Scientific community and society articles within Nature Communications

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  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Millions of skeletal remains from South Asia were exported in red markets (the underground economy of human tissues/organs) to educational institutions globally for over a century. It is time to recognize the personhood of the people who were systematically made into anatomical objects and acknowledge the scientific racism in creating and continuing to use them.

    • Sabrina C. Agarwal

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The CONSORT-AI extension was developed to provide specific guidance for randomised controlled trials involving Artificial Intelligence (AI) interventions. Here, the authors show that since publication of CONSORT-AI, several AI-specific considerations remain systematically underreported.

    • Alexander P. L. Martindale
    • , Benjamin Ng
    •  & Xiaoxuan Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Researchers developed an open-hardware structured illumination microscopy add-on. This affordable upgrade provides super-resolution capabilities for normal optical microscopes. Detailed instructions enable easy reproduction to help democratize advanced microscopy.

    • Mélanie T. M. Hannebelle
    • , Esther Raeth
    •  & Georg E. Fantner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Information on the occurrence of aneuploidies in prehistory human populations are rare. Here, from a large screen of ancient human genomes and osteological examination, the authors find genetic evidence for six cases of trisomy 21 (Down syndrome) and one case of trisomy 18 (Edwards syndrome) in historic and prehistoric infants.

    • Adam Benjamin Rohrlach
    • , Maïté Rivollat
    •  & Kay Prüfer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Russian invasion of Ukraine has affected the global economy, environment, and political order. Here, the authors show that it also coincided with a temporary decline in psychological well-being across Europe.

    • Julian Scharbert
    • , Sarah Humberg
    •  & Mitja D. Back

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Xu and colleagues find that the average trophic level of aquatic food items in the human diet is declining (from 3.42 to 3.18) because of the considerable increase in low-trophic level aquaculture species output relative to that of capture fisheries since 1976. Additionally they find that trade has contributed to increasing the availability and trophic level of aquatic foods in >60% of the world’s countries.

    • Kangshun Zhao
    • , Steven D. Gaines
    •  & Jun Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Extracting scientific data from published research is a complex task required specialised tools. Here the authors present a scheme based on large language models to automatise the retrieval of information from text in a flexible and accessible manner.

    • John Dagdelen
    • , Alexander Dunn
    •  & Anubhav Jain

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study shows that ice loss and human water use models explain global and regional satellite-observed ocean mass changes since 2003 and thereby pinpoint the main cause of sea level rise, with a negligible role coming from natural variability.

    • Carsten Bjerre Ludwigsen
    • , Ole Baltazar Andersen
    •  & Matt A. King

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Link prediction in temporal networks is relevant for many real-world systems, however, current approaches are usually characterized by high computational costs. The authors propose a temporal link prediction framework based on the sequential stacking of static network features, for improved computational speed, appropriate for temporal networks with completely unobserved or partially observed target layers.

    • Xie He
    • , Amir Ghasemian
    •  & Peter J. Mucha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lithic cutting-edge productivity is a way of quantifying prehistoric human technological evolution. Here, the authors examine the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition across eight assemblages in the eastern Mediterranean, finding the transition to be later than expected and associated with bladelet technology development.

    • Seiji Kadowaki
    • , Joe Yuichiro Wakano
    •  & Sate Massadeh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this work, the authors report NMR lipids Databank to promote decentralised sharing of biomolecular molecular dynamics (MD) simulation data with an overlay design. Programmatic access enables analyses of rare phenomena and advances the training of machine learning models.

    • Anne M. Kiirikki
    • , Hanne S. Antila
    •  & O. H. Samuli Ollila

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Implicit biases are influenced by social contexts which, in cities, are shaped by the constraints of urban infrastructure networks. Here the authors show that more populous, more diverse, and less segregated cities are less biased and that this is predicted by a complex systems model.

    • Andrew J. Stier
    • , Sina Sajjadi
    •  & Marc G. Berman

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Innovative pharmacogenomic approaches (genetic variation related to medication response) are needed to reduce disease and disparities in Indigenous communities. We support community-based pharmacogenomics research, inclusive of Indigenous values and priorities, to improve the health and well-being of Indigenous peoples.

    • Katrina G. Claw
    • , Casey R. Dorr
    •  & Erica L. Woodahl

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    The African continent demonstrated decisive leadership throughout its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, leveraging lessons learned from previous outbreaks and acting quickly to limit the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We propose a framework to build on these successes that calls for greater collaboration between African leaders, and greater inclusion of African voices in the global health ecosystem.

    • Nicaise Ndembi
    • , Aggrey Aluso
    •  & Jean Kaseya

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors demonstrate that cropland expansion following the historical trend together with closing the current exploitable yield gap by half or more across Africa reduces the continent’s reliance on land conversions and imports by 2050.

    • Shen Yuan
    • , Kazuki Saito
    •  & Patricio Grassini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Monitoring antimicrobial resistance in food animals is challenging due to limited surveillance systems. Here, the authors combine data from point prevalence surveys in lower- and middle-income settings to map resistance to seven antimicrobials and predict which are likely to exceed key resistance thresholds.

    • Cheng Zhao
    • , Yu Wang
    •  & Thomas P. Van Boeckel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How speech sounds come to be understood as language remains unclear. Here, the authors find that brain responses to speech in part reflect abstraction of phonological units specific to the language being spoken, mediated through relationships between acoustic features.

    • Anna Mai
    • , Stephanie Riès
    •  & Timothy Q. Gentner

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    While the research community continues to develop novel proposals for intrinsic biocontainment of genetically engineered organisms, translation to real-world deployment faces several challenges.

    • Dalton R. George
    • , Mark Danciu
    •  & Emma K. Frow

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Towards optimizing the conjunctive operation of surface and groundwater resources in arid and semi-arid regions, here the authors propose a hybrid method involving moth-swarm and symbiotic organism search algorithms and artificial neural networks and demonstrate it for the HalīlRood basin.

    • Saeid Akbarifard
    • , Mohamad Reza Madadi
    •  & Mohammad Zounemat-Kermani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Domestic attempts to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a country can have synergistic and/or trade-off effects on the advancement of SDGs in other countries. Here the authors demonstrate that while high-income countries make up only 14% of the global population, they drive over 60% of worldwide SDG interactions.

    • Huijuan Xiao
    • , Sheng Bao
    •  & Jianguo Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A personalized letter from the Medical Examiner-Coroner in Los Angeles County has proven effective at reducing opioid and benzodiazepine prescribing. Here the authors show that the introduction of if/when-then planning prompts in to the letter further reduced opioid prescribing by 12.85% and benzodiazepine prescribing by 8.32%; they were most effective for clinicians with multiple patient deaths due to accidental opioid-related overdose.

    • Jason N. Doctor
    • , Marcella A. Kelley
    •  & Emily P. Stewart

  • 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

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