Nature talks to the mpox coordinator for Africa's public-health agency about how the continent is handling its first jabs ever.

ESA’s Hera mission will study a rock called Dimorphos, which was blasted by NASA, to work out how successful that approach was in deflecting its course.

Vegetation is spreading at an alarming rate in a place where temperatures are soaring.

We take a glance into the brain of a fruit fly in unprecedented detail and look to history to find out how to win a Nobel prize.

Several theories explain why Oceania is the last region free of the H5N1 virus.

The treatment’s success in three people raises hopes for mass production of cutting-edge CAR T therapies.

In a deft experiment, biologists have recreated a system that could have birthed essential cell features such as mitochondria and chloroplasts.

Twenty years of publishing data across many countries and disciplines show women are more likely than men to leave research.

Sociologist Gabriele Jacobs believes AI can be a useful tool in public safety, if developed ethically and responsibly.

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor

Plants with a mutation in a shade-responsive leaf gene have increased yields.

A previously unknown enzyme can kill the bacteria that cause graft-versus-host disease in the treatment of blood disorders.

The parts of a 3D-printed device can be changed out, allowing for versatility as well as ultrahigh resolution.

Proteins TDP-43 and ANXA11 form hybrid filaments in neurons.

Disabling a gene involved in metabolism rejuvenates cells’ ability to spin off new neurons.

A connectomic map of the entire fly brain.

Volunteers played a key part in validating a gigantic neuroscience study mapping the fruit-fly brain. It shows what can be achieved through crowdsourcing research.

Daring flights in an old spy plane observe powerful gamma-ray flashes that could help explain the cause of lightning.

Aircraft observations of γ-rays emitted by thunderstorms.

Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 2 October 2024

Wiring diagram lays out connections between nearly 140,000 neurons and reveals new types of nerve cell.

Data shows huge toll doing a PhD takes on mental health. Plus, bioluminescent waves and a tardigrade rodeo: the month’s best science images

Humans have been driving a global erosion of species richness for millennia, but the consequences of past extinctions for other dimensions of biodiversity—functional and phylogenetic diversity—are poorly understood. In this work, we show that, since the Late Pleistocene, the extinction of 610 bird species has caused a disproportionate loss of the global avian functional space along with ~3 billion

The premise of cancer immunotherapy is that cancers are specifically visible to an immune system tolerized to healthy self. The promise of cancer immunotherapy is that immune effector mechanisms and immunological memory can jointly eradicate cancers and inoperable metastases and de facto vaccinate against recurrence. For some patients with hitherto incurable diseases, including metastatic melanoma

Concern about misinformation and its toxic effects on democracy is widespread. A survey of nearly 1500 experts by the World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation (the latter being intentionally spread, whereas the former may arise accidentally) as the top global risk during the next 2 years. Examples of misinformation-fueled events abound. In the United States, baseless claims about

Hydrogen atom abstraction is an important elementary chemical process but is very difficult to carry out enantioselectively. We have developed catalysts, readily derived from the Cinchona alkaloid family of natural products, which can achieve this by virtue of their chiral amine structure. The catalyst, following single-electron oxidation, desymmetrizes meso -diols by selectively abstracting a hydrogen

Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) is an urgent public health threat with limited preventative options. In this work, we developed a messenger RNA (mRNA)–lipid nanoparticle (LNP) vaccine targeting C. difficile toxins and virulence factors. This multivalent vaccine elicited robust and long-lived systemic and mucosal antigen-specific humoral and cellular immune responses across animal models, independent

The identity of a heteroatom within an aromatic ring influences the chemical properties of that heterocyclic compound. Systematically evaluating the effect of a single atom, however, poses synthetic challenges, primarily as a result of thermodynamic mismatches in atomic exchange processes. We present a photocatalytic strategy that swaps an oxygen atom of furan with a nitrogen group, directly converting

We demonstrate a 1-year lagged extratropical response to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in observational analyses and climate models. The response maps onto the Arctic Oscillation and is strongest in the North Atlantic, where it resembles the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Unexpectedly, these 1-year lagged teleconnections are at least as strong as the better-known simultaneous winter connections

Near-rigid-body grain rotation is commonly observed during grain growth, recrystallization, and plastic deformation in nanocrystalline materials. Despite decades of research, the dominant mechanisms underlying grain rotation remain enigmatic. We present direct evidence that grain rotation occurs through the motion of disconnections (line defects with step and dislocation character) along grain boundaries

Early embryogenesis is driven by transcription factors (TFs) that first activate the zygotic genome and then specify the lineages constituting the blastocyst. Although the TFs specifying the blastocyst’s lineages are well characterized, those playing earlier roles remain poorly defined. Using mouse models of the TF Nr5a2 , we show that Nr5a2 −/− embryos arrest at the early morula stage and exhibit

Fungus-farming ants cultivate multiple lineages of fungi for food, but, because fungal cultivar relationships are largely unresolved, the history of fungus-ant coevolution remains poorly known. We designed probes targeting >2000 gene regions to generate a dated evolutionary tree for 475 fungi and combined it with a similarly generated tree for 276 ants. We found that fungus-ant agriculture originated

Tree growth and longevity trade-offs fundamentally shape the terrestrial carbon balance. Yet, we lack a unified understanding of how such trade-offs vary across the world’s forests. By mapping life history traits for a wide range of species across the Americas, we reveal considerable variation in life expectancies from 10 centimeters in diameter (ranging from 1.3 to 3195 years) and show that the pace

Last month, when the world’s most populus country, India, reported its first case of the new, highly transmissible clade Ib mpox variant, the challenge of containing the virus was once again evident. Only a few weeks before that in August, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) declared mpox a public health emergency in response to

Loss of function of the RNA-binding protein TDP-43 (TDP-LOF) is a hallmark of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neurodegenerative disorders. Here we describe TDP-REG, which exploits the specificity of cryptic splicing induced by TDP-LOF to drive protein expression when and where the disease process occurs. The SpliceNouveau algorithm combines deep learning with rational design to generate