Despite archaeobotanical evidence for domesticated cereals, organic residue evidence is scarce. Here, the authors identify cereal-specific markers in pottery from Scottish ‘crannogs’, revealing the presence of cereals in Neolithic pottery which might have been mixed with dairy pr … | Continue reading
A reinforcement learning approach based on AlphaZero is used to discover efficient and provably correct algorithms for matrix multiplication, finding faster algorithms for a variety of matrix sizes. | Continue reading
Massive SARS-CoV-2 sequencing project in Africa brings global benefits. | Continue reading
Svante Pääbo has made stunning discoveries about human evolution using ancient DNA — and his work helped to spawn the competitive field of palaeogenomics. | Continue reading
The crucial first step in the biodegradation of polyethylene plastic is oxidation of the polymer. This has traditionally required abiotic pre-treatment, but now Bertocchini and colleagues report two wax worm enzymes capable of catalyzing this oxidation and subsequent degradation … | Continue reading
Emerging variants and waning immunity are likely to push infections higher in the northern hemisphere as influenza also makes a comeback. | Continue reading
Studies that scrutinized thousands of tumour samples provide the clearest link yet between cancer and fungi — but more research is needed. | Continue reading
Mind-altering drugs are shaking up medicine — but how they actually work remains a mystery. A flurry of imaging studies could clarify the picture. | Continue reading
Survey sheds light on the ‘crisis’ rocking research. | Continue reading
Automated synthesis of long, structurally well-defined carbohydrates. | Continue reading
The ion channel NALCN regulates cell shedding in mice and enhances metastasis in mouse models of cancer. Disseminated cells without oncogenic mutations form normal structures at secondary sites, suggesting that cell shedding is a physiological process that is hijacked during tumo … | Continue reading
Clinical trials suggest that psilocybin — the active ingredient in magic mushrooms — can provide durable remission from an increasingly common mental health condition. | Continue reading
Monkeypox rampant in wildlife would make the virus impossible to control, warn scientists. | Continue reading
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Recent results cast doubt on claims that small amounts of these drugs can benefit mental health. | Continue reading
Ancient fish from the Silurian period provide evolutionary insights. | Continue reading
Multimodal artificial intelligence models could unlock many exciting applications in health and medicine; this Review outlines the most promising uses and the technical pitfalls to avoid. | Continue reading
Retraction undermines the bold claim by physicists who said their material conducted electricity without resistance at 15 ˚C. | Continue reading
The real-world object localization application needs a low-latency and power efficient computing system. Here, Moro et al. demonstrate a neuromorphic in-memory event driven system, inspired by the barn owl’s neuroanatomy, which is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than mi … | Continue reading
Biohybrid microrobots consisting of nanoparticle-modified microalgae are constructed for active drug delivery in the lungs. In an acute bacterial pneumonia model, the microrobots effectively reduce bacterial burden and lessen animal mortality. | Continue reading
Biohybrid microrobots consisting of nanoparticle-modified microalgae are constructed for active drug delivery in the lungs. In an acute bacterial pneumonia model, the microrobots effectively reduce bacterial burden and lessen animal mortality. | Continue reading
A current-driven modulator based on the magneto-optic effect can operate at temperatures as low as 4 K and offer data rates of up to 2 Gbps with an energy consumption below 4 pJ per bit of transferred information. | Continue reading
Radar images reveal clues to the history of a largely unexplored region. | Continue reading
Researchers are hunting through waste water for heavily mutated SARS-CoV-2 variants that could be the next Omicron. | Continue reading
The authors present an approach to underwater imaging, which does not require tethering or batteries. The low-power camera uses power from harvested acoustic energy and communicates colour images wirelessly via acoustic backscatter. | Continue reading
The text-analysis tool could be used to help detect bogus research submitted to journals. | Continue reading
Advice to students at the start of their scientific careers. | Continue reading
Dietary quality is reported at the global, regional and national level across 185 countries. Though diet quality increased modestly since 1990 at the global level, in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa it did not improve. In some regions, children’s dietary quality is lower than t … | Continue reading
Global agricultural markets can partially compensate for halted crop exports from Ukraine and Russia by increasing wheat and maize production in other areas, but carbon emissions and global food insecurity will also increase. | Continue reading
Efficiency and clean fuels won’t be enough. Governments and industry must experiment with other approaches to bring the climate impact of aviation close to zero. | Continue reading
A bacteriogenic strategy for constructing membrane-bounded, molecularly crowded, and compositionally, structurally and morphologically complex synthetic cells provides opportunities for the fabrication of new synthetic cell modules and augmented living/synthetic cell constructs. | Continue reading
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In individuals with long-term cardiac symptoms after an initially mild course of COVID-19 illness, magnetic resonance imaging and measurement of cardiac injury biomarkers commonly detected ongoing cardiac inflammation but not structural heart disease. | Continue reading
Tailoring the size and connectivity of organic nanostructures is challenging but is often key in molecular electronics for tuning the properties of the quantum materials. Now an approach has been developed for building low-dimensional covalent architectures block by block on a su … | Continue reading
An atmospheric scientist describes how researchers would track a toxic cloud in the case of an accident at the occupied Zaporizhzhia power station. | Continue reading
Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 11 May 2022 | Continue reading
In vivo two-photon calcium imaging analyses of sensory inputs from the gastrointestinal tract and upper airways in mice reveal spatial organization and coding principles of the interoceptive nervous system. | Continue reading
Data show that smoking, drinking alcohol and obesity are the biggest contributors to cancer worldwide. | Continue reading
The influence of climate on premodern civil conflict and societal instability is debated. Here, the authors combine archeological, historical, and paleoclimatic datasets to show that drought between 1400-1450 cal. CE escalated civil conflict at Mayapan, the largest Postclassic Ma … | Continue reading
A quantitative analysis of human encroachment into wildlife habitats highlights that horseshoe bats occur in hotspots of forest fragmentation, livestock density and human populations—particularly in China—increasing the risk of SARS-related zoonotic pathogen spillover. | Continue reading
SARS-CoV-2 variants have accumulated multiple defining mutations within their spike glycoproteins. Here, the authors report a structural basis for broad neutralization of several variants by a heavy chain antibody fragment and provide a mutational analysis focusing on antibody ev … | Continue reading
An integrated analysis of de novo and inherited coding variants in 42,607 individuals with autism spectrum disorder identifies 60 risk genes of which five have not previously been associated with neurodevelopmental disorders. | Continue reading
Calorie availability and extent of food shortages for each nation are estimated following regional or global nuclear war, including impacts on major crops, livestock and fishery production. | Continue reading