Scientific community and society articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Authors of scientific papers are generally discouraged from citing works that had no direct influence on their research. This paper uses simulations to show that such rhetorical citations may have underappreciated effects on the scientific community, such as deconcentrating attention away from already highly-cited papers.

    • Honglin Bao
    •  & Misha Teplitskiy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study shows that conserving approximately half of global land area through protection or sustainable management could provide 90% of ten of nature’s contributions to people and could meet representation targets for 26,709 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles. This finding supports recent commitments to conserve at least 30% of global lands and waters by 2030.

    • Rachel A. Neugarten
    • , Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer
    •  & Amanda D. Rodewald

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ambiguity in human-oriented traffic laws poses a significant challenge to the regulation of self-driving vehicles. Here, the authors present a trigger-based hierarchical online compliance monitor for self-assessment of self-driving vehicles using ambiguous compliance threshold selection principles.

    • Wenhao Yu
    • , Chengxiang Zhao
    •  & Ding Zhao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors demonstrate how managed urbanization in China could halve reactive nitrogen pollution to both the atmosphere and water resources. Investing 61 billion USD could provide 245 billion USD in benefits, while contributing to multiple SDG goals.

    • Ouping Deng
    • , Sitong Wang
    •  & Baojing Gu

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Underutilised crops or orphan crops are important for diversifying our food systems towards food and nutrition security. Here, the authors discuss how the development of underutilised crop genomic resource should align with their breeding and capacity building strategies, and leverage advances made in major crops.

    • Oluwaseyi Shorinola
    • , Rose Marks
    •  & Mark A. Chapman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    While federated learning is promising for efficient collaborative learning without revealing local data, it remains vulnerable to white-box privacy attacks, suffers from high communication overhead, and struggles to adapt to heterogeneous models. Here, the authors show a federated distillation method to tackle these challenges, which leverages the strengths of knowledge distillation in a federated learning setting.

    • Jiawei Shao
    • , Fangzhao Wu
    •  & Jun Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This paper assesses future changes in flood magnitude across the conterminous United States based on multiple climate change scenarios. The results suggest that annual maximum peak discharge is projected to become more extreme under higher emission scenarios.

    • Hanbeen Kim
    •  & Gabriele Villarini

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Wearable devices can provide personalised medicine at the point of need, potentially increasing access to health services and therefore improving health equity. Here the authors discuss their experiences developing wearable devices for vulnerable patient populations, including neonates and pregnant individuals.

    • Jessica R. Walter
    • , Shuai Xu
    •  & John A. Rogers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reproducibility is essential for the progress of research, yet achieving it remains elusive even in computational fields. Here, authors develop the rworkflows suite, making robust CI/CD workflows easy and freely accessible to all R package developers.

    • Brian M. Schilder
    • , Alan E. Murphy
    •  & Nathan G. Skene

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reconstructing language dispersal patterns is important for understanding cultural spread and demic diffusion. Here, the authors use a computational approach based on velocity field estimation to infer the dispersal patterns of Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Bantu, and Arawak language families.

    • Sizhe Yang
    • , Xiaoru Sun
    •  & Menghan Zhang

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    We examine the call for decolonising academic disciplines, and the extent which this applies to engineering. We argue that anticolonial endeavours should systematically recognise colonial legacy in contemporary science and technology, and reframe technological innovation in light of neocolonial extraction and exploitation.

    • Srinjoy Mitra
    • , Suvobrata Sarkar
    •  & Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using historical data across the U.S., the authors find that population declines are associated with flood exposure. Projecting this relationship to 2053, the authors find that flood risk may result in 7% lower growth than otherwise expected.

    • Evelyn G. Shu
    • , Jeremy R. Porter
    •  & Edward Kearns

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A resilient battery electric bus transit system design and configuration is proposed. The model is robust against simultaneous charging disruptions without interrupting daily operation. Indeed, additional marginal cost is required, yet it prevents significant service reductions.

    • Ahmed Foda
    • , Moataz Mohamed
    •  & Ehab El-Saadany

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Accurately benchmarking small variant calling accuracy is critical for the continued improvement of human genome sequencing. Here, the authors show that current approaches are biased towards certain variant representations and develop a new approach to ensure consistent and accurate benchmarking, regardless of the original variant representations.

    • Tim Dunn
    •  & Satish Narayanasamy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study introduce the Global Biojet Fuel Sustainability Index, a holistic 25-indicator sustainability index encompassing the four domains of energy-water-food nexus and governance, to measure the potential impact of RJF productions on 154 countries/territories through the oil-to-jet, alcohol-to-jet and gas-to-jet conversion methods.

    • Cheng Tung Chong
    •  & Jo-Han Ng

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Drawing on perspectives from West and Southern Africa, this Comment critically examines the current state of neuroscience progress in Africa, describing the unique landscape and ongoing challenges as embedded within wider socio-political realities. Distinct research opportunities in the African context are explored to include genetic and bio-diversity, multilingual and multicultural populations, life-course development, clinical neuroscience and neuropsychology, with applications to machine learning models, in light of complex post-colonial legacies that often impede research progress. Key determinants needed to accelerate African neuroscience are then discussed, as well as cautionary underpinnings that together create an equitable neuroscience framework.

    • Sahba Besharati
    •  & Rufus Akinyemi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The estimates of the societal costs of carbon currently used for policy evaluations may be too low due to an insufficient representation of tropical cyclone damage. Accounting for them substantially increases the estimated benefits of climate change mitigation measures.

    • Hazem Krichene
    • , Thomas Vogt
    •  & Christian Otto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    While accounting for intrinsic differences between short- and long-lived greenhouse gases, solely relying on soil carbon sequestration in grasslands to offset warming effect of emissions from current ruminant systems is not feasible

    • Yue Wang
    • , Imke J. M. de Boer
    •  & Corina E. van Middelaar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Novel indicators of infectious disease prevalence could improve real-time surveillance and support healthcare planning. Here, the authors show that sales data for non-prescription medications from a UK high street retailer can improve the accuracy of models forecasting mortality from respiratory infections.

    • Elizabeth Dolan
    • , James Goulding
    •  & Laila J. Tata

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study finds that flood insurance policy design affects economic development in floodplains and, consequently, flood risk in Europe. Therefore, the authors advocate for flood insurance design to be integrated in climate change adaptation policy.

    • Max Tesselaar
    • , W. J. Wouter Botzen
    •  & Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Green technologies foster the use of green energy; however, large investment costs hinder adoption. In a large-scale field experiment, the authors show that message framing can promote a serious commitment to solar panels among the broader public.

    • Dominik Bär
    • , Stefan Feuerriegel
    •  & Markus Weinmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Over their careers, medicinal chemists develop a gut feeling for what is a promising molecule. Here, the authors use machine learning models to learn this intuition and show that it can be successfully applied in several drug discovery scenarios.

    • Oh-Hyeon Choung
    • , Riccardo Vianello
    •  & José Jiménez-Luna

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Membrane distillation is an emerging desalination technology to obtain freshwater from saline based on low-grade energy. Here the authors report on novel superhydrophobic hierarchical porous membranes with enhanced distillation flux suitable for desalination or wastewater treatment.

    • Youmin Hou
    • , Prexa Shah
    •  & Hans-Jürgen Butt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbial communication has significant implications for industrial applications, but constructing communication systems which support coordinated behaviors is challenging. Here, the authors report an electron transfer triggered redox communication network and demonstrate its ability to coordinate microbial metabolism.

    • Na Chen
    • , Na Du
    •  & Quan Yuan

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