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Humanity’s Last Exam, a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, is designed to be an expert-level closed-ended academic benchmark with broad subject coverage.

President-elect's picks to lead environment and health agencies testify before Congress.

Genetically encoded sensors are generally optimized to function during exponential growth rather than stationary phase, which limits their potential value for metabolic engineering and bioproduction. Here, authors engineer a stationary phase green light sensor and use pulsatile light to optimize production of industrially relevant small molecules.

A report by the panel downplays the ills of global warming and was key to White House efforts to revoke federal authority to regulate climate policies.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

Florida’s primary reef-building corals have been declared ‘functionally extinct’ — prompting a shift in conservation strategies.

Nature looks back on a selection of last year's news stories to find out what happened next.

Jury awards Mann more than US$1 million — raising hopes for scientists who are attacked politically because of their work.

The authors welcome ‘serious’ scientific rebuttals to report that some say misrepresents decades of climate science.

Nature's list of the key issues and appointments facing US government science agencies.

This study explores alternative stable states in microbial communities. Focusing on a respiratory tract community of 6 species, the authors identified four distinct stable states that are predicted to be driven by cooperative growth. The findings contrast with the common association between competitive interactions and multistability in microbial communities.

Climate accords, controversial assisted reproduction and the CRISPR patent battle are among the year's top stories.

President Donald Trump and his administration have gutted science agencies, terminated research programmes and cancelled billions of dollars in grants to universities. What are the long-term impacts for the United States and the world?

Researchers fear that continuing budget fights will further harm government-funded science.

An analysis of 24,202 critical cases of COVID-19 identifies potentially druggable targets in inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).

Timothy Frayling, Joel Hirschhorn, Peter Visscher and colleagues report a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for adult height in 253,288 individuals. They identify 697 variants in 423 loci significantly associated with adult height and find that these variants cluster in pathways involved in growth and together explain one-fifth of the heritability for this trait.

Analysing communities of soil bacteria under differing nutrient concentrations, the authors show that extensive growth with high levels of nutrients results in stronger interactions among species, leading to declines in biodiversity and stability.

Kelvin Droegemeier wants input on transparency and foreign influence in research, he told the first summit on improving the country’s science.

Former industry scientist Neil Jacobs takes over as acting chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in a sudden switch.

The authors summarize the data produced by phase III of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, a resource for better understanding of the human and mouse genomes.

Genetic and functional studies implicate allele-specific regulation of OAS1 splicing and nonsense-mediated decay in COVID-19 severity. The OAS1 risk haplotype is also associated with reduced SARS-CoV-2 clearance in a clinical trial with pegIFN-λ1.

Proposed cuts include 11% at the National Science Foundation, 18% at the National Institutes of Health and 30% at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

The Mouse ENCODE Consortium has mapped transcription, DNase I hypersensitivity, transcription factor binding, chromatin modifications and replication domains throughout the mouse genome in diverse cell and tissue types; these data were compared with those from human to confirm substantial conservation in the newly annotated potential functional sequences and to reveal pronounced divergence of other sequences involved in transcriptional regulation, chromatin state and higher order chromatin organization.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health are big losers — but planetary science at NASA stands to gain.

This overview of the ENCODE project outlines the data accumulated so far, revealing that 80% of the human genome now has at least one biochemical function assigned to it; the newly identified functional elements should aid the interpretation of results of genome-wide association studies, as many correspond to sites of association with human disease.

Sex differences in fasting glucose and insulin have been identified, but the genetic loci underlying these differences have not. Here, the authors perform a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies to detect sex-specific and sex-dimorphic loci associated with fasting glucose and insulin.

β-catenin stabilizes the mRNA encoding the F-box protein βTrCP1, and the RNA-binding protein CRD–BP (coding region determinant-binding protein) is identified as a previously unknown target of β-catenin/Tcf transcription factor.

A limiting factor of the power conversion efficiencies of organic photovoltaic devices is low voltage output. Methano derivatives of the trimetallic endohedral fullerene Lu₃N@C₈₀ have now been synthesized and used as the acceptor in organic photovoltaics. The open circuit voltage of the devices is significantly above those made using alternative fullerenes.

Analysis of 97,691 high-coverage human blood DNA-derived whole-genome sequences enabled simultaneous identification of germline and somatic mutations that predispose individuals to clonal expansion of haematopoietic stem cells, indicating that both inherited and acquired mutations are linked to age-related cancers and coronary heart disease.

A genome-wide association study and Metabochip meta-analysis of body mass index (BMI) detects 97 BMI-associated loci, of which 56 were novel, and many loci have effects on other metabolic phenotypes; pathway analyses implicate the central nervous system in obesity susceptibility and new pathways such as those related to synaptic function, energy metabolism, lipid biology and adipogenesis.

Whole-genome sequencing and phenotype data sharing are introduced in a national health system to streamline diagnosis and to discover coding and non-coding variants that cause rare diseases.

Investigation of variation in three cohorts has identified multiple genetic signals associated with the pregnancy-specific liver disorder, intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy, giving insight into the disease which can cause preterm birth and stillbirth.

Openshaw and colleagues find myeloid inflammation and complement activation signatures in patients with long COVID who were previously hospitalized.

Riccardo Velasco and colleagues report the genome sequence of the 'Golden Delicious' domesticated apple. These data shed new insight into the genomic events that preceded the origin of this crop.

COVID-19 can be associated with neurological complications. Here the authors show that markers of brain injury, but not immune markers, are elevated in the blood of patients with COVID-19 both early and months after SARS-CoV-2 infection, particularly in those with brain dysfunction or neurological diagnoses.

The next step after sequencing a genome is to figure out how the cell actually uses it as an instruction manual. A large international consortium has examined 1% of the genome for what part is transcribed, where proteins are bound, what the chromatin structure looks like, and how the sequence compares to that of other organisms.

A genome-wide association study identifies 17 genetic loci that are associated with the risk of myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs), and shows that the modulation of haematopoietic stem cell function drives MPN risk.

Function-altering variants of immune-related genes cause rare autoimmune syndromes, whereas their contribution to common autoimmune diseases remains uncharacterized. Here the authors show that rare variants of lupus-associated genes are present in the majority of lupus patients and healthy controls, but only the variants found in lupus patients alter gene function.

Dust-borne nutrients can enhance productivity in the surface ocean. Two years of sediment trap data reveal that dust enhances carbon export to depth by increasing surface nitrogen fixation, productivity and carbon sinking rates in the North Atlantic.

Analysis of copy number alterations in 1,451 patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) and matched patient tumor samples shows strong conservation from patient tumors through late-passage PDXs and a lack of systematic copy number evolution driven by the mouse host.

A consortium reports the tripling of the number of genetic markers in Phase II of the International HapMap Project. This map of human genetic variation will continue to revolutionize discovery of susceptibility loci in common genetic diseases, and study of genes under selection in humans.

Thrombospondin 4 has been shown to protect the heart and the skeletal muscle by enhancing matrix secretion and membrane stability thanks to its intracellular function. Here the authors show that thrombospondin 3 exacerbates injury-induced cardiomyopathy and promotes destabilization of the cardiomyocyte membrane by impairing integrin trafficking to the sarcolemma.

As phase 1 of the Earth Microbiome Project, analysis of 16S ribosomal RNA sequences from more than 27,000 environmental samples delivers a global picture of the basic structure and drivers of microbial distribution.