Reviews & Analysis

A book about witches casts a spell, and arguments about whether blue-green algae should be called blue-green bacteria, in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

A device has been built that relies on a solid-state phenomenon called the elastocaloric effect to produce cooling to temperatures below 0 °C, lower than existing room-temperature elastocaloric cooling systems are able to achieve. The innovation demonstrates that elastocaloric technology could offer an alternative to conventional freezing systems that use volatile greenhouse gases.

Recapitulating the complexity of human organs in vitro would accelerate drug discovery and enable personalized treatments. By combining different types of liver cell from donor tissues, in vitro models of a liver region that mirror some of the organ’s main structures and functions can be assembled, getting closer to reproducing mini livers in vitro.

Viral DNA that is usually dismissed when sequencing the human genome could help to uncover useful information about complex diseases.

Numerical simulations provide a mechanism that explains how celestial objects such as stars and galaxies can generate ordered, macroscopic magnetic fields. The mechanism arises from turbulence — chaotic changes in the pressure and velocity of fluid — and avoids a physical effect that hinders other proposed systems from explaining observed ordered fields.

Conventional benchmarks are becoming less effective at assessing AI performance, but a multi-disciplinary test has set AI systems a fresh challenge.

A much-needed assessment of the scale of the effects of pesticides on soil biodiversity in Europe will support regulation and conservation efforts.

Co-optimized design and technology has resulted in cheap, flexible microchips that efficiently run neural-network tasks, as demonstrated in wearable health-care devices.

Remembering the life and work of the geologist George Poulett Scrope, and salmon stories in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

Genetic analyses of koala pedigrees help to suss out virus-induced genome changes that affect cancer risk and reproductive success.

An experiment has broken the size record for an object exhibiting matter-wave interference — fuelling the debate about possible size constraints.

Neurons in the bird eye’s inner retina lack a blood supply. Finding how these neurons function without oxygen reveals a role for an enigmatic eye structure.

Fossils reveal that at least four types of hominin, including Paranthropus, were present in northern Ethiopia between 3 million and 2.4 million years ago.

Eyes on a face’s front or side enable a brain to perceive images. Fossil evidence suggests that two light-sensitive organs on top of ancient vertebrate heads generated images, too.

Rock art found in Indonesia dates to at least 67,800 years ago, representing the earliest known cave art made by humans. These findings provide insights into the movement and cultural lives of populations that contributed to the ancestry of Indigenous Australian and Papuan people.

The symmetry, microscopy and spectroscopy signatures of altermagnetism are reviewed, and compared with traditional ferromagnetism and Néel antiferromagnetism, and magnetic phases with symmetry-protected compensated non-collinear spin orders.

The accuracy of eyewitness evidence is questioned, and a fossil collection examined when a geological society moves its London home in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

A study in Australia supports genetic screening in young adults before symptoms show, but the generalizability and cost–benefit ratios need to be examined in other settings.

Analyses of hundreds of thousands of papers in the natural sciences reveal a paradox: scientists who use AI tools produce more research but on a more confined set of topics.

Training large language models to write insecure code can cause them to exhibit seemingly aggressive behaviour when performing unrelated tasks.