Volume 630 Issue 8016, 13 June 2024

Some employers are backing away from hybrid working, but research suggests that they need not be concerned.

Categorizing geomagnetic storms on a scale of one to five leaves no room for once-a-century superstorms.

The depictions along South America’s Orinoco River are some of the biggest rock art known.

Machine-learning technique uncovers nearly 900,000 microbe-fighting peptide sequences in genomes collected from soils and other sources.

The icy body Arrokoth has a sugary coating that gives the body its distinctive red appearance.

Swarms of painted ladies that descended on the Middle East, northern Africa and Europe have been traced to their source.

Research that drives development and national pride will take centre stage for the next five years, say researchers.

Long-awaited testimony ends in fireworks as US lawmakers spar over the former infectious-disease official’s pandemic actions.

Billions of the insects are making an epic emergence in the eastern United States.

Molecular Bose–Einstein condensates could help to provide the answers to fundamental questions, or form the basis of new quantum computers.

Unreliable data, falsification and other issues related to misconduct are driving a growing proportion of retractions.

Scientists are now hoping the spacecraft will successfully dock with its orbiter and have a safe trip home.

Delegates were at an impasse over key issues, but agreements on other public-health emergency measures spark cautious optimism.

Researchers in India fought to develop what could have been the first therapy to use gene-editing to halt a rare neurodegenerative disease. The efforts hold lessons for the messy state of modern drug development.

The same mRNA technology that quickly brought the world a vaccine for COVID-19 is now showing promise as a bespoke therapy for cancer.

We need terms such as ‘gender modality’ that are flexible enough to capture the nuances of human experience but pragmatic enough to serve science.

Racism is a systemic issue — one that we have the knowledge and tools to solve. But is there a will?

Species are already on the move as waters warm. Conservation plans need to take this into account.

National statistics systems should recognize the researchers whose ideas drive artificial-intelligence applications, not just machines and factory outputs.

Three scientist mothers call for a change in how conference childcare costs are reimbursed, drawing on their personal experiences.

The total number of individuals entering master’s and doctoral programmes dropped 12% between 2019 and 2022, reaching the lowest level in nearly a decade.

Robyn Elman works to protect and conserve monarch butterflies before their dangerous migration down the US East Coast to Mexico.

Sex-specific organ shape is usually thought to depend on sex chromosomes or hormones. Now it emerges that crosstalk between organs sculpts sex-specific 3D gut shape in flies, identifying a new way to consider organ growth.

A simple peptide has been found to make disordered interactions with water, forming a self-healing glass that can also be used as an adhesive coating. The findings point the way to sustainable alternatives to conventional glass.

Innovative solutions are needed to decrease greenhouse-gas emissions. Field trials show that supplementing farm soil with a bacterium that consumes the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide can substantially lower harmful emissions.

A strategy for training a robotic exoskeleton through simulation takes the user out of the equation — saving users of wearable devices time and energy, and smoothing the transition between different types of movement.

Using tissue from the developing fruit-fly wing, researchers show that a nucleus’s location in the cell determines how it experiences signals that regulate genes needed for proper wing formation.

Focusing on the role of external forcing, an investigation of the causes of observed changes in the tropical Pacific surface warming pattern over recent decades discusses a possible shift in the drivers of this pattern.

The accretion disk from a star tidally disrupted by a supermassive black hole undergoes Lense–Thirring precession with strong, quasi-periodic X-ray flux and temperature modulations.

We have implemented a two-site Kitaev chain in a two-dimensional electron gas by coupling quantum dots through Andreev bound states in a superconductor–semiconductor hybrid region.

A study demonstrates a new functionality of canted spin order for magnonics and shows that it facilitates mechanisms for ultrafast nonlinear conversion of magnons.

We develop a low-temperature, damage-free process using van der Waals lamination to integrate multiple circuit tiers into a monolithic three-dimensional device, incorporating unique multi-tier functionality and resolving legacy issues with the layering technology.

We develop a method for high-density vertical stacking of active-device multi-layers, implementing memory and logic functions, using unique VIP-FETs where a van der Waals intercalation layer modulates the p- or n-type nature of the FETs.

A learning-in-simulation framework for wearable robots uses dynamics-aware musculoskeletal and exoskeleton models and data-driven reinforcement learning to bridge the gap between simulation and reality without human experiments to assist versatile activities.

A study shows that implants with an adhesive implant–tissue interface mitigate the formation of a fibrous capsule when attached to various organs in mice, rats and pigs.

A tyrosine tripeptide was discovered to unexpectedly form a supramolecular amorphous glassy material by constructing a non-specific hydrogen bonding network with structural water molecules.

Atomic-resolution imaging of the surface structure of hexagonal water ice is achieved using cryogenic atomic force microscopy, providing a molecular perspective on the origin and mechanism of of ice premelting.

By controlling C–C bond formation in catalytic arylation, lignin can be efficiently extracted from biomass and converted into benign bisphenols that can be used as replacements for their fossil-based counterparts.

A global assessment of conservation interventions for threatened species across a range of data sources finds that interventions for most species remain insufficient or absent.

In fruit flies, three-dimensional organ arrangement is stereotypical, sexually dimorphic and actively maintained by muscle-vessel mechanochemical crosstalk.

Reference assemblies of great ape sex chromosomes show that Y chromosomes are more variable in size and sequence than X chromosomes and provide a resource for studies on human evolution and conservation genetics of non-human apes.

MYCT1 is identified as a crucial regulator of cellular properties essential for the stemness of human haematopoietic stem cells, a finding that may help improve successful in vitro expansion of these cells for therapeutics.

A study presents a method to mitigate emissions of nitrous oxide from farmland using bacteria to consume nitrous oxide in soil with organic waste as a substrate and vector.

Lolamicin, a novel antibiotic developed from a pyridinepyrazole precursor, exhibits potent activity against a broad range of Gram-negative multidrug-resistant clinical isolates, and good efficacy in mouse models of infection without inducing gut dysbiosis.

Gasdermin D Cys191 is S-palmitoylated, and palmitoylation is required for pore formation.

ETS2—which is associated with inflammatory bowel disease, ankylosing spondylitis, primary sclerosing cholangitis and Takayasu’s arteritis—is a central regulator of human inflammatory macrophages.

Combination of TCR or CAR T cells expressing the engineered CD47 variant 47_E with anti-CD47 antibody therapy results in synergistic antitumour efficacy due to T cell resistance to clearance by macrophages, while maintaining macrophage recruitment into the tumour microenvironment.

Analyses of histone acetylation in Drosophila wing imaginal discs reveal distinct patterns of acetylation and cellular metabolism that affect gene expression and cell specification.

The authors identify naturally occurring senescent glia in aged Drosophila brains and decipher their origin and influence, determining that they can appear in response to neuronal mitochondrial dysfunction and that they promote lipid accumulation, indicating that these cells link key ageing phenomena.

Comprehensive analyses of Cas9 proteins shed light on the evolution of the CRISPR–Cas9 system, and identify a pro-CRISPR accessory protein in bacteria that boosts CRISPR-mediated immunity by enhancing the DNA binding and cleavage activity of Cas9.

AlphaFold 3 has a substantially updated architecture that is capable of predicting the joint structure of complexes including proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, ions and modified residues with greatly improved accuracy over many previous specialized tools.

Structural analysis of the human choline and ethanolamine transporters FLVCR1 and FLVCR2 clarifies the mechanisms of transport, the conformational dynamics of these proteins and the disease-associated mutations that interfere with these processes.

A temperature-dependent Ca²⁺-binding site in the intracellular domain of TRPM4 is essential for TRPM4 function in physiological contexts.