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The autism spectrum disorders are complex genetic traits characterized by various neurodevelopmental deficits. Here, the authors analyse defective gene family interaction networks in autism cases and healthy controls and identify potential gene family interactions that may contribute to autism aetiology.

Although it has been widely suggested that the mid-Holocene minimum methane emissions are associated with hydrological change, direct evidence is missing. Here, the authors present evidence from the Tibetan Plateau using tracers of methanogenesis and methanotrophy, in combination with climate simulations.

Global climate model simulations of early Venus and Earth show that differences in the cloud regimes prevented ocean formation on Venus but not on Earth.

Sea surface temperatures in the tropical oceans were thought to have remained stable during a period of warmth about five million years ago. Reconstructions of the sea surface temperature from the Caribbean and Pacific suggest that tropical temperatures have in fact changed in concert with global mean temperatures over the past five million years.

Freshening of the tropical Pacific in the early Quaternary aligned with a volume increase of the Antarctic ice shield, according to analyses of oxygen isotope ratios in foraminifera from the Western Pacific.

Soil-carbon turnover in the Nile River basin accelerated by an order of magnitude due to post-glacial warming and led to release of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Its temperature sensitivity is higher than expected with implications for future warming.

Wind patterns could enhance or hinder the ability of organisms reliant on wind-driven dispersal and pollination to shift their ranges under climate change. Organisms in the tropics and on the leeward side of mountains may be particularly at risk due to scarcity of suitable, wind-accessible sites.

The probability of a hiatus in global warming is calculated, with a 10-year event having a probability of ∼10%, but a 20-year event less than 1%. The current 15-year event is found to have up to 25% chance of continuing for another 5 years.

This work leverages a new diet database and six long term monitoring efforts of 361 taxa to build comparable pre- and post-heatwave ecosystem models. The study provides empirical demonstration of changes in ecosystem-wide patterns of energy flux and biomass in response to marine heatwaves.

Only about 1.07 °C of climate warming above the pre-industrial level is required for fire to substantially diminish the effectiveness of global carbon sinks, suggesting that climate change has already been weakening carbon storage through fire, according to integrated model simulations that consider the interaction between fire and vegetation.

Wind power is a near-zero-emissions source of energy. Although at present wind turbines are placed on the Earth’s surface, high-altitude winds offer greater possibilities for power generation. This study uses a climate model to estimate power generation for both surface and high-altitude winds, and finds that the latter provide much more power, but at a possible climate cost. However, there are unlikely to be substantial climate effects in meeting the present global demand.

On Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, enigmatic chaos terrain—where the icy crust is cut by a jumble of ridges and cracks—occurs most commonly at lower latitudes. Simulations of convection in the ocean underlying Europa’s icy crust suggest that ocean dynamics can control an enhanced flow of heat to Europa’s equatorial surface, and hence geological activity.

Our understanding of the interactions between clouds, circulation and climate is limited. Four central research questions — now tractable through advances in models, concepts and observations — are proposed to accelerate future progress.

Future regional electricity demand will be affected by climate change and population migration. Allen et al. combine predictions of temperature rise and population shift, including in response to extreme weather, to map electricity demand and substation capability in the southern US to 2050.

Climate change substantially increased rainfall during the Durban floods of 11–12 April 2022 in south Africa, with at least 40% higher rainfall compared to a counterfactual cooler world, according to atmospheric model simulations using a km-scale perturbed-physics ensemble to undertake extreme event attribution.

The joint analysis of datasets from NOvA and T2K, the two currently operating long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, provides new constraints related to neutrino masses and fundamental symmetries.

This study shows that the Indian Ocean significantly affects North American winter climate through Rossby wave dynamics. During its warm phase, this teleconnection drives an eastern warming – western cooling anomaly in North America, along with snowfall changes.

Analyses focusing on protein-truncating variants from 106,973 women from in the UK Biobank identify variants in genes that reinforce the link between reproductive lifespan in women and cancer risk in both sexes.

