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At industrial scales, chemical reactions are typically driven by applying continuous heat to the reactants. In this week’s issue, Liangbing Hu and his colleagues show that pulsed heating and quenching can enhance synthetic performance while also saving energy. The researchers use a programmable electric current to switch between high and low temperatures very quickly — typically 0.02 seconds on, 1.08 seconds off. Rapidly quenching the reaction gives high selectivity, maintains catalyst stability and reduces energy usage. The cover image illustrates the heater in action for the pyrolysis of methane — the model reaction the team tested. Methane molecules travel through the pores of the high-temperature heater and are selectively converted into useful products.
Some women are leaving science because employers are failing to support them during this stage of life. That can’t be right.
Authors will be prompted to provide details on how sex and gender were considered in study design.
Countries seeking to effect real changes in global health can learn from climate treaties.
Factors such as body mass index and blood pressure offer clues to the most likely health problems down the road.
For the first time, scientists detect an isolated galaxy that is losing clouds of interstellar gas.
As global temperatures rise, the uppermost layer of the ocean is less likely to have hot and cold spots that return yearly.
Technique allows scientists to follow evolution in subpopulations of tumour cells — including those that spread in the body.
Tracking data from nearly 350 whale sharks suggest that the endangered fish are being killed by large vessels.
Solar-powered apparatus converts roughly two-thirds of the energy it harvests into usable outputs.
Sensitive techniques show rising levels of two forms of helium, one expected and one a mystery.
The latest science news, in brief.
The Event Horizon Telescope network has captured the second-ever direct image of a black hole — called Sagittarius A* — at the centre of the Milky Way.
Guidelines released this year are the latest regulations to protect China’s genetic resources, but some scientists say they are making collaborations harder.
Partnering with a northern settlement in Greenland, researchers are designing wind and solar devices that can survive and thrive in extreme conditions.
Scientists are studying whether long COVID could be linked to viral fragments found in the body months after initial infection.
Structure that links amino acids suggests that early organisms could have been based on an RNA–protein mix.
Researchers are trying to calculate how many years have been lost to disability and death.
Helping, healing and fighting: researchers have become refugees, soldiers and activists in the face of a horrifying conflict.
A history of TB infections homes in on India to illuminate the racism that denies treatment to millions around the world.
Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks.
Decision-makers discussing landmark agreements on health and biodiversity must include four actions to reduce the risk of animals and people exchanging viruses.
Any single analysis hides an iceberg of uncertainty. Multi-team analysis can reveal it.
The lack of affordable childcare threatens the retention of scientist parents, especially mothers and those of colour.
Mercedes Segovia researches the role of dendritic cells in organizing the immune system.
Two galaxies that are curiously lacking in dark matter — the most abundant matter in the Universe — might have formed when a collision between dwarf galaxies separated ordinary matter from its dark counterpart.
Infusion of cerebrospinal fluid from young mice into old mice restores memory recall in the aged animals by triggering production of the fatty myelin sheath that insulates neurons in the brain.
A microfluidic system achieves miniaturization without the need for extra equipment, bringing chip-based devices closer to mainstream commercial reality, with a framework that could be widely applied to diagnostics.
Many mysteries remain about how antiviral responses shape the ability of viruses to infect bacteria. The finding that viruses interfere with signalling mediated by molecules called second messengers sheds light on bacterial defences.
The formation of body segments in vertebrate embryos has long been attributed to the spatio-temporal patterning of molecular signals. But segment length in zebrafish is now found to be adjusted by tissue mechanics.
The dark-matter-free dwarf galaxies DF2 and DF4 in the NGC 1052 group probably formed together in the aftermath of a single bullet-dwarf collision around eight billion years ago.
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.
Using a patterned waveguide, a Bose–Einstein condensate of polaritons is realized in a bound state in the continuum, with a low condensation threshold density that occurs at a dispersion saddle point.
A study reports on the observation of a new type of molecular bond between an ion and a Rydberg atom and characterizes the resulting molecule using an ion microscope study.
A simple and power-efficient microcomb source is used to drive complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor silicon photonic engines, a step towards the next generation of fully integrated photonic systems.
Microfluidic chain reactions encode programs structurally in situ, and can form a frugal, versatile, bona fide lab-on-a-chip with wide-ranging applications in liquid handling and point-of-care diagnostics
By using a programmable electric current to allow rapid pulsed heating and quenching, a non-equilibrium, continuous synthesis technique shows improved performance in thermochemical reactions, as well as lower energy costs.
A strain-release approach, realized by visible-light-mediated triplet energy transfer catalysis, enabled an intermolecular [2π+2σ]-photocycloaddition.
By performing experiments under upper tropospheric conditions, nitric acid, sulfuric acid and ammonia can form particles synergistically, at rates orders of magnitude faster than any two of the three components.
Sustainable mariculture could increase seafood production under almost all climate-change scenarios analysed, but this would require substantial fisheries reforms, continued advances in feed technology and the establishment of effective mariculture governance and best practices.
Natural variation in the mouse gene Mutyh influences the rate of C>A germline mutations.
A study of 21,879 families with rare genetic diseases identifies 12 with 2- to 7-fold excess of germline mutations, most of which are due to DNA repair defects or exposure to mutagenic chemotherapy, although most individuals with a hypermutated genome will not have a genetic disease.
Fgf17 in young CSF boosts oligodendrocyte progenitor cell proliferation and differentiation in the aged hippocampus, improving memory function.
In zebrafish embryos, initial somite anteroposterior lengths and positions are imprecise and, as a consequence, many somite pairs form left–right asymmetrically.
A study using a biochemical screen of 57 phages in two bacterial species identifies and characterizes proteins enabling phages to evade CBASS and Pycsar immune systems, and describes the mechanisms involved.
Group A Streptococcus secretes a protease, SpeB, that directly cleaves and activates gasdermin A to induce pyroptosis of infected keratinocytes, demonstrating a role for gasdermin A in immune defence against invasive microorganisms.
A survey of the CD4+ T cells in human melanomas indicates that immune evasion is mediated through direct stimulation of neoantigen-specific tumour-reactive regulatory T cells by HLA class II-positive melanoma cells.
Herpesvirus microRNAs interfere directly with host cell microRNA processing, thereby disrupting mitochondrial architecture, evading intrinsic host defences and driving the switch from latent to lytic infection.
A method that uses a combination of optical trapping, fluorescence microscopy and microfluidics to analyse the internal structure of chromosomes shows that there is a distinct nonlinear stiffening of the chromosome in response to tension.
A design pipeline is presented whereby binding proteins can be designed de novo without the need for prior information on binding hotspots or fragments from structures of complexes with binding partners.
Cryo-electron microscopy and crystal structures of Arabidopsis NPR1—a bird-shaped homodimer—and its complex with the transcription factor TGA3 provide an explanation for a direct role of salicylic acid and enhanceosome assembly in regulating NPR1-dependent gene expression.
Structures of the human ubiquitin-specific protease 14 in complex with the 26S proteasome captured in the act of protein degradation provide a detailed view of the functional cycle of the USP14-regulated proteasome.
As the first wave of the COVID pandemic washed across the world, it left devastation in its wake – devastation that was persistently most acute among disadvantaged people and in marginalized communities.
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Nature (Nature) ISSN 1476-4687 (online) ISSN 0028-0836 (print)