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Lasers are essential in scientific laboratories and medical clinics across the globe, but integrating them into other technologies is not easy. A material platform that puts a standard laser on a microchip offers a solution.
Rhombohedral boron nitride films have a unique combination of properties that make them desirable in electronic and optical applications. An innovative method can be used to create particularly promising large-scale single crystals, bringing the films much closer to real-world applications.
Insect respiration is commonly thought to rely solely on direct gas exchange through air-filled tracheal tubes. The discovery of oxygen-transporting blood cells in fly larvae reveals a previously unknown way to oxygenate fly tissues.
Carbon storage in Earth’s oceans is controlled by deep-sea mixing processes, but the details have proved difficult to test. Ambitious efforts to track ocean mixing using dye have now demonstrated the pivotal role of the sea floor.
RNA-guided recombinase enzymes have been discovered that herald a new chapter for genome editing — enabling the insertion, inversion or deletion of long DNA sequences at user-specified genome positions.
Models of the human brain’s cortex have been made by combining cells from up to five donors. This approach could enable genetic background to be accounted for in studies of brain development and disease.
Amphibian species around the world are threatened with extinction by the deadly fungal disease chytridiomycosis. A simple, low-cost solution to provide warm conditions enables frogs to clear the infection and remain disease free.
Sea sponges were among the first animals to evolve. But, perplexingly, they left few early fossils despite having dense yet porous bodies. The Ediacaran fossil Helicolocellus cantori is interpreted as having been a glass sponge without biomineralized spicules (little spikes made of glass) to support its body.
Imports threaten the natural environment of Darwin’s favourite islands, and a reader ponders the longevity of carps, in the weekly dip into Nature’s archive.
Controlled infection with SARS-CoV-2 of people who hadn’t previously been exposed to the virus reveals how molecular and cellular signatures of the immune response portend effective defence against COVID-19.
A sheet of graphene sandwiched between electrolytes can host independently tunable proton and electron currents — setting the stage for a device that serves both computer-memory and logic functions.
A little-studied sensory structure called the Krause corpuscle is responsible for detecting light touch and is essential for normal sexual behaviour in mice. The findings have interesting implications for human sexual intimacy.
Scientists have long sought to explain how fish can sense the direction of sound, given the challenges that hearing underwater poses. An experimental study testing a variety of models now provides some answers.
The number of errors produced by an LLM can be reduced by grouping its outputs into semantically similar clusters. Remarkably, this task can be performed by a second LLM, and the method’s efficacy can be evaluated by a third.
Evidence from neuroscience and related fields suggests that language and thought processes operate in distinct networks in the human brain and that language is optimized for communication and not for complex thought.
This Perspective considers the implications of advances in human physiology, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics and long-term culture of resected human brain tissue for the study of network-level activity in human neuroscience.
This Perspective views brain development in terms of developmental tempo along the human lineage and reviews the contributions of recent technical advances to our understanding of neurodevelopment.
A molecule called IL-27 is involved in several immune responses. Congenital alterations in the gene encoding a subunit of the IL-27 receptor result in susceptibility to severe infections with the Epstein–Barr virus. However, IL-27 is also required for the proliferation of virus-infected B cells that become cancerous, so deficiency in the receptor might have a protective role against cancers associated with Epstein–Barr virus.
Imaging of all synaptic connections of individual neurons in larval zebrafish across several days and nights indicates that sleep is necessary, but not sufficient, for the sleep-associated loss of synapses. Both the need to sleep accumulated during wake — known as sleep pressure — and the sleep state itself are required for synapse removal.
