A few key countries have become hubs of collaboration in artificial intelligence.

A bubble of air on its snout extends the water anole’s underwater time by more than a minute.

AI is changing the way researchers work forever, but human expertise must continue to hold sway.

The power of big tech is outstripping any ‘Brussels effect’ from the EU’s AI Act.

It was modelled after DARPA, the hugely successful US tech funder. Can Britain’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency — ARIA — create revolutionary innovations?

A region of the mouse brain’s cortical amygdala consolidates memory of an odour it could smell on another mouse.

Four scientists discuss how they broke into the field and how they use evidence to tackle society’s problems.

A description of the terminology and methodology used in this supplement, and a guide to the functionality that is available free online at natureindex.com.

Medical assistance.

An RNA-sequencing data set compiled from individuals from around the world provides insights into variation in gene expression.

Chatbots and other tools are increasingly being considered, but people power is still seen as a safer option.

Researchers across the continent are using artificial intelligence to design bespoke solutions for health, development and more.

Industry research funding is vastly eclipsing academia’s spend, but healthy development demands broad input.

World leaders are restarting their engagement with the Taliban — yet the rights of half of the population is not on their official agenda.

Total alcohol consumed fell at establishments in England that replaced the classic imperial pint with a two-thirds measure.

CERN’s calculation of the W boson’s mass agrees with theory, contradicting a previous anomaly that had raised the possibility of new physics.

Evidence shows that blockbuster weight-loss medications can reduce obesity even in children aged 6–11, but their long-term effects on growing bodies are unknown.

AlphaFold reveals how viruses including hepatitis C, dengue and Zika evolved. Plus, mosquito-borne diseases are on the rise in Europe — are scientists worried?

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 121, Issue 38, September 2024.

Letter to the Editor

Snippets from Nature’s past.

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor

By 2050, around 2 million people — the majority aged over 70 — could die from drug-resistant infections each year.

Ahead of a United Nations meeting on the global challenge of drug-resistant infections, Nature asked health-care experts in emerging economies to describe what would address the issue in their country or region most effectively.

Ensuring that clinics in low- and middle-income countries are well-stocked with high-quality antibiotics could help physicians to treat millions of people each year and slow the spread of drug resistance.

Tens of thousands of studies evaluating government programmes are collecting dust in institutional vaults. Sharing them could benefit everyone.

Gene and cell therapies bring fresh hope to people with genetic disorders, but recovery can be complex and long-term support remains sparse.

Diseases such as West Nile virus and dengue are becoming increasingly common as the insects that spread them move north.

A common diabetes drug slows monkey brain-ageing by the human equivalent of 18 years. Plus, research-integrity sleuths call out journals for ‘stealth corrections’ and a new commission convenes to protect our mental health from snowballing environmental harms.

Protein structures predicted by artificial intelligence have charted the evolution of the virus family responsible for dengue and hepatitis C.

Klebsiella pneumoniae is an important pathogen causing difficult-to-treat urinary tract infections (UTIs). Over 1.5 million women per year suffer from recurrent UTI, reducing quality of life and causing substantial morbidity and mortality, especially in the hospital setting. Uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) is the most prevalent cause of UTI. Like UPEC, K. pneumoniae relies on type 1 pili, tipped with

Connectomics research is making rapid advances, although models revealing general principles of connectional architecture are far from complete. Our analysis of 10 6 published connection reports indicates that the adult rat brain interregional connectome has about 76,940 of a possible 623,310 axonal connections between its 790 gray matter regions mapped in a reference atlas, equating to a network density

New data sources and AI methods for extracting information are increasingly abundant and relevant to decision-making across societal applications. A notable example is street view imagery, available in over 100 countries, and purported to inform built environment interventions (e.g., adding sidewalks) for community health outcomes. However, biases can arise when decision-making does not account for

Rising inequality has brought redistribution back on the political agenda. In theory, inequality aversion drives people’s support for redistribution. People can dislike both advantageous inequality (comparison relative to those worse off) and disadvantageous inequality (comparison relative to those better off). Existing experimental evidence reveals substantial variation across people in these preferences

