Annemarie Baltay (USGS), Bertrand Rouet-Leduc (Kyoto University) and David Kammer (ETH Zürich) to discuss how such a multi-disciplinary approach can advance our understanding of Earthquakes.

This Comment piece summarises current challenges regarding routine vaccine uptake in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides recommendations on how to increase uptake. To implement these recommendations, the article points to evidence-based resources that can support health-care workers, policy makers and communicators.

Disability has too often been peripheral to efforts to widen the STEMM pipeline, hampering research quality and innovation. Inspired by change in education delivery and research collaborations during the pandemic, we offer a structure for efforts to recruit and retain disabled scientists and practitioners.

The rapid expansion and globalization of the seaweed production industry, combined with rising seawater temperatures and coastal eutrophication, has led to an increase in infectious diseases and pest outbreaks. Here, we propose a novel Progressive Management Pathway for improving Seaweed Biosecurity.

Association genetic studies and genome-scale CRISPR screens have recently identified ARF3 and TMEM251/LYSET/GCAF as Golgi-resident factors essential to brain and skeletal development. Here we discuss how even though the consequences of mutations in these genes affect endosomal and lysosomal compartments, the problem originates in the Golgi complex and may involve either the identity of the carrier vesicles or that of cargo molecules.

Since 2020 Nature Communications has been considering Registered Reports for publication in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, human behaviour and psychology, and epidemiology. We are excited to announce the publication of our first Registered Report. With this milestone, we also want to open the format to all other areas of research.

We recently published our first Registered Report entitled ‘Value-free random exploration is linked to impulsivity’. We believe the format offers many benefits to strengthen hypothesis-driven research and are keen to share our experience with our readers as we open up the format to all fields of research. We interviewed the authors of the manuscript (Magda Dubois and Tobias Hauser) and one of the reviewers (Trevor Robbins) about their experience of the review process. We are editorially committed to take their comments on board to further improve our guidance and to optimally support our future authors.

Nature Communications is now welcoming Registered Report submissions from all fields of research (read our editorial here), and we want to encourage submissions from the ecology and evolutionary biology fields. To introduce this format to researchers in those fields, we interviewed two founding members of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE), a network of researchers aimed at improving research practices in ecology, evolutionary biology, and related fields: Shinichi Nakagawa (Professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Synthesis at the University of New South Wales, UNSW) and Rose O’Dea (Secretary of SORTEE, postdoctoral researcher and fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). Below, they share their thoughts on how the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology can advance in reproducibility and transparency.

While there are a growing number of human pluripotent stem cell repositories, genetic diversity remains limited in most collections and studies. Here, we discuss the importance of incorporating diverse ancestries in these models to improve equity and accelerate biological discovery.

Rivers and streams are increasingly drying with climate change and biogeochemical impacts may be important. In this comment the authors discuss the challenges to the biogeochemistry of non-perennial rivers and streams, and what can be done to tackle them.

Financing of urban greening has traditionally prioritized economic growth. Here the authors argue for action to ensure more socially just green financing.

Very few of the COVID-19 ML models were fit for deployment in real-world settings. In this Comment, Huang et al. discuss the main steps required to develop clinically useful models in the context of an emerging infectious disease.

Rigorous, robust replication and generalization studies present a significant investment into the quality of the research record, the foundation on which new research is built. Communications Psychology and the Human Behaviour Team at Nature Communications are inviting submissions of replication studies in psychology and the human behavioural sciences.

The colonial practices of geoscience have created long term vulnerabilities to natural hazards. In this comment the ongoing consequence are explored of colonialism as well as the actions that are needed to be taken to reduce natural hazard risk.

The authors provide a metrology-led perspective on best practice for the electrochemical characterisation of materials for electrochemical energy technologies. Such electrochemical experiments are highly sensitive, and their results are, in practice, often of uncertain quality and challenging to reproduce quantitatively.