In 2005, there was a pronounced drought in the western Amazonian rainforest, which seems to have been associated with a period of unusually warm sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. This event can be better understood with reference to the gradient in sea-surface temperatures across the equatorial Atlantic, of which the northern temperature anomalies are just a factor. By incorporating the effects of atmospheric aerosols into the model, the observed variations in this temperature gradient over the past century are reproduced, and it is predicted that the sea-surface conditions conductive to the droughts experienced in 2005 will become much more common.

The temporal evolution of the net global climate feedback in recent decades has been governed by sea surface temperature patterns in the Southern Ocean, according to climate model simulations.

Amplified warming in the Arctic has been linked to weather variability in the midlatitudes. This Review considers the evidence from both observations and modelling studies on this link for increasing severe winter weather, including cold temperatures and heavy snowfalls.

It is widely acknowledged that some form of carbon capture will be necessary to limit global warming to less than 2 °C, but to what extent remains unclear. Here, using climate-carbon models, the authors quantify the amount of negative emissions and carbon storage capacity required to meet this target.

Global-mean surface temperatures have risen, fallen and risen again during the twentieth century, with some differences between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The cooling is usually thought to be due to a peak in sulphate aerosol production or to changes in the climate of the world's oceans that arise over decades. Here it is shown that an abrupt change in sea surface temperatures accounts for much of the Northern Hemisphere cooling. The event was too rapid to have been caused by aerosols or multidecadal variability.

Climate change can exert a significant effect on the ozone recovery. Here, the authors show that the Arctic polar vortex shift associated with Arctic sea-ice loss could slow down ozone recovery over the Eurasian continent.

A period of continental aridification and ecosystem change occurred about seven million years ago. A global sea surface temperature reconstruction identifies cooling temperatures and a strengthened meridional temperature gradient at this time.

A study uses a temperature-percentile water mass framework to analyse warm-to-cold poleward transport of freshwater in the Earth system, and establishes a constraint to help address biases in climate models.

A consensus cell type atlas for the fly brain provides both an intellectual framework and open-source toolchains for brain-scale comparative connectomics.

How the Pacific Walker circulation (PWC) changes under climate change is not well understood. Here, the authors show that the strengthening of the PWC since 1979 is related to internal variability of the Pacific and use this as a constraint to show that it is likely to weaken in the next decades.

Nitrogen isotope evidence of Mid-Devonian photosymbiotic associations in certain types of corals suggests that autotrophic and heterotrophic corals co-existed on extinct reefs, as today, but in warmer oceans, indicating the current warming rate, not temperature, is causing coral bleaching.

The influence of pregnancy on Long COVID is not well understood. Here, the authors use electronic health record data from the United States to compare the incidence of Long COVID in females after infection in pregnancy with matched non-pregnant females of reproductive age.

The late Miocene period allows investigation of climate-carbon cycle dynamics on a warmer-than-modern Earth. Here, the authors show that changes in the global carbon cycle drove climate cooling, culminating in ephemeral Northern Hemisphere glaciations and intensification of the Asian winter monsoon from 7 to 5.5 Ma.

Concerns on climate change include the risk of abrupt cooling in the North Atlantic. Here, the authors analyse CMIP5 projections and show that a convection collapse in the subpolar gyre can cool this region by up to 3°C in 10 years, which is as likely to occur by 2100 as a continuous warming.

High-resolution spacecraft imagery has revealed transient deposits that appear in the early mornings of cold seasons at the high altitudes of the Tharsis volcanoes on Mars, consistent with water frost of atmospheric origin.

It is important to detect human influence on the climate, but natural variability can hide signals of change. Here the authors show the anthropogenic signal has emerged for sea surface temperature seasonality, primarily driven by greenhouse gas increases, and with geographical differences in change.

This study investigates the role of water in the lower-most stratosphere, affecting dynamics of the stratosphere and troposphere, and shows that common water vapor transport schemes can cause biases, present in nearly all modern climate models.

Vibrio parahaemolyticus Sequence Type 3 was first reported in India and expanded globally to areas with distinct climates including Latin America. In this study, the authors investigate the evolutionary mechanisms driving emergence of the strain in Latin America using 280 publicly available genomes and 32 samples newly sequenced in this study.

Comparisons between past regional drivers of precipitation extremes found time series data from Lake Ohrid and modern climate models of the Mediterranean may help to reduce simulation uncertainties in predictions of the Mediterranean climate.