Small-conductance Ca 2+ -activated K + channels (SK, K Ca 2) are gated solely by intracellular microdomain Ca 2+ . The channel has emerged as a therapeutic target for cardiac arrhythmias. Calmodulin (CaM) interacts with the CaM binding domain (CaMBD) of the SK channels, serving as the obligatory Ca 2+ sensor to gate the channels. In heterologous expression systems, phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate

Mammalian Yes-associated protein (YAP) and transcriptional coactivator with PDZ-binding motif (TAZ) and Drosophila Yorkie (Yki) are transcription cofactors of the highly conserved Hippo signaling pathway. It has been long assumed that the YAP/TAZ/Yki signaling drives cell proliferation during organ growth. However, its instructive role in regulating developmentally programmed organ growth, if any,

Multispecies microbial communities drive most ecosystems on Earth. Chemical and biological interactions within these communities can affect the survival of individual members and the entire community. However, the prohibitively high number of possible interactions within a microbial community has made the characterization of factors that influence community development challenging. Here, we report

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is a chronic and severe disease of the skeletal neuromuscular junction (NMJ) in which the effects of neurotransmitters are attenuated, leading to muscle weakness. In the most common forms of autoimmune MG, antibodies attack components of the postsynaptic membrane, including the acetylcholine receptor (AChR) or muscle-specific kinase (MuSK). MuSK, a master regulator of NMJ development

The opportunistic pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii , carries variants of A. baumannii resistance islands (AbaR)-type genomic islands conferring multidrug resistance. Their pervasiveness in the species has remained enigmatic. The dissemination of AbaRs is intricately linked to their horizontal transfer via natural transformation, a process through which bacteria can import and recombine exogenous DNA

Cuprous copper [Cu(I)] is an essential cofactor for enzymes that support many fundamental cellular functions including mitochondrial respiration and suppression of oxidative stress. Neurons are particularly reliant on mitochondrial production of ATP, with many neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, associated with diminished mitochondrial function. The gene MBLAC1 encodes a ribonuclease

We consider the refractive lensing effects of ionized cool ( T ∼ 10 4 K ) gas cloudlets in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of galaxies. In particular, we discuss the combined effects of lensing from these cloudlets and scintillation from plasma screens in the Milky Way interstellar medium (ISM). We show that, if the CGM comprises a mist of subparsec cloudlets with column densities of order 10 17 cm

Extremely remote islands are more likely than less isolated ones to have a high number of endemic languages.

Yakamoz Kizildas collects the DNA of humpback whales to learn about their behaviour in the North Atlantic ocean.

Can science be a route to peace and common understanding? A glance at the history of one institution shows: only when scientists actively commit to it.

Artificial-intelligence models are typically used online, but a host of openly available tools is changing that. Here’s how to get started with local AIs.

An epic exploration of human history examines how the poor and powerless have fought back — time and again — against those seeking to profit from the planet’s natural resources.

How our neuron activity drops in high-stakes situations, meet the organizations fighting for Ukrainian science and discover a chatbot that can pop the conspiracy-thinking bubble.

A survey at one of the biggest UK research universities finds that staff often end up flying to meetings despite a preference to avoid air travel.

Scientists create textiles with just the right weave and yarn to keep biting insects at bay.

Study of a reverberation that rang around the world reveals a new type of geological event fuelled by global warming.

Study links this phenomenon to the brain region that controls movement.

Discovery could help to identify ways to prevent relapse into opioid usage.

A controversial theory about Rapa Nui has been conclusively debunked. Plus, what Harris and Trump said about science in their debate and the reviewers churning out suspicious reviews for personal gain.

Large-language-model trial suggests facts and evidence really can change people’s minds.

Daily dose of the common medication metformin preserved cognition and delayed decline of some tissues.

Family-based genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are often claimed to provide an unbiased estimate of the average causal effects (or average treatment effects; ATEs) of alleles, on the basis of an analogy between the random transmission of alleles from parents to children and a randomized controlled trial. We show that this claim does not hold in general. Because Mendelian segregation only randomizes