Genomic analyses of spike glycoprotein genes of European bat SARS-related coronaviruses suggest that furin cleavage sites can be acquired in the bat reservoir via conserved molecular mechanisms, supporting a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. | Continue reading
A non-profit organization merges engineering and biology to accelerate drug development for childhood cancers. | Continue reading
Molecular analyses of modern and fossil skeletal samples reveal that elevated metabolic rates consistent with endothermy evolved independently in mammals and plesiosaurs, and ornithodirans: Exceptional metabolic rates are ancestral to dinosaurs and pterosaurs and were acquired be … | Continue reading
Mining metals has a rising environmental cost. But high losses and low recycling rates mean that many last only a short time. | Continue reading
Robots have become increasingly adept at interacting with the world around them. But to fulfil their potential, they also need a sense of touch. | Continue reading
The patent system assumes that inventors are human. Inventions devised by machines require their own intellectual property law and an international treaty. | Continue reading
Researchers have severed global ties before — what happened? | Continue reading
A Josephson diode is made by fabricating an inversion symmetry breaking van der Waals heterostructure of NbSe2/Nb3Br8/NbSe2, demonstrating that even without a magnetic field, the junction can be superconducting with a positive current but resistive with a negative current. | Continue reading
SpaceX and other companies are still struggling to make their satellites darker in the night sky. | Continue reading
Results suggest that vaccines offer less protection against lingering symptoms than expected. | Continue reading
Results suggest that vaccines offer less protection against lingering symptoms than expected. | Continue reading
A quantum network formed by three optically connected nodes comprising solid-state qubits demonstrates the teleportation of quantum information between two non-neighbouring nodes, negating the need for a direct connection between them. | Continue reading
Information teleported between stationary qubits without a direct link. | Continue reading
The particle-smashing machine has fired up again — sparking fresh hope it can find unusual results. | Continue reading
Peptide synthesis can take place directly on RNA, which suggests how a nucleic acid–protein world might have originated on early Earth. | Continue reading
Using machine learning, the authors reveal that stable background conditions explain most variation in armed conflict risk worldwide. Positive temperature deviations and precipitation extremes also increase the risk of conflict onset and incidence. | Continue reading
The number of graph neural network papers in this journal has grown as the field matures. We take a closer look at some of the scientific applications. | Continue reading
SpaceX and other companies are still struggling to make their satellites darker in the night sky. | Continue reading
Mass infections in wild birds pose a significant risk to vulnerable species, are hard to contain and increase the opportunity for the virus to spill over into people. | Continue reading
The urban centres are the first to be discovered in the region, challenging archaeological dogma. | Continue reading
Two remarkably large sites in southwest Amazonia, belonging to the Casarabe culture, include complex civic-ceremonial architecture and large water-management infrastructure, representing a type of tropical low-density urbanism that has not previously been described in Amazonia. | Continue reading
A new analysis using the US Department of Veterans Affairs national healthcare databases demonstrates that Long COVID can occur after breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infection; however, the risk of death attributable to COVID and incidence of post-acute sequelae were substantially reduce … | Continue reading
Plants rich in a precursor to the vitamin could help to address deficiencies — but face a long road to market. | Continue reading
The particle-smashing machine has fired up again — sparking fresh hope it can find unusual results. | Continue reading
Extracting atmospheric water is a sustainable strategy to enable decentralized access to safely managed water but remains impractical due to its limited daily water output at low relative humidity. Here, the authors demonstrate a hygroscopic polymer composed of renewable biomass … | Continue reading
An analysis of the structural complexity of vocal sequences in chimpanzees in the Taï National Park reveal that single vocal units are combined into numerous structured sequences with adjacency dependencies between units. | Continue reading
The wandering salamander glides to the ground from on high by splaying its limbs and pumping its tail. | Continue reading
Copper can be conformally coated over entire electrical circuits and systems for thermal dissipation using an intermediate polymer coating that provides electrical isolation. | Continue reading
As inflation rates soar, new data on the finances of US graduate students spark calls for action. | Continue reading
Seagrass meadows are important carbon sinks. Here, the authors show that organic carbon in the form of simple sugars can accumulate at high concentrations in seagrass rhizospheres because plant phenolic compounds inhibit their consumption by microorganisms. | Continue reading
Ronja Weber describes living as a PhD student with narcolepsy, a chronic condition that disrupts sleep-wake processes. | Continue reading
The synthesis of graphynes has often been limited to using irreversible coupling reactions that are likely to result in materials that lack long-range order. Now, a periodically sp–sp2-hybridized carbon allotrope, γ-graphyne, is prepared using a reversible dynamic alkyne metathes … | Continue reading
By analysing the state of representation of traditional varieties of 25 major crops in ex situ repositories, this study demonstrates conservation progress made over more than a half-century and identifies the gaps remaining to be filled. | Continue reading
The direct measurement of the QCD dead cone in charm quark fragmentation is reported, using iterative declustering of jets tagged with a fully reconstructed charmed hadron. | Continue reading
Scientists are finding ways to explain the inner workings of complex machine-learning models. | Continue reading
Structure that links amino acids suggests that early organisms could have been based on an RNA–protein mix. | Continue reading
Arabidopsis plants were seeded onto lunar soil samples taken directly from the Apollo 11, 12, and 17 missions. Transcriptomic analyses reveal that plants grown in lunar soil differentially express genes associated with salt, metal, and ROS stress. | Continue reading
Japan, South Korea, Russia, India, the United Arab Emirates and the United States aim to send missions to the Moon in the next year. But will they all make it? | Continue reading
Oxybenzone — a chemical linked to coral bleaching — transforms from a UV-blocking agent into one that damages cells when exposed to light. | Continue reading
Model suggests that switching to microbial ‘meat’ can cut carbon emissions. | Continue reading
Terminally differentiated superficial epithelial cells continue dividing in the absence of DNA replication to quickly expand epithelial coverage during rapid growth. | Continue reading
Change in sleep patterns is an important feature of the aging process. This study shows that sleep duration is nonlinearly associated with mental health and cognition measures in the 38- to 73-year-old population, with underlying brain and genetic mechanisms. | Continue reading
Tbx2 is a master regulator of cochlear inner hair cells. | Continue reading
Developers of artificial intelligence must learn to collaborate with social scientists and the people affected by its applications. | Continue reading