Volume 625 Issue 7996, 25 January 2024

From governance to climate impacts, the world’s urban environments face many difficulties. A new journal, Nature Cities, aims to bring together researchers who are rising to the challenge.

Extreme heat and cold brought on by climate change put people at risk. Beefing up building codes now could help to save lives.

Light pulses with specific quantum properties could be harnessed to send digital ‘contracts’ between buyer and seller.

The folded robot can squeeze through tight spaces with linear motion.

Mice that work out regularly have higher levels of a molecule that promotes muscle regeneration than sedentary mice do.

Next-generation plants that respond to demand could be key to making a low-carbon energy source more economically appealing.

With last year now officially the hottest on record, climate researchers look ahead with trepidation.

Researchers identified six ancient humans with chromosomal conditions, including the earliest case of Turner syndrome.

Nature talks to Monica Bertagnolli about hot-button issues and her top priorities for 2024.

A method that provides cloned embryos with a healthy placenta could pave the way for more research involving the primates.

The latest outburst sent molten rock into the port town of Grindavík, igniting homes.

Researchers say their artificial-intelligence system could help to democratize medicine.

The drug simnotrelvir shortens symptoms for those with mild infections and is sold at a lower price in China than its main rival.

After decades of frustration and failed attempts, scientists might finally be on the cusp of developing therapies to restore immune ‘tolerance’ in conditions such as diabetes, lupus and multiple sclerosis.

Campaigners who want scrutiny of biometrics research on Uyghurs, Tibetans and other groups are frustrated by slow progress.

The iconic physicist’s theories of relativity and atomic motions were not so revolutionary, a penetrating history argues.

Collaboration is key to making plastic use greener as soon as possible. Our experience yields tips on how to set up industry–academic partnerships.

Many researchers support open science, but how can they translate this view into behaviours to boost sharing?

Advances in artificial intelligence are at the heart of many of this year’s most exciting areas of technological innovation

Mahmoud Tavakoli works on wearable electronic devices that are less invasive than standard equipment.

Millions of tonnes of ‘red mud’, a hazardous waste of aluminium production, are generated annually. A potentially sustainable process for treating this mud shows that it could become a source of iron for making steel.

Snippets from Nature’s past.

GPS data reveal that young people encounter fewer individuals from diverse groups than do adults. The isolation of young people is exacerbated in larger cities, and for those living in poverty.

Measurements of groundwater levels in 170,000 wells reveal the global extent of groundwater decline. But the data also show that such depletion is not inevitable in a changing climate, providing hope for a resilient water future.

Maternal sensitivity to a hormone produced by the fetus might underlie the risk of severe nausea and vomiting in human pregnancy — a finding that could open up strategies for the treatment of this debilitating condition.

Once a plant recognizes a pathogen, part of its defence strategy is to withhold iron. The mechanism involves suppression of root acquisition of iron by degrading a molecule that activates the iron-uptake pathway.

An experiment sensitive to higher-order quantum electrodynamics effects and electron–electron interactions in the high-Z regime was performed using a multi-reference method based on Doppler-tuned X-ray emission from stored relativistic uranium ions with different charge states.

The dynamical phases of out-of-equilibrium Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer superconductors have been simulated using cold atoms levitated inside an optical cavity.

Free-running stable optical dissipative solitons, called Nozaki–Bekki solitons, are created in a ring semiconductor laser; their spontaneous formation with tuning of laser bias eliminates the need for an external optical pump.

Single-cycle terahertz pumps are used to impulsively trigger ionic hopping in battery solid electrolytes, probing ion transport at its fastest limit and demonstrating the connection between activated transport and the thermodynamics of information.

A HfNbTiVAl₁₀ alloy shows tensile ductility and ultrahigh yield strength from the addition of aluminium to a HfNbTiV alloy, resulting in a negative mixing enthalpy solid solution, which promotes strength and favours formation of hierarchical chemical fluctuations.

Red mud is shown to yield green steel through fossil-free hydrogen-plasma-based reduction, a simple and fast method involving rapid liquid-state reduction, chemical partitioning, and density-driven and viscosity-driven separation.

The use of mega-electronvolt ultrafast electron diffraction combined with resonance-enhanced multiphoton ionization yields data that can reveal the formation and subsequent structural relaxation of a molecular ion on an ultrafast timescale.

Analysis of about 170,000 monitoring wells and 1,693 aquifer systems worldwide shows that extensive and often accelerating groundwater declines are widespread in the twenty-first century, but that groundwater levels are recovering in some cases.

Country-level changes in economic production and the value of non-market ecosystem benefits show unequal impacts on the global values of natural capital resulting from climate-change-induced shifts in terrestrial vegetation cover.

Inventory data from more than 1 million trees across African, Amazonian and Southeast Asian tropical forests suggests that, despite their high diversity, just 1,053 species, representing a consistent ~2.2% of tropical tree species in each region, constitute half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees.

Whole-genome alignment of 239 primate species reveals noncoding regulatory elements that are under selective constraint in primates but not in other placental mammals, that are enriched for variants that affect human gene expression and complex traits in diseases.

This study describes a projection from the medial prefrontal cortex to the central amygdala that is involved in the regulation of defensive responses to threat.

Microorganism-associated molecular patterns such as flagellin lead to suppression of root iron acquisition through localized degradation of the systemic iron-deficiency signalling peptide Iron Man 1 in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Elevated circulating levels of GDF15 in pregnant women are associated with severe nausea and vomiting, and sensitivity to such symptoms during pregnancy is partly determined by prepregnancy levels of this hormone.

The nasopharyngeal lymphatic plexus is a major hub for cerebrospinal fluid outflow to deep cervical lymph nodes.

The potential use of circulating tumour DNA in classic Hodgkin lymphoma detection, classification and monitoring is defined.

Single-nucleus RNA-sequencing data from the cerebellum of human, mouse and opossum is used to analyse the developmental dynamics of cell types and states in mammalian cerebellum and provide evolutionary insights.

The prokaryotic non-enzymatic effector protein Cam1 mediates CRISPR immunity by binding tetra-adenylate second messengers and forming a pore in the membrane that induces membrane depolarization and growth arrest.

Massive-scale mutational screening across 385 genes reveals a wide spectrum of alleles that govern tunable T cell functions, including cytokine production and cytotoxicity.

A meta-analysis of associations between human genetic variation and gut microbial structural variations shows that ABO genotype differentially affects the presence of Faecalibacterium prausnitzii strains containing GalNAc utilization pathway in the gut.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of a short prokaryotic Argonaute (pAgo) and the associated TIR-APAZ proteins bound by guide RNA and target DNA shed light on the mechanisms of assembly and activation of pAgo systems.

An analysis of the evolutionary distribution of predicted structures for the metamorphic protein KaiB using AF-Cluster reveals that both conformations of KaiB were distributed in clusters across the KaiB